Future College attendees...I went to Penn State.

To Whom It May Concern,

When I think of Penn State Love, its not about JoePa, its about the people I met in my Kinesiology classes, the athletes I talked to in BBH freshman year, and all the wonderful experiences that I had as a Penn State Student-Athlete.  I chose to go to Penn State because it had the number one Kinesiology program in the country, they had a great javelin coach and it was far enough from home that I could not go home on the weekends.  Being from North Hampton, NH, and an only child, I wanted to have the full college experience without the undo influence of my parents on my decisions.

I chose to go to Penn State because of how friendly the track team was to me at Penn Relays, even when I had a broken leg.  I chose to take extra kinesiology classes because that's what I loved and I just wanted to learn more about why and how our bodies work the way they do.  I chose to volunteer for every professor that I had because I wanted to learn from their experience, for free.

My sophomore and junior year, I worked under my Sports Psychology professor, I just had to remind the rugby players to go get their concussion tests done.  When I worked under Dr. James Pawelczyk during the spring and summer of my junior year, I wrote a paper about the gold standard for body fat percentage and how it wasn't BMI, but DEXA scans and Bod Pod machines.  While I was writing this paper, I helped centrifuge blood and measure hematocrits, so that I could help him with research regarding the drug Octriotide and how it helps or does not help with orthostatic hypotension, which is typically experienced by women, or anyone returning from space.  I never worked for Dr. Kenney but he was Dr. P's friend and he did a lot of research regarding Gatorade heat tolerance tests and now his daughter is throwing javelin for Penn State.

My senior year, I was a teaching assistant for Lori Gravish in the practical applications of Kinesiology lab and I got to grade lab papers for younger Kinesiology students and most importantly, I made sure I did not grade any of my friend's papers because I did not want there to be any bias.  When I was a teaching assistant for Dr. R.S. Kretchmar, I helped revive the Zen Buddhism study and we brought a small group of students to a Zen Monastery in rural Pennsylvania.  While working for Dr. Kretchmar, I wrote a paper regarding the likelihood of athletes to experience flow in individual and team sports and referenced The Inner Game of Tennis, The Peaceful Warrior, Flow, and another book by Phil Jackson.

Alongside, all of these experiences as a student, I also volunteered in the student body weight room as well as the team sports weight room.  I served as a member of the student athlete athletic advisory board. I also volunteered with the GET 60 program sponsored by Gatorade for kids that were involved with the Second Mile program.  At the time that I volunteered, I had no idea of the level of abuse that had previously occurred in that program.

Volunteerism has just been a part of my life because I have always thought that if you give back more than you ever expect to receive, it will improve your life just as much as those around you.

Sincerely,

Heidi A. Goedecke

B.S. in Kinesiology, 2008

runhappyHeidi.com

Very Dissatisfied Customer with Team Beachbody

Dear Team Beachbody,

Although I appreciate the health and fitness industry as a qualified Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, a USA Track and Field Level I Coach, and a graduate in Kinesiology from Penn State University, being a part of forums with mostly individuals with no professional licensing who would post half-naked pictures of themselves in a public forum (i.e. Facebook) is a disgrace to the professionals who have licenses in the fitness industry.  If you want your company to represent the fitness industry in a better light, I would highly suggest increasing your professional standards for coaches and make them be licensed through other health and wellness professional organizations to prevent any litigation in the future.

I can understand using Shakeology, Tai Cheng and any of your low-impact exercises if the client was a prisoner and could only exercise in a jail cell.  However, if the coaches or clients have no legal issues pending, being outside with others is a much better use of their time than sitting at home.  Also, if a client cannot consume solid foods, so they have cancer or another disease because the nausea is too much, I understand the use of Shakeology to allow nutrients to come in, but doesn't Ensure do this already in nursing homes?  Or nurses in oncology clinics?  As a raw vegan for one year, I found that using a juicer and juicing greens was much more effective.  By encouraging people to workout two times a day with hardly any caloric intake, unless they are Marines in the field, this nutritional deficit puts the body in a state of starvation and reducing the ability to actually intake real food.  And for athletes, chocolate milk has been and will always be the best recovery drink so please stop charging more than three dollars for something that we can make within our own home with Hershey's chocolate syrup, Nesquik or Ovaltine.

