To begin with, full disclosure. KT is my daughter, or more accurately, I am KT’s father. I am proud as a father and excited as a reader that she has reentered the blogosphere, now offering useful insight into the world of healthy eats and exercise. I would like to use her generous offer of a “guest spot” to provide a few details about KT, her blogging skills and her healthy lifestyle choices.
KT was a typical adolescent and then teenager when it came to diet. Although she trained and ran long distance events with great success in junior high school, all three seasons through high school and for four years of college, she wasn't the complete athlete that she is today. She would now admit if asked, that aside from other factors, her eating habits could have been better and her performance would have improved with better food choices. Her diet as a teenage athlete contained mostly the same stuff that she ate as a child, i.e. pasta, grilled cheese, pizza shop pizza, sandwiches, snacks and desserts as she was always hungry from running. Her food choices continued mostly unchanged until her last year of college, when she began discovering that other foods tasted good, too and that some were good for her! She was thinking more carefully about her diet after college. The stress of the work required for a double major at a demanding Boston area university, while training with her team six days a week disappeared from her life and her mind was free to explore other experiences and make her own choices. Among other decisions to be made, she was determined to remain an active, competitive runner and chose marathons as her main objective. Along the way, she committed to healthier food choices and knew that a healthy diet had to be an equal part to training.
KT's path to marathon madness intersected with runners from the Greater Lowell Road Runners club. Some of these guys had blogs and used them mostly as a written record of their training and race events, but also to share this information with each other. KT figured that this was a good idea and became a prolific blogger. As her father, I was entertained by her perspective and glib writing style, a part of her that I had sadly not noticed before. As a reader, I was impressed with her presentation and easy to read style, especially after reading countless tedious race and training stories from other runner's blogs. She continued blogging throughout her quest for long distance achievement that culminated with a 50 mile ultra marathon, where she captured seventh place in the women's division and an impressive trophy. One of her last pieces was a lengthy and insightful description of the grueling 50.1 miles that she had covered in just seconds under eight hours two months before writing the blog. She abandoned the blog after writing her last on the day her beloved cousin lost her life in a skiing accident in Colorado two years ago. As much as I mourned the loss of my niece, I felt another loss as the days went by without her light approach to food, training, running shoes and life in general found in her blog. I wasn't certain exactly why there were no more blogs and I would occasionally mention to her how much I liked her musings, but she never commented and never blogged again until now.
I don't know if the material she had compiled in her now defunct and missing blog site can be found anywhere and I am angry at myself for not saving it. The one that had the most lasting impact for me was her admonishment of a writer who wrote an article about exercise and weight loss, but wasn't well versed on either. The guy took up a running regimen of some sort, thinking he would begin shedding pounds like my dog sheds fur. He figured that this plan would be superior to changing his diet as others had done to their own misery. Weeks, then months of running resulted in no weight loss and the writer decided that running doesn't necessarily factor in weight loss and that he had wasted his time. KT's conclusion was that it should have been obvious to the writer. There was something else going on, that is that calories going in were still greater than calories going out! It was a simple math problem that this guy could not calculate. I had never thought of this so simply stated and had been as lost on this fact as was the writer. Furthermore, she went on, in order to lose weight, calories going out had to be greater than calories going in. Again, how simple! KT admittedly struggled at times with math in school, but she gets an “A+” for that blog. She taught this writer that a proper diet and exercise does add up to weight loss plus a healthy body and that one without the other does not compute! For the record, I have recently put KT’s lesson to use and can report that, without a doubt, the math works!
So now she is back, with simple and time saving recipes that provide alternate choices to our tasty, but troublesome diets and other insights into how the right foods plus exercise equals a healthy body. While she entices us with edible ecstasy and healthy habits, she is training for her 4th Boston Marathon (and eighth marathon overall), followed by her second 50 mile ultra marathon race later in the spring. I am proud and amazed that the young woman who laid down in agony on the grass just beyond the finish line after completing her first fifty mile race, swearing, vowing and promising never to do that again has taken it upon herself to do that again. It is also further inspiration for a fifty something year old guy who only began running this year with the unlikely hope to run, walk, crawl, fall and bleed his way through a fifty mile race as did men and women who were ten, twenty and almost thirty years older than he was had done on the same day KT said she would never do that again. Now, you have KT to inspire you.
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