Natalie Hustad

The last two weeks of my life have been a living hell. Problems have been flying at me from every direction. And yet, aside from one tiny meltdown (which amounted to about 1 hour of feeling sorry for myself) I remained calm!

If you're wondering how, lean in and I'll share the secret ...

When I was 16 I was sitting at home flipping through channels and came across a documentary on the national geographic channel about a 10 day race which spanned two continents. Not in a car, but on foot, bike, kayak, horse, or whatever else was available. Each team consisted of four people and more then half of those who began dropped out in the first three days. It was the most thrilling thing I had ever seen. I decided by the end of the documentary that I wanted to participate in this challenge. I knew it would take years but I wanted to do it.

Forest Gump is a great movie for a lot of reasons. One of my favorite scenes is at the end of the movie, when Forest decides to pick up and run to the end of the road. He gets there and decides to run to the end of town, and then “for no particular reason at all” he decides to run across the great state of Alabama. And thus begins his run across the USA.

I remember the first time I “decided” to run a marathon. I hadn’t run more then 3 miles throughout my athletic career. In high school I was a sprinter and a pole-vaulter. It was my first year of college, and I had disclosed to my college track coach  that my dream was to run the Raid Galois’s or the Eco Challenge before I was 21. He laughed, not in a mocking manner, but just that I had not really ever experienced that kind of training.

As I sat in my over-sized stuffed couch, a luxury that I rarely get these days, I propped my left foot on the coffee table and just stared at it. I then began to just move my ankle around, move my toes, invert and evert my foot. Watching the intricacies and subtleties of the movements, thinking about all of the amazing things bout the human body, all the ways it can change and adapt. And I thought of my friend Damien -- a quadriplegic who's rehabilitated himself to paraplegic -- and the miracle he has become.

Yoga is an ancient Indian system of movement for meditation. It is thousands of years old. The Vedic Reshi’s in India devised Yoga’s system of stretch-like movements for the sole purpose of getting their body into strong flexible shape in order to sit in a meditative posture for long periods of time. Today we use yoga as a part of an integrated program for fitness and mental clarity.