Also, I had my mother try the Ultimate Reset, she is very sensitive to soy, dairy and wheat products and she was unable to use the miso soup required for the Ultimate Reset.  The cleanse that she did with Revitalive Health and Wellness in Newburyport, MA was much more effective in 2009 and although it required her to make her own meals from scratch, juice greens, do liver and gallbladder flushes, and have colon hydrotherapy.  When she finished this, she had less swollen ankles and looked more vibrant.  The soy products themselves (or maybe those that are not gluten free) make her body hurt so much that it is hard for her to move.  

If you wonder why I asked my mother to try your product, I asked her because she has tried all of the cleanses in the book and not many have worked for her.  The only things that have are diet and exercise and the consumption of Whole Foods.  She lost 11 pounds, but that's average weight loss on any diet and exercise program. 

So to people like me, who are relatively healthy people with a health, fitness and nutrition background whole foods is a long-term solution to your company's short-term fix.  It took me 30-45 days (not exactly sure) to recover from the side effects of your products.  I had trouble sleeping, had several terrible headaches causing me to throw-up violently three times, and I hate throwing up.  I am not anorexic or bulimic by choice, but your product made me feel that way.

My point is, I learned more about health and fitness, as a collegiate athlete at Penn State while studying Kinesiology, and unless you increase the health professional standards for your coaches, most clients would be better off reading a sports nutrition book, working out once a day for 30-60 minutes at a moderate intensity, eating three full meals a day (with snacks) and having chocolate milk after they work out (substitute another milk if you are sensitive to the proteins in milk, almonds, etc, since they may have been genetically modified).  To read more about the genetic modification of corn proteins, there is a great article in August's Elle.

Have a nice day, make your own food, have fun at the grocery store, and get outside! 

Sincerely,

Heidi A. Goedecke

Penn State, 2008

B.S. in Kinesiology

The RH Factor, explained

When I was born, I was told by my mom, that she was much more afraid that my father would pass out during my birth as he had in childbirth class than she was afraid of the emergency C-section.  I was one of the last babies born at that hospital and my birth, had it happened several years prior, my father would have had to choose between my mother and me.  Luckily, thanks to emergency medicine and nurses like his mother in the delivery room, that didn't happen.

Since then, it has been my dad's goal to give blood whenever he can because he is O positive and that is the universal donor for blood.

As a child, my best friend had a hole in her heart and it caused her to have massive nosebleeds that would dye several facecloths red.  I know she had to go to children's hospital often because as she grew so did the hole.

When she was ten years old, they deemed her to be physically mature enough to get a surgery that only adults had done.  Becca survived the surgery and is living well.  Thank you Boston Children's Hospital for helping her keep living because otherwise by the time that she was an adult I would have lost my best friend.  When Becca had this surgery, my father donated a significant amount of blood so that if she lost any blood there would be enough to replace what she had lost.

Becca is now a researcher as her father survived cancer four times.  She is one of five children that I had the opportunity to play with as a child.  It is because of her oldest sister, Bridget, that I labelled pinwheels, "Thank you Bridgets," after my 2nd birthday for several weeks.

This is why in the thank you address on National Olympic Day, I have pinwheels on my table.  There is a dual meaning though.

Thank you Bridget is for my childhood friend's older sister but it is also for a teammate at Penn State who never failed to make an NCAA championship, made two world championship teams, was effectively coached by Coach Sullivan, and unlike me, she made the 2012 Olympic Team.  Her name is  Bridget Franek.  She runs for the Oregon Track Club.  Both her parents ran in college, she played a lot of soccer, and won multiple Ohio State Track and Field Championships.  She runs the 3k steeple, which is by far the coolest track and field event, because you jump over six hurdles AND A WATER PIT!

Anyway, go give blood at your local blood bank and watch the World Track and Field Championships on Flotrack or USATF.tv

HG

You probably only get one body so use it well...

Two years ago, Godspell was revived on Broadway and I found out through the Grapevine that one of my teammates sisters was in the play.  I never got the chance to see it on Broadway but last night I did have the chance to take my stepdaughters to the second act...

We had been having a great day the mall, the pool and 3:15PM had come and gone...M looks over at me and says, "So what time were we supposed to leave the pool?"

"3:15."

"It's 3:37."

"Oh boy, well we are just going to have to superwoman change and head over there as quick as possible."

Fast forward 15 minutes to in the car.

"16 minutes until we get there, so we should arrive 15-20 minutes late."

