Tech Exec Wellness Podcast: Conversations to Reignite Your Soul
In the fast-paced world of technology, where innovation and disruption are the norm, tech executives often find themselves caught in a whirlwind of high-pressure decision-making, long working hours, and constant connectivity. The relentless pursuit of success and the demands of their roles can take a toll on their mental, emotional, and physical well-being. However, a new narrative that emphasizes the importance of tech executive wellness as a crucial component of sustainable success is emerging. This is the story of the tech executive's journey to rediscover balance, prioritize well-being, and ultimately thrive in their personal and professional lives.
If you're ready to embark on a wellness journey that will empower you to live your best life, I invite you to subscribe to Tech Exec Wellness, Navigating the Digital Balance, wherever you listen to podcasts. Together, let's cultivate harmony within ourselves and radiate positive energy to the world. Each week, we'll explore a wide range of topics related to wellness, inviting experts, thought leaders, and everyday individuals who have transformed their lives through mindful living, self-care, practices, and holistic approaches. We'll dive deep into areas such as nutrition, fitness, mental health, spirituality, mindfulness, personal growth, and more.
Tech Exec Wellness Podcast: Conversations to Reignite Your Soul
Balancing Executive Leadership, Spartan Racing, and Personal Growth with Gwendolyn "Wendy" Bounds
Award-winning journalist and author Gwendolyn "Wendy" Bounds joins us to share her fascinating journey from covering major stories at the Wall Street Journal to leading at Smart News. Wendy’s story is peppered with eclectic music tastes and unforgettable childhood concert memories, setting the stage for her compelling narrative of midlife transformation. Get ready to be inspired as Wendy takes us through her diverse career and her fearless approach to embracing new challenges.
What drives a non-athlete to become a top-ranked Spartan racer? Wendy's journey through obstacle course racing reveals the profound meditative states and life-changing focus that come with rigorous physical challenges. As she balances a demanding executive career with intense training, Wendy shares her actionable strategies for battling burnout and achieving personal growth through single-task focus and perseverance.
Balancing career, family, and personal goals is no easy feat, but Wendy's insights on time management and prioritizing essential tasks offer a roadmap for navigating life's many commitments. From the power of small movements and community support in fitness to the importance of a balanced diet, Wendy provides practical advice for anyone looking to improve their physical well-being. And don't miss her powerful book recommendation that has sparked serendipitous connections and inspired countless transformations. Join us for a heartening conversation that promises to motivate and empower.
Please visit our website https://www.techexecwellness.com to stay up to date and subscribe to our newsletter!
And welcome back to another episode of the Tech Exec Wellness Podcast. I'm Melissa.
Speaker 2:And I'm Shannon.
Speaker 1:We're delighted to have Shannon on board with the first conversation with Wendy Bounds today. So Gwendolyn Wendy Bounds is an award-winning journalist and author whose career spans media brands including the Wall Street Journal, abc News, consumer Reports, cnbc and more. She is currently Vice President of Content and media partnerships at Smart News. Her most recent book, not Too Late, which we're going to talk about Not Too Late the Power of Pushing Limits at Any Age, is an inspiring account about balance, midlife transformation into a competitive athlete and what science shows about the benefits of embracing new challenges at any stage. Raised in North Carolina, bounce now lives in New York's Hudson River Valley, and you can subscribe to her sub stack and I'm going to add that link into the show notes for our listeners. Wendy, welcome to the show. Before we get started, I ask this of every guest what's your favorite music genres and can you share a memorable concert with us?
Speaker 3:Thanks, melissa, nice to be here, and Shannon, good to see you when we're not in the desert together, but that's just a little drop there For that. Last time we were, we were sitting side by side, all right. So music genres like this is a pretty, pretty challenging one to narrow it down to just a favorite one, but I am I may be the only tech person who will say this, but I am a country music fan, a pretty big one, and my playlist. I actually have a playlist that I listened to a lot while I was writing the book, so it ranges from Eric Church and people like Travis Tritt and Kenny Chesney and others, but it also then goes right into Beyonce, bb King, katy Perry, faith Hill, the jackson five. So make of that what you will, it's country, but with a pretty big twist. Any reactions before we move on to concert memorable concert experiences.
Speaker 1:I I think it's eclectic and and I love it. I I like uh travis tritt and I really like eric church. Shannon, what about you? You get into?
