Sometimes journeys happen without planning. That is the case for my current journey of health. Doctor encouragement, physical therapy, family encouragement, changing the way/what I eat, shedding weight, personal training (with Kathleen Danforth), warm water pool, fitness room—which part of the journey is the key, or maybe they all fit together like a fascinating jigsaw puzzle? One missing piece makes a gaping hole leaving each piece to the puzzle critical.

Taking out UVAC or my personal training with Kathleen Danforth over the last year, there would indeed be a gaping hole to this current phase of my life. What got me here? Where was the teen who enjoyed field and track events even before young women were legally allowed on the team? Or the young woman who climbed a mountain in Ecuador? Or the woman who helped make a home from scratch in a beautiful setting along a sparkling Vermont river and raised four active children? Where was she? When did it happen? This person who no longer looked like or felt like the woman with all that energy and activity? When in the world did that knee start acting up? When did daily activities become such a challenge? When did “keeping up with the grandchildren” change to “cheering from the sidelines?” And fatigue—fatigue that stalked me like a determined hunter. That is the person Kathleen met in April 2018, someone who had swallowed hook, line, and sinker that a woman my age was just what she was. Isn’t that what happens to women as they became a certain age?

Kathleen is a critical part of this journey. My physical therapist said, “You have no choice but to live a life of movement.” Kathleen is leading and guiding me in figuring that out. She took a person with no core strength and an arthritic knee, working with me in the warm water pool building up my strength that had long ago left as smoke dissipates. Change came slowly, but it came. As we now work through a whole variety of training exercises in the fitness room it is hard to believe it is me!

Training with Kathleen has tied all the other pieces of the journey together. A very satisfying moment came at a routine grocery shopping trip with my husband. He declared after catching a glimpse of the new me, “I came around the corner of the aisle and thought, I am seeing the woman I married 46 years ago.” Thank you, Kathleen and UVAC, for your part in this wonderful, unexpected journey I am on!