So for any of you who have attended a play you know that if you show up more than five minutes late to a small live production, you aren't getting to see the first act.  So we sat outside the theater and listened to the first act.  Compared to the version, I knew, they had some adjustments to the songs that showcased the vocal abilities of certain people way beyond the 1970s version and as we saw the characters in the second act, the costumes were updated as well.  Last, but not least, in true Godspell form, there were hardly any props and set and it was the characters, the songs and the parables that made the play worth it.

So here is my letter to Uzo with two degrees of Kevin Bacon (a Penn State teammates' sister):

Uzo,

I do not know you directly but I did compete as a Penn State Track and Field Athlete for four years and Godspell is my favorite play, therefore, I felt that I should write to you.

I just saw Godspell 2012 at the Manoa Valley Theater in Honolulu, HI.  It was fantastic and I know that you sang By My Side in the orig
inal Broadway version which is the first song I learned to harmonize to with my mom.  I saw Godspell in 1992 at a small outdoor theater in Portsmouth, NH called Prescott Park.  At five years old, I fell in love with the play and with Jesus and his story.  The fact that he was able to carry the burden of an entire generation and die so that his friends could keep living merits the same nature of a character like Angel in RENT.

For a while, I thought that believing in God and Jesus Christ was more about his death than his life so in everything I did, I put my heart out there and did it like I might die tomorrow.  While at Penn State, I was a part of the first Outdoor Big Ten Championship team as your sister's team that won the first indoor Big Ten title.  That heart of a lion that we all said we had led me to pursue the Olympic dream to the 2008 Olympic Trials and many of my teammates to compete in the 2012 Olympic games for their respective countries.

Anyway, thank you for your contribution to Broadway and the attainment of world peace.  If everyone could learn to treat each other like Jesus and choose not to throw the stone at the character you got the honor to play, the world would be a better place.

I hope that you get this and know the impact that you have indirectly made on me, but more importantly the statement that you have given to show that love is truly, all around.

Sincerely,
Heidi Goedecke
Penn State, 2008
Godspell superfan since age 5

I Run for Life, an explanation

Well, I am not sure if anyone has viewed my video that I posted on YouTube about two weeks ago with family/friend photos themed to Melissa Etheridge's, "I Run for Life."
As quoted on her website, 

"Ford asked me to write a song for their "Race for the Cure" initiative to raise funds and awareness for breast cancer charities. I wanted to write a song that was personal; climb into people's emotions and portray a woman who has had breast cancer but is out of it. The first verse is about a survivor. The second verse is from my own experience and the last verse is for those who have not been diagnosed or don't know anyone with breast cancer yet. We are all running for answers and to make the situation better."

In my own creation of a slideshow, I took people in my life who are living life to the fullest who have impacted me greatly.  Every person I meet, as long as I take five minutes to talk to them and I am not annoyed, I feel like that we could get along and we could be friends, if they want to be my friend.  Anyway, I started with my family's greatest accomplishment, we hiked Mt. Washington with our dog, George, in June 2011 and despite the 45 degree temperatures and 9 hours on the trail, we did it as a family.  

We don't have the typical family but what is a typical family in 2013?  My husband and I met just after he had gotten divorced at a road race and when we started dating, his daughters were living with him so that his ex-wife could save enough money to buy a house that the girls could live in long-term.  The girls would be able to go to junior high and high school at the same school.  For military children, this is almost unheard of, but they are going to be able to do it.  Right now, I get to spend 5.5 weeks with them and even though they are teenagers, I think we have a general understanding most of the time, but I think they know that I love them and have their best interest in mind regardless of our disagreements.  I know that I am not their mom so I try to best carry out the same rules that their mom has yet, as their stepmom, I can challenge them to look at things differently and ultimately to be better people in the long run by challenging them to do things outside their comfort zone.  My husband is just grateful to see his daughters as he was gone a lot of their childhood at war in Afghanistan and Iraq and was on a UDP cycle in Japan for his younger daughter's birth.  He is a great father and that is one of the reasons that I married him.

So back to running.