Speaker 2:any of those. I just got into chrispleton. My wife took me to his concert down in San Diego back in March.
Speaker 3:All right, cool. Well then, I am not riding solo on this one, I feel good. So I have to say, though, my most memorable concert experience does not come from somebody I just named. My very first concert when I was a kid was Jimmy Buffett, who just died this past year. And I was a kid was Jimmy Buffett who just died this past year, and he my parents took me.
Speaker 3:I think I was like seven years old and it was just this raucous concert. I might've been in the seventies or very early eighties I'm trying to do the math on it when I was seven, but apparently a lot of people were smoking, you know marijuana in the audience, and I kept saying like daddy, what's that smell? Mommy, what's that smell? And they were like just play with the beach ball, somebody's bouncing around. That certainly remained, and people were wearing I don't know if you've ever been to a Jimmy Buffett concert, but people would wear shark heads on their, like these fake shark rubber things on their heads for his song. Fins and beach balls get thrown all around in the audience, and it's quite a scene before and after and during the concert. But the most memorable concert was certainly that Sticks with me. Haven't beat it yet.
Speaker 1:That's pretty incredible At seven years old Mom. What's that smell? I?
Speaker 3:love that. That's like a children's book in the making, don't you guys think? I think so, all right.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love hearing about that. Can you walk us through your awesome career, because you've done a lot and I just want our listeners to kind of get a glimpse into who you are before we talk about some of the athletic tech stuff.
Speaker 3:Sure, I mean I'll be short about it. My career history is strange in a way. It's not particularly linear. I mean the first part was a little bit, but then it jumps around. People like to say I've done a lot of pivots.
Speaker 3:I started out, I started right out of college working for the Wall Street Journal as an intern, which then segued into a full-time job there as a journalist, and this when I first started. This was in the days where text was king and the print newspaper was still sort of that was the main medium, and I cut my teeth really in my very early 20s with some of the best journalists in the world, learning from them. I did not have a financial background. I'm terrible at math, but I got a pretty good education working there in my 20s, learning from some of the again best folks in the trade, and I got to basically witness the digital revolution, when it happened, from the offices of the Wall Street Journal, which was one of the first big players in the digital space to charge for its content on the web, and it turned out to be a very smart decision on their part and I was able to, through my time there, both move over and work on the video team and spend a lot of time also working just on the dot-com side itself, and so I got a pretty fulsome look at that main transition that we had and how information was delivered. After that I went over to Consumer Reports, which is one of the oldest product rating organizations in the country magazine, website, podcasts and I ran all of their media there for about eight years, and you know then obviously by that point, social media was part of the big transition, and just as I was leaving, we were starting to talk to this company called OpenAI about this new technology generative AI and we were starting to experiment with it. And I ended up leaving Consumer Reports to go to a tech company called Smart News, where I work now, which is based in Tokyo, which is an information news aggregator with a presence both in Japan and also here in the United States both in Japan and also here in the United States and we have just hired a bunch of big, interesting tech people over from Google and other places and are really doubling down what we're doing in the US, and obviously the AI revolution has transformed everything about the information business, and so I'm deep in it in that there and in the meantime, just I'll drop this and I'll stop talking.
Speaker 3:I've written a couple of books. The first book I wrote after the terrorist attacks in September 11th of 2001,. I ended up I lived next door to the World Trade Center towers and my apartment building was damaged from the attacks, and both are also our offices at the Wall Street Journal. I ended up moving upstate to the Hudson River Valley in New York and stumbled upon this Irish pub where the community was struggling to save it, and I ended up working there behind the counter some and took a leave of absence from my job at the Journal and wrote a book about this pub and the community's attempt to keep it alive. And then my second book, which we'll get into, so I won't do it now is Not Too Late, and I'm assuming we'll go there at some point. So that's, that's it in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's extraordinary. I think that's phenomenal, and I was just looking at my flip phone the other day and how far we've come.
Speaker 3:It's a flip phone. I like that. Sometimes you still see flip phones on TV right Like they're very effective when people want to hang up on each other.
Speaker 1:I they're very effective when people want to hang up on each other.
Speaker 3:I miss the flip phone. I really do. I miss it. Let's bring it back. Let's make that your podcast goal to bring back the flip phone.
Speaker 1:Wendy, let's do that. Let's start a movement.
