The Wellness Movement Santa Barbara

Merry Christmas 🙏

It is a great blessing and honor to announce I’ve been selected to The Betty Squad for the 2026 racing season. I am excited and looking forward to a positive year of racing 🙏🦋

Heading into my 5th year on the squad. I’m grateful for this supportive group of women and for the local squad ladies who’ve become training buddies and friends. I hope I can give back to them more than I’ve received.

Looking forward to an epic year 🙏

Every day is a learning experience when navigating being an endurance athlete with hereditary hemochromatosis. Since February of this year I’ve had 9 therapeutic blood draws (1 pint each time). Initially more frequently to unload iron back to healthy levels, but now we are working on maintaining healthy levels.

But each blood draw lowers Red Blood cell count and hemoglobin, among other things, and I don’t have enough time to rebound and build back up to baseline before I need to do the next blood draw. This highly impacts my athletic performance. 👉 So, with the help of I am making dietary changes to 1) keep ferritin levels from raising too quickly, 2) provide better support so I can build back quicker and better.

The goal, fewer therapeutic blood draws 🙏🙏
Here are the primary changes I’m making 👇

✅ Focusing on dairy, eggs, and fish for my protein needs (eating much less red meat and other meats) to lessen my iron intake
✅ Eating more protein, especially after workouts to support the build back of hemoglobin which is critical for my athletic performance
✅ A lot of leafy greens and high oxalates foods to discourage iron absorption
✅ Discouraging iron absorption by including drinking milk or black tea or coffee with meals, only eating fruit outside of meals
✅ Supplementing with curcumin (turmeric) to chelate iron, as well as supplementing several nutrients for support or that I may miss from my food as I avoid high iron food (B vitamins, zinc, magnesium, etc)
✅ I may try ketones post workout as they are known to support the build of red blood cells

I’ll be getting weekly blood tests to see if/how much these changes will impact my ferritin levels and build back of RBC’s and hemoglobin.

I’m just an athlete trying to navigate these new waters proactively and using all the information we currently have access to. If you can relate, please let me know 🙏🙏

I was blessed to receive this postcard from my friend and former training buddy Dax. Dax hand painted it. That’s what makes it the most special.

Dax has many talents, but his greatest talent is how he uses his talents to make a positive impact in the lives of others. During a time when there is so much negative and divisiveness in the world, he creates opportunities to give.

I’m very grateful for this postcard and all that it symbolizes. There is depth and beauty in it. It carries a piece of Dax and embodies the purist thing that we have - nature.

“True wilderness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.” ~ Robert Bly

Thank you Dax 🙏 It’s fitting that the first time I met you, you weren’t present at the meeting. You were off on an adventure in the mountains the day I first met with your running group. You were just a name at first but then I finally got to meet you for real - and it changed the course of my life for the good 🙏

90+ degrees outside 🥵👉 Not conducive to a productive workout, so I opted for the treadmill 👏 But to tolerate the treadmill, I have to keep things interesting 😄
Here’s what I did 👇

1 mile warm up
1 mile alternating between steady-state and tempo by quarter miles
2 miles of alternating between steady-state and tempo by half miles
1 mile of alternating between steady-state and tempo by quarter miles
Very short cool down

Monitoring my calf strain and things mostly felt good 👍 I cut the cooldown short because the calf started getting angry.

Sub-threshold intervals keep the pressure on without tipping into lactate accumulation. This type of training improves your ability to recycle lactate, boosting your ability to hold a faster pace for longer 🙌🙌

Today I was supposed to be racing at the USAT draft-legal sprint duathlon nationals. My body was not ready (returning to form and fitness following hereditary hemochromatosis iron unloading therapy) so I didn’t make the trip to Omaha.

I woke up feeling sad that I couldn’t race. I know many of you know that feeling all too well 🙏❤️
Since I’m not completely broken, I decided I’d do my own sprint duathlon today. I wanted to push and see. I wanted to feel a little bit of the pain cave.

The official Sprint du is a 5k run/20k bike/2.5k run

My runs were done on the treadmill, my bike was out on the open road.
My conclusion = I am so glad I did this. It was healing to me. I felt great at my paces (which were somewhere in between a true race pace and a typical training pace). It was essentially a tempo effort throughout.

From here I will keep building back. What else is there to do. When something is a part of who you are you just keep going.

I dislike the comfort zone. It makes you weak. Training isn’t comfortable. Life isn’t comfortable. They’re full of challenge, good days, hards days. Thank goodness. I want to be strong, not comfortable.

“It’s hard to move mountains when you’re paralyzed, but you gotta try” ❤️❤️❤️ My teammates are such a blessing ❤️

Fighting through the practical disadvantages of lower red blood cell count and waning hemoglobin as I journey through weekly therapeutic blood draws to pull iron out of my iron overloaded body.

In my mind I know why every workout feels so much harder than it should but I still struggle with feeling discouraged (and definitely humbled). But I do know, and hold onto the reality, that this shall pass. And I will keep doing what I can. No backing down 🤜🤛

My 4th weekly blood draw is tomorrow and then doctors will retest my ferritin levels 🤞🤞🤞





and.adventures

I enjoyed another Climb butt-kicker this morning! Thank you ladies 🙏❤️

I look forward to feeling good and powerful but for now am grateful just to be able to do what I can ❤️❤️

Today’s workout 🥰
I’m in an overall fitness focus, not yet in a race prep. These types of workouts are not only fun, fresh and different than the typical training grind, they are also an excellent way to keep a continually high heart rate while getting strength, core, plyometrics, and quality run efforts!

Perfect for a Saturday!! Fuel with real food 👍 Afterwards! Now to get ready for our hike in Evergreen 😍