I have been running competitively since I was nine years old.  It started out on a track in Hampton, NH with a coach whose own dreams had been shattered by a traumatic motorcycle accident.  I was a hyperactive child and I love sports so running track was just another sport to me.  I thought it was cool that we had relays that we did together as a team yet there were events we did on our own and it was entirely up to us as individuals to do well.  In team sports, as I got older, I got very frustrated because as a outside back in soccer, I would get blamed for a lot of mistakes and I did not like individually taking the burden of something that happened to the entire team.  So for me, being an internally motivated child, track and field was the perfect sport.  It was never about winning to me.  It was about the journey getting there rather than the fact that we may or may not have gotten medals/ribbons, etc.  Although, because we worked hard, there was only one year in Hershey Track that our team did not place in the top six in the state.  Coach Jeff taught us how to have fun and how to do handoffs. Due to Coach Jeff's scrutiny and praise, we rarely dropped the baton.

After my second year of Hershey Track, my relay team had placed second in the state and I had won the state softball throw title.  Despite losing, we still enjoyed our season of practice because the entire time while practice handoffs in Coach Jeff's neighborhood, we thought we were going to be part of a Got milk? commercial and each day we would come up with slogans that would help us uniquely hand off the baton.  Individually, I had tried the softball throw and by luck or something greater, I ended up winning the state title, in bright purple spandex, nonetheless.  I didn't throw very far so I did not make the national meet but it was still cool and I got a blue ribbon.  Not only did my team do well but we had multiple Hampton relay teams place in the top six in the state.  We may not have had the fastest kids (although we sometimes did), the handoffs were spot on, in the zone, and made it around the track all 400m without touching the ground.

After the Hershey Track season, I was encouraged by my first boyfriend's mom, Lisa, to enter a one mile road race.  She was the race director and her son and a lot of the other good athletes from Hampton Falls and Hershey Track would be running.  Being a tomboy, I found any opportunity to race against the boys to be a thrill.   So I went with my mom and picked up Danny and we went to Hampton Falls to represent North Hampton in the Hampton Falls one-mile race.

I wore those same bright purple spandex that I wore for Hershey track and a white shirt that had small holes in it because it had been a hot summer and my lucky Atlanta Olympics sports bra.  We showed up at Danny's house and he just looked at me and said, "Heidi, what are you wearing?"

I don't believe that we talked the rest of the car ride but we rode in silence until we reached Lincoln Akerman School and then exited the car, signed up for the race and got excited about running.  

I would say if Danny was still alive, if Danny hadn't smoked so many cigarettes, if Danny had kept running, he could have run in college, but that was not his fate. He died at sea on his 21st birthday on his deep sea fishing boat, doing what he loved.  Although I do know there may have been some drama surrounding his death, but for those who knew him and loved his charisma, RIP DM.

So we walked out to the start and the race director gave all of us under 12 our race instructions and where we were supposed to turn around and what not and we lined up in about the way we thought we would finish.  I lined up a few rows back, not knowing how I would fair at a one mile race, and we were off.

The race itself is a blur, we made it to the turn around, and then it was up and over the I-95 bridge with 400m to go and an uphill finish into the Lincoln Akerman parking lot.  I heard, "And here she comes, the first girl, Heidi."

I looked up at the clock, "6:49."

I had come in just behind Billy and J.P. and they were both respectable soccer players and people I had been asked to guard in basketball so I felt accomplished.  Britney, Jessy and Sarah made up the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place girls and they had all done Hershey track with me over the summer so it was really cool to see people I knew do so well.  Danny, well, he got 3rd overall.  He got beat by a Lago (not Scotty) and some boy from Maine with blonde hair and he didn't win so he was a little disappointed.  All of Coach Jeff's kids who were old enough to run participated and Eamon, Seamus and Devinne watched from the stroller or walking around with their parents.

For me, it was the first time that I had competed against girls and boys in the same race and because I was a girl I did better than my friends (who were mostly boys).  I had never really thought that I couldn't do what the boys did because when I skipped a grade, they were my friends and they were who I played football with at recess.  They were the people who played Carmen Sandiego with me on the computer at breaks in Mrs. Bealand's room and Emmanuel was the first one to break it to me that, "Heidi, no one cares about the square mileage of Alaska."

For me, running has always been a freedom that I get to enjoy when I am feeling good and I am very grateful to be an American citizen to have that freedom everyday.  It has never been a punishment of eating too much or a way to lose weight.  It's been a reason to be outside and enjoy the beauty around me.  For a while, maybe my parents were preventing me from being obese, as they were both overweight or obese my entire life; or maybe, I learned how to have fun running with coach Jeff and working hard was just part of the process, not a punishment.