Speaker 2:I mean that's pretty amazing, I think. But we really wanted to dive right into the book, which I'm really excited to talk about. I had the opportunity to listen to it. I got a heads up when we first met back in April that it was launching and I was really excited about it and started promoting it. I know Michael Easter gave me an opportunity to, I think, guest write on his sub stack and launch it and I was sharing that around and other folks in my network. My mom bought the book. I had an opportunity to listen to it on audio as I was driving from New York to California last month. So I kind of wanted to start and give you an opportunity to talk about what inspired you to write the book.
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, thank you to your mom and thank you to you, and we should just tie that knot that I mentioned us meeting in the desert. We actually I met you at one of Michael Easter, who's a great author himself, who's built a wonderful community called the 2% Community. He wrote a book called the Comfort Crisis. I met Shannon in a desert at a conference called Don't Die. So there you have it. That is where the deepest of friendships get formed is, at a conference called Don't Die, in the Las Vegas desert. So more on that maybe at another point. In terms of what inspired so not too late is it traces my evolution from a, you know, I grew up a scrawny kid, last picked for sports teams and evolved into, like many people I know, and this may ring true to you a busy executive tied to my screens doing a lot of sitting, but someone who was not a competitive athlete. And at age 45, I had a wake up call at a dinner party, which you talk about later if you like. But it really triggered me to get up the next morning and start. I googled what are some of the hardest things you can do, and one thing that popped up was obstacle course racing and Spartan racing, which is a brand of obstacle course racing. And for people who don't know it, this is a brand of obstacle course racing and, for people who don't know it, this is a type of endurance sport that's pretty demanding. You have to have high respiratory fitness because you're running through cross country terrain, mountains and farmland and you know difficult, muddy, rocky conditions. But you're also scaling obstacles. You're climbing a 17 foot rope, you are carrying a 40 pound sandbag up and down mountains, you are going over walls six foot walls, eight foot walls so I thought this is the last thing I'll ever do. And then just I started, you know, getting these workouts of the day from Spartan and kind of put my foot into it and little by little I got up to my first race and now, eight years later, I have written about my evolution from that point to this year. I was ranked number one in the country in the national series for my age group in Spartan racing and 50 plus races through it, and have competed in two world championships.
Speaker 3:So the book is about that evolution but, more deeply, is about how all of us can answer these profound questions that hit us when we hit the age of midlife, of. Is this really all I am? Is this all I can be? Is this? My time is running shorter on this earth? I am in this cycle of the same things every day. You know that wake up, same routine, same friends, same family, same restaurants. And how do we break that? How do we add something more and different to our life, especially something we thought was maybe impossible for us to ever be?
Speaker 3:So that is the essence of it, and the inspiration to write it just came from the fact that people would ask me how have you done this, like, how have you balanced a big career with taking on something new and ambitious? You were not an athlete, and how did you do it? How did you manage your time? How did you get out of inertia? How did you explain this to your friends and family? And every time I would get finished telling them they'd say you should write a book about that. So, finally, I talked to my agent, my book agent and that's what I did.
Speaker 2:That's pretty cool. As a fellow Spartan I guess I've run a few races I totally appreciate and it resonates everything that you're talking about. I mean, actually it was funny when we were comparing. I sent you all my race scores and found out we actually raced on the same course over, I think in San Luis Obispo, wasn't it?
Speaker 3:Yes, and I think that's one of the best. I had a terrible race that day, but that was one of the nicest courses I've ever run. I don't know how you feel, shannon, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was gorgeous.
Speaker 2:I mean, I love driving through that part of California and coastal California is gorgeous and coastal California is gorgeous, but actually running through cow pastures alongside the live oaks, I thought it was awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you may feel this and, melissa, this is something that might resonate with you and your listeners, but people who hear this and think, oh, what do you get out of? Running through cow pastures, right, and crawling under barbed wire, and all of the this sounds crazy. But I feel and I'd like to hear how you feel, shannon that you know when you start these competitions, everything else fades away right, like whatever it is that you're worrying about in that moment, whether it's some meeting you had at work or an argument you had with somebody, or if you're worrying about something on the health front. The thing is it's like, for that time period that you're on the course, you're focused on nothing else but just one foot in front of the other, and so for me it's kind of been almost like a more aggressive form of meditation in that right. I don't know if you've experienced the same thing.
