Sometimes the articles I write are just fun. Like this one for LIVESTRONG.ORG.

Overview

Tetherball is a summer mainstay of campers, revelers, outdoor enthusiasts and fans of the movie “Napolean Dynamite.” The activity of smacking a ball tethered to a string around a pole until the string wraps itself completely around the pole while another person tries to smack the ball to wrap the rope around the pole the opposite way has a cloudy history and murky origin, however…

I love the supermarket. The overwhelming colors. The activity. The amazing food. Even the smallest supermarket has everything! Artichokes and eight kinds of apples and two kinds of pears and Otter Pops and spinach and … The Safeway in Bisbee is small, but it’s the only supermarket we’ve got. (Tombstone, up the road, doesn’t even have a supermarket.) I was feeling a little down a few days ago and I went to the supermarket for a freshly baked baguette and salad to make dinner. When I was there I appreciated how great the place was and transferred that thinking to my life and listed the colorful, unique, interesting things I had been through in the last week alone. It enabled me to get out of my own head and release myself from a torpor of pointless ennui and focus on good things …

A site called asweetlife.org, dedicated to diabetes, ran an essay of mine called Curing Diabetes: Would I Do it Again? It’s about my transplant and the fallout from it. There are some kind and interesting comments at the bottom of the piece. It’s a wonderful site I urge you to visit for more than just what I’ve written.

LIVESTRONG.ORG story I wrote on razor-siping and running shoes:

Cutting the soles of running shoes is a time-honored, old-school running habit. Runners would slice small lateral grooves into shoes they felt weren’t flexible enough for their feet. They found that making the cuts made some shoes more comfortable because doing so allowed the foot to flex more naturally as they ran on large, cushioned mid-soles. To improve traction, comfort and foot flexibility, the practice of cutting soles has gone “new school” and is being embraced today by many shoe manufacturers…

Posted on Livestrong.org, my story on Fartlek training:

Fartlek, translated from Swedish, literally means “speed play.” Fartlek was the brainchild of Swedish national coach Gosta Holmer in the 1930s. His cross-country and track runners were lagging well behind the rulers of running at the time, Finland. Holmer, desperate to find a way to make his team faster, threw away the stopwatch. He set his runners free in fields and on trails to alter their speed as they saw fit, from fast to very fast — much like under race conditions…