Blog

WHAT ROLLS BETTER THAN A BALL?
At the St. George Marathon expo I wandered by a booth of wooden plaques with etched messages. One jumped out at me: There may come a day when I cannot run … today is NOT that day! This sign sits prominently beside my desk in my home office.
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CAN HANDS REALLY HEAL?
“Running for cancer relief,” is the tagline for The Jacquelyn Project. I ran the Boston Marathon in my daughter’s memory but I also ran because of massage. I ran with massage. I ran for massage. So as this first phase of The Jacquelyn Project winds down, it seems appropriate to highlight the importance of massage to me.
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THE OUTCOME
Some days it feels like The Jacquelyn Project just began—but here I am, summarizing the outcome. Where did the time go? When I began, my goals were to:
• Honor my daughter’s legacy by raising $50,000-plus for the Massage Therapy Foundation to fund cancer-relieving community service grants.
• Offer self-care advice to encourage improved health, longer careers in massage as well as better counsel for clients.
• Promote massage as my preferred wellness, recovery, and healing intervention
• Show up to run a great Boston Marathon, representing my daughter, sponsors, and the entire massage profession as proudly as possible.
• Connect massage therapists with our great sponsoring brands who care deeply about supporting this profession.
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TAKE TIME TO DECOMPRESS
Our fast pace contributes to higher levels of stress, demanding occasional mental decompression through healthy diversions like a massage, walk in nature, meditation, exercise, or whatever enables us to pause and regroup. To decompress literally means to release from pressure or compression.
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THE RESILIENT MINDSET
Endurance running demands physical toughness. Yet, no matter how hard I train, it’s usually not my legs or lungs that hold me back. Rather, it’s my mind, hardwired as it is to protect me from pain. Persevering in marathon training, or in a massage therapy career, requires a great measure of mental toughness.
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HAPPY NOW, HAPPY LATER
Our world is full of trade-offs. Not too long ago I purchased paper towels and toilet tissue made from 100% recycled materials in an effort to reduce my burden on our environment. While these products offer attractive long-term benefits, they fell well short of desired quality. Have you noticed that too many products and services seem to excel in certain attributes while falling short in others? I introduced this trade-off in last month’s blog highlighting how I am always in search of brands that offer it all, delivering happy now and happy later!
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PRIORITIZE RECOVERY
Recovery is a vital step on our pathway to a normal state of health, mind or strength. We can recover from injury, from addiction, even from a tough workout or hard day at work. I am beginning to fully appreciate the power of recovery in my own training for the Boston Marathon as I learn that the best athletes are, in part, the best because they recover quickly. It doesn’t matter how fast and far I ran today if I can’t show up again tomorrow.
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TRANSFORMATIONAL INSIGHT
We are bombarded with information. As a coping mechanism, we skim, filter and block the majority of detail that passes before us as we lack the capacity to ‘double click’ on every topic. Yet, as our life circumstances evolve, we often find ourselves drilling deeply into subject matter that we previously ignored.
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AVOID CAREER-ENDING INJURY
How to differentiate between random acute pain versus the beginning of something chronic that may become our companion for a day, a week—or forever? What would you hate to lose due to a career-ending injury?
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CASTING A BROADER NET
Years ago, I led a development effort to create better home-care solutions. While my team and I spent considerable time understanding domestic unmet needs, we also explored how other countries were tacking these identical human requirements. After all, mobility challenges are not unique to one geography; and we hoped that exciting new answers had already begun to emerge to address these legacy problems elsewhere. Guess what we discovered?
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LEVERAGE EXPERTS
As I began my running journey, I just went outside and ran. As I progressed and hit plateaus, I began to search for experts, starting with family and friends, to help me to break through barriers. Ultimately, I engaged a personal running coach for expert guidance.
We are all accustomed to advisors and coaches. We take tennis or golf lessons from a pro. We use attorneys to help us navigate through contracts, wills and the like. An accountant handles our books and income taxes once things get a little too complicated.
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EXPLORATION & DISCOVERY
Over 2,000 years ago Plato stated, “our need will be the real creator,” and this phrase has morphed over time into the proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” We have all experienced necessity at some point; facing a problem, we search for solutions and whether we invent something new or simply discover or modify something that exists, “eureka,” we find our path forward. Discovery feels great and our lives are forever improved with new insight as well as a broader solution set.
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DON’T OVERLOOK TOOLS
When my fitness center closed near the start of the pandemic, an immediate concern for me was how to remain active. I reluctantly decided to start running for daily exercise. I was surprised as I began to enjoy an activity I always claimed to hate, especially as my times consistently improved. Mind you, it’s easy to run faster when you start slow.
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INFRASTRUCTURE MAINTENANCE & REPAIR
Fair warning was provided—building cardio-pulmonary capacity would be easiest; muscle strength and endurance would follow. But, “infrastructure,” –joints, bones, ligaments, tendons– these take the longest to adapt to the stresses of endurance training due to limited blood flow. Within six to 12 months of initiating endurance training it’s fairly common for injuries to emerge like stress fractures, tendinitis, or sprains.
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MASSAGE FOR TRAINING
Last year after progressing with 5 and 10Ks, I wondered if I could successfully run a half marathon. So I signed up for two and started to increase my mileage in preparation. While I successfully completed both races, it was also the introduction of some chronic tendinitis for me. I even stopped running for about six weeks in late 2021 to give my body some rest and recovery … before I started to slowly ramp up training for the next challenge – my first full marathon and qualifying for Boston.
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MANAGING PAIN
Keeping the mind and body in sync and firing on all cylinders is essential, especially when running marathons … or performing daily massage … is part of life’s journey. One of the main challenges that can throw a wrench in any marathon or massage plan is PAIN. Pain sidelines even the most well-conditioned individual as it disrupts not only how the body moves and performs but also impacts mentality, mood, even motivation.
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RUNNING FOR MASSAGE THERAPY
When Jacquelyn (Dahneke) Penrose was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, she underwent a common treatment route: chemotherapy, radiation, and radical surgery. Her parents and five siblings stood beside her all the way.
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BECOMING AN ENDURANCE ATHLETE
I will run the Boston Marathon next April as a 58-year-old after qualifying on my own merits. How can I possibly accomplish this, especially after three decades of sedentary living and not focusing on my own wellness? Is it possible to make such an abrupt course correction and become an endurance athlete at my age?
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SLEEP IS A SUPERPOWER
As I look back on my wellness renaissance, what was the first step in my transformation? I shifted my wellness lifestyle trajectory just a few short years ago–with sleep! I made a personal commitment to get consistent sleep every night.
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