Speaker 2:I totally agree. Like you know, two or three hours out on the course and you think about nothing else. No, none of the worries about what's going on in your life are there whatsoever. It's like one of the most profound ways of getting to presence and flow that I can think of.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I flow is a great word for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I. That resonates with me a lot, especially now that I'm strength training. And congratulations to Wendy. I think that's awesome that you've had those accolades. That's amazing. Yeah, I feel present when I'm doing something and I don't know. I think, being in technology, you just tend to multitask and I really think that's where burnout starts to come from. I'm really glad that you're both sharing this for our listeners.
Speaker 3:That you know. Let's just double. Listen to me say double click. Let's double click right on the multitasking point. Click right on the multitasking point, boy. That just proved it all. But I think that is being able to engage in something where you can break yourself out of that frame of my mind is going here, here, here, here, and carrying so many things and being able to focus on just a singular thing, which, in this case, was the physical sense of just moving forward and getting through to the finish line in strength training, like what you're talking about, melissa. It's can you. Can you just drop your phone right for what, however long you were doing that strength training session, and concentrate on nothing else but getting your form right, getting your breathing right and anybody who's going to dive into something that matters to them, that they truly want to learn, get better at, maybe even attempt to master. This kind of singular focus is really important for anybody and super important for people who have tech brains like we do.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. One more thing about actually writing the book and it was your second book, by the sounds of it, and you're an experienced writer but what did you find to be the most challenging part of writing it and how did you overcome it?
Speaker 3:it's a great question and I think looks writers will say I think across the board people who write books will say this To some degree. It's a very lonely process. Until you get to this point. You are in a room by yourself trying to put together 90,000 words, in my case, and figure out what themes and what the narrative arc should be, what should be in the book, More importantly, what should not be in the book, and piecing this all together so that one day you hope somebody will read it and remember something and you'll talk to them about it. Right, and and, but you don't know. And it's a, it's a lot of, it is just a lot of commitment for the unknown. So that just overcoming that hurdle I think is true for anybody who is writing a book.
Speaker 3:It was easier this time, my second time around the but the most challenging part was adding that to the balance of things that I was doing in a day, because I did not take a leave of absence from work. I had just started, I got the book contract and then I got this new job at Smart News and I wanted to do both things. I had this opportunity. They just happened to collide at one time and I had to figure out how to balance doing both of those while also training and then traveling to compete and then, yeah, also being a good spouse and taking care of my family and thinking about my parents and my dog and the chores that we all have to do and the laundry right. So I think really my time management and my discipline about what things are actually the essential things in my life and what things are non-essential and could be parked, that reconciling that, Shannon, was the most challenging part, but when I when, that's how I was able to get it done. Yeah.
Speaker 2:One thing I really liked was, I mean, you were really open and leaned into vulnerability, if I can use it that way. I mean there was some actually emotional parts. You made my mom cry when you talked about your dog and what you went through there. So I mean the way that you just kind of laid out your heart, you know, in terms of what you were going through, the doubts, all of that stuff and coming to the other side of it, I thought that was one of the most inspiring parts of the book.
Speaker 3:Well, I appreciate your saying that and again, you know another shout out to your mother. One of the things about experiences like this and if you're going to write about them is the truth is it's not like the movies in many ways, where you don't just wake up one day and it's like everything's great and the Rocky music comes on and you just charged a Victor. Right, that's not how it happens. I mean, life is complicated and you lose people, you lose pets, thing, people get sick, you get sick, um, and you lose a job.
Speaker 3:Like all these things can happen that can throw you off the course of the best intentions of the thing that you really want to be spending time on, and how you find your way back to that thing and in my case, this thing was obstacle course racing and then also how that thing can lift you up and bring you, make you feel like the future is still filled with new possibility, at a time when, again, like things in midlife can be challenging, right, and you've got this overload, and that can be true even when you're in your 20s and 30s. So, in a sense, if you can stick with it and find a way to keep at it, I think it can be the thing that actually pulls you out of some of the darkest moments, and that was the truth for me and that's, you know, some of what you're referring to. That was the truth for me and that's some of what you're referring to. That are some dark moments in the book, but I think that journey is the true journey that anyone would face.
Speaker 1:I really resonate with that. My wife and we lost a pet and it was hard having this pet. It was the child to me as we reflect on these moments. I don't know about you, wendy and Shannon, but I'm more mindful of my time and how I spend it and who I spend it with.