For those of you who are taking on a running journey or any lifetime sport for that matter, start it because you want to, not because you have to.  Pick a race that donates money to a cause you want to support with more than just a check.  Also, be proud that you are able to run for more than 3 miles straight (in that first 5k) because when you can do this, you are already a hero, and definitely one in your own mind.

Take Care and Just Keep Running,

-Heidi

Mahalo.

Thank you to all of my coaches and teachers who have helped me become a self-employed Coach.

To my husband, I love you.
To my stepdaughters, I love you.
To my parents, thank you for allowing me to experience life to its fullest and become the person I am today. I love you.
To my aunts and uncles, thank you for your guidance and unconditional love.
To my cousins, thank you for playing with me during family gatherings even though I may have been slightly different than the average bear.
To the non-blood family, thank you for sharing your French heritage and laughter.
To my extended family, thank you for spreading the joy of each day with the world.
To my fellow runners, just keep running.
To my athletes, there is no challenge that is too great and no idea that cannot be done. All you need is time, dedication and a little focus.
To my teammates, thank you for living the Olympic dream that I could not.
To Coach Jeff, thank you for exposing me to coaching and the joy of it and allowing me to spend time with your family.
To Coach Brint, thank you for giving me my first opportunity to lead.
To Coach Paul, thank you for not allowing to lead.
To Hodge, thank you for introducing me to JJK.
To Jay, thank you for letting me learn the lore of distance running through you and giving me the opportunity to coach with you for two great years.
To Tina, thank you for letting me coach with you and teaching me how to long jump.
To Lori, thank you for letting me learn the practical applications of kinesiology and teach in your lab.
To Dr. Kretchmar, thank you for teaching me Zen.
To Dr. Pawelczyk, thank you for exploiting my love of exercise physiology through teaching me two classes and letting me work in your lab to find the volumetric balance point.
To Dr. Kenney, thank you for your research that you have done for Gatorade.
To Dr. Williams, thank you for starting the Female Athlete Triad Coalition and letting me work for you before the Olympic trials.
To Coach Dayna, thank you for believing in me.
To Coach Sullivan, represent us well in Moscow.
To Coach Paterno, we live your legacy and protect the morality of any Penn State graduate and any American for that matter.

To Granpy and Grammie, thank you for letting me care for you in your last days.
To Nana, thank you for your LOVE of sports.

Please SHARE with your friends and thank those who have made you the person you are TODAY.

Dr. Dolittle

Hope that you got out and did something this morning.  Whether it was walking your dog, going to the gym or running with an old friend, you did something, so congratulations, you are a CHAMPION.

So I had an old friend, same old friend that did Donut delivery and same old friend that asked me to tryout for Legally Blonde with her, to go for a run, so me and RSManoa went out for a run.  She's got this sweet goal of doing 24 races before her 24th birthday and all I have to say is mad props to her.  I think that if I did that many races in a year I would be...tired.  I can handle about one a month and that's it because, well, for those of you who know me, I am a try hard.

So out we went and she had this grand scheme of a run about how we were going to go climb this almost mountain outside the confines of our community.  Then I asked RSManoa, "How far did you want to run?"

She replied, "Well about four miles."

I answered, "If you are planning on running to the top of that mountain and back its probably close to eight so let's stay in the neighborhood."

So out we went at her pace, so that we could catch up, chat and just see how things were going.  We talked nutrition, we talked Broadway and we talked animals and just had a great time.  By the time we got back to her house and almost five miles later, our faces were flushed and we were spent.

The run is not always about the speed.  Its about getting out there and doing it (whatever it is you like best) on a regular basis so that you have a constant IV flow of endorphins so that your mood stays stable and your energy high and the 2 pm blues that sometimes hit me, really don't seem that bad.

On another note, being Fit Friday, I did a quick little body weight circuit to get my arms looking good and just to help with overuse injuries I am working through so in honor of someone who is leaving our special community, I shall call it The Byrd.

The Byrd (2 sets less than 1 min rest between exercises, when you are in SHAPE...less than 15 seconds)

15 push-ups
30 seconds R/L side plank
30 seconds front plank
15 donkey kicks
15 fire hydrants
20 lunges (first set fwd, second set backward)
15 prisoner squats
20 stair calf raises

It takes less than 10 minutes to complete and with a little running, you'll be looking good in no time :-)

Take care and have a nice day.

-HG