Speaker 3:I agree, and I'd be interested to hear both of your thoughts on this. But I was driving. I'm in North Carolina right now talking to you all, which is where my parents live, and I'm here visiting them. I see them really only a couple of times a year because I live in New York. But one point there's a scene in the book where I'm actually visiting them and I'm driving along by some farmland and I have to pull over my car because, guess what?
Speaker 3:I needed to answer a text from work and so I'd pulled over and I was on the side of this road, this country road. I happened to look up and I saw a farmer on his tractor and he was just going down the rows of the crops and was waiting for the text to come back in. I was probably like agitated and I just kept staring at him and then I realized like he's not looking at his phone, like he's just going up and down those rows of crops and if he doesn't do that, his crop dies. And that focus and that notion of like if you don't do these things, your crop dies made me go home and write in this notebook I had, like you know, don't, let, don't let your crop die. And it made me think what is my crop, what is the thing that is I need to take care of every day, and everything else can be sort of secondary to that.
Speaker 3:And that's what I did. You know it was my family, our health, my job, and then obstacle course racing, like I put that in my crop. And then things like social engagements. I stepped down from some boards that I was on. I didn't really like go see a concert, like there were a lot of things I cut out. I cut out scrolling, aimless scrolling on social media. Those things were dispensable. But my crop and the indispensable things, right, those were what got my attention every single day. It's very clarifying, melissa, as you're alluding to, like you know, you're talking about your wife and your pet and people. Everybody will know what their crop is if they truly, truly think about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was just going to say. I mean, on what you just said, melissa and Wendy, there's this essay by Paul Graham called Life is Short, and I think I shared this with you before, melissa. But he really, in this short essay, just drives home the point that it's not a cliche statement and when you truly grasp that life is short, you will relentlessly prune bullshit from your life. I think is a direct quote and I've read that multiple times over the last few months and shared that because it's so true.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean that book. There's a book called 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman Time Management for Mortals. And when you think about it, like yeah, we got roughly 80 years and 4,000 weeks and when you think about how short amount of time that is and if you're you know, if you're in midlife, you're getting close to where you got more sand in the hourglass that's gone through than still at the top and, um, you know, you can talk about it a lot, but and you won't feel it ever Like I think it's impossible to think about it every single minute of every single day, but if you can think about it more than you are now, like you're saying, it's a forcing mechanism, shannon, and I totally agree, wendy as you became an elite athlete.
Speaker 1:What surprised you the most about your physical transformation? Would it be mental or physical? What surprised you the most about taking on these obstacles?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, it's interesting. So I mean, I know some people say elite and they use elite differently. In Spartan racing, elite is a very specific category of racer that I am not. These are people who are almost like professionals and they're generally younger than I am. But I have become a competitive athlete and I have become I am when I'm at my best. I'm among some of the best of my age, which is something I never thought would ever be possible, like me being able to fly myself to Mars right now or win a Grammy and if you heard me sing anything you would say, yes, she's going to get to Mars before she ever wins a Grammy. So there's that.
Speaker 3:But my body changed early on. Again, I was this skinny, scrawny kid and there wasn't much muscle mass to me. But the first thing I remember we're getting these little calluses. I would touch under conference room tables when we were knee deep in about 85 page PowerPoint presentations and I thought my head was going to explode and then I'd kind of feel these little baby calluses emerging under the conference room table. It was like this little secret. I had right that I had this life where I was and I wasn't even serious yet, but I was getting up an hour earlier or 45 minutes earlier and going out in my backyard to train and I didn't know what I was doing. I was doing things in the frosty grass while my neighbors would drive by and gawk at me. But the physical transformation that started to occur, like when I would have muscle tone and somebody would say, oh, you must be a runner, and because I'd be at a doctor and be looking at my calves and I'd be like who are you talking to, right? So just the transformation of my thinking that anybody would look at me and think that I look like somebody who was either athletic or strong, that was an awakening. That was just something I'd never had any people say to me ever other thing I think this is far more psychological is that we all have attributes, right, and attributes are very different than skills.
Speaker 3:Skills are something you acquire and can learn. Just as I learned to scale a wall, I learned to scale a rope, to climb a rope, but attributes are kind of always running in the background. There's a great book called Attributes, by former Navy SEAL called, named Rich Dibney, and these attributes are things like determination or humor, grit, things of those natures, of that nature and I found that my superpower in racing was really the grit factor. I never come out fast, I never come out hot, I'm a slow, I'm a slow start, but I can suffer for a long time and I I'm able sort of to pick it up through the end, and that is, I think, grit was something I had in the workplace and it was very interesting to see how attributes from one part of my life could translate into something completely new, where and help me right, even if they seemed like such different environments being in a corporate world versus being in a muddy race course.
Speaker 3:But I think that that is something everybody listening to this can pick up on if they're trying to learn something new, whether it's something physical or chess or whatever the activity might be. Your attributes, your attributes are there, running in the background. You have them, you know what they are in other disciplines. How do you make them work for you in something new, especially learning something new and hard? How do those attributes give you your edges and your equalizers to help you advance? And I have found that to be a really profound part of this journey to understand that translation of those parts of me.
Speaker 2:That's pretty great. Another question for you and I think this kind of dovetails, I'll say like when I emailed you after I had read the book and just followed up, because we've been, you know, obviously in communication ever since the Don't Die event with the crew that were there. I just have to tell you how much I appreciated the time you took to give me just a really great, lengthy response, because I talked to you about struggling with injury. I haven't been able to do a Spartan now for about a year and it just meant so much. And when you closed that last email with we will do a Spartan together, that just was the inspiration for me to really say forget this, especially the things that you hit on in the book about. People will just get injured and then just say this is what you do at midlife, and then they drift away. And I felt like I was headed in that direction until I read the book. But what advice would you?
Speaker 3:I appreciate it. You can't let me throw that out there and not let me say something to you, which I need to, because, look, I met you First of all. Somebody who's going to just give up doesn't show up at a conference called Don't Die. They don't read a book like mine and then email the author.
Speaker 3:And the truth of the matter is I can see something in you where I know that you're going to come back from that, and I meant it when I said we're going to run one together and even if we had to walk it together, we would do it, right, it wouldn't matter, we'll get there. And I see that in you and I appreciate your wanting to come back from it, because I think so many people just kind of do give up and they say it's too late. And that is the core of what I want people to know is I'm not saying it's never too late, right, I'm not living in a fantasy world, but often it's not too late, and that's what I was trying to say to you. So, thank you and back to you.
Speaker 2:No, it works. So encouragement to me meant a lot. So what would you give and advice that you would offer up to others who aren't physically fit today but want to take on a similar challenge?
Speaker 3:Just love this question. So first of all, I there's two things. One, don't try and boil the ocean right away, so you don't have to go from I'm not physically fit to tomorrow I'm going to compete in a Spartan race, an obstacle course race. I mean, it took me almost two years before I got to my first race, but just because of life events and I wanted to feel ready for it. But I think it's, how do you start to incorporate movement more into your daily life? And that can be anything as small and I mean when I say small I mean small from the 10 minute.
Speaker 3:You know little bites and chunks of time that emerge in your days where you're like well, I have 10 minutes before this next meeting, I guess I'll just check my email or I'll scroll on Instagram or I'll go wander down the hall. If anybody even goes to an office anymore and talk to somebody. Can you use those 10 minutes in more productive ways? I wrote about this in my newsletter, my Substack newsletter, not too late recently, how to use these time slices, and I actually give some very specific examples exercises, breathing, things that people can do that are going to just turn them and their brain a little bit more toward thinking about health, like. The first thing is a mentality shift of how you're going to add little bits during the day to your little bits of wellness into your day, and that's going to just starting to think like that is going to be a big first step. The next thing I would say is you know if you need, if you're alone in trying to do this and it's not working for you, how can you find community? How can you find somebody who will go out and take a jog with you? Or can you find a community online that you can join that will inspire you and hold you accountable, because accountability is really important when you're setting goals on being fit, and I think and I'm not going to give a prescription about you know what actual things to do, because this could differ for everybody, but I'm trying to give some broad strokes, things that I think will change people mentally so that being physically fit becomes a part of their just their daily life.
Speaker 3:People are afraid and you get more afraid of this as you get older. They're afraid to look foolish. They're afraid they're gonna like well, who's somebody's gonna laugh at me and the way I run, or picking up this tennis racket and the way I hit the ball, or, you know, I was really like, I know I looked really dumb when I started training in gyms with people who are half my age. But once you get over that, that feeling of like I shouldn't look foolish, or that feeling of I need to have my hand on the master control switch, it's so powerful and that's how you begin to get better.
Speaker 3:So I would say to anybody who's worried about that, just like park, that the you know the stoic philosopher, epictetus, you know, talks about this and says you know, if you want to improve, you know you need to be okay looking a little bit foolish, be content to look a little bit foolish, and that's a mantra I would say to everybody. So those are a few things and, again, we could talk for hours about this and it's what I'm trying to dive into in my newsletter more, but I think those are some places to start. Shannon, those are perfect, thank you.
Speaker 1:You're saying I shouldn't get on my skateboard tonight, maybe.
Speaker 3:I think maybe if you I don't know, are you good, Go get on it.
Speaker 1:All right, I can't do those head pipes, but I absolutely think you should get on your skateboard.
Speaker 3:I love that you do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm a big kid at heart, but I want to pivot here for a second. Can you talk about nutrition? And then I want to dive into wearables. What is Wendy doing? Is she using a Nora ring, an Apple watch? Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 3:So nutrition, I'm pretty simple about it. I try to get most of my nutrients and from food right. I do. I do do some supplementation, but I mostly eat a Mediterranean diet. I am, I do eat some red meat, but I focus mostly again on fish, things that swim or things that fly, those are my proteins, and again really on that Mediterranean nuts, olive oil, leafy greens, vegetables, things of that nature, and that works for me. I'm quite conscious about the amount of protein I eat and I am trying to get, you know, close. I can't get quite close to a gram per body of, per pound, but I I'm trying. There's, there's a lot of science out there about protein and how important it is for maintaining muscle mass and, you know, managing hunger and energy, and so I'm very careful about the amount of protein I get.
Speaker 3:And I've become far more conscious about the amount of alcohol that I consume. I've reduced it a lot. I mean not all journalists, but many journalists by nature are often, you know they're, they often drink or they go to bars. And I still do drink some, but I drink a lot less than I did and I've been quite conscious about that. And I take supplements to the degree that they are supplementing things that I have talked to my doctors about. That I know I need more of like vitamin D. I'm not out in the sun a lot, unless I'm racing, because I had a diagnosis of melanoma, which is a very aggressive form of skin cancer, five or six years ago, and so I'm very careful about that. So I take D and some fish oil and a handful of other things, but those are things I have run by my doctors so I'm not experimenting a lot with new things that come out in the market. I try to keep it pretty simple.
Speaker 3:Does that answer your question.
Speaker 1:It does, it does. And speaking of drinking, I was in the Navy, so make of that what you will. I don't drink anymore and I miss it a little bit, but as you age, you just can't come back the next day like you used to as a kid.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think, look, I mean again, I'm not. I do consume alcohol, so I'm going to say this as somebody who does, but you know the science really that I pay the most attention to, there's not really a good level. No alcohol is good for you, so it's not helping you in any capacity. And so I just take that input and I think, well, all right, if it's not helping me.
Speaker 3:It's just I'm trying to put things in my body at this age that are going to improve my health span. Right, I don't want to just live a lot longer and not be as healthy as I possibly can because I'm not going to improve my health span. Right, I don't want to just live a lot longer and not be as healthy as I possibly can because I'm not going to enjoy it. So that's just a factor, and it also impacts how I train and how I think and how I feel in the morning and how I sleep, which I know we'll get into wearables in a minute and I can track this with some of my wearables. I can see very easily the impact that alcohol has on my sleep when I do consume it. So it's just something. I think about it and I'm not preaching and saying everybody should stop drinking, but I just say I'm drinking less and it's working for me.
Speaker 2:I have to. I mean just say that like for me. Same kind of journey. I know you're going to talk about wearables, but my Oura ring took me on this number of year journey to realize that there was literally no safe amount of alcohol to have good sleep. I had read a book by Matt Walker about why we sleep and just how important it is. I think that if there was anything I could say about the single most transformative thing in my life in the last several years was complete removal of alcohol. I just feel so much better. I miss it. I love my glasses of red wine, but it had a profound impact on me.
Speaker 3:All right, so are we going to wearables now Melissa.
Speaker 1:Yes, let's go to wearables, and I think Shannon started out with the Oura Ring. What are you doing to track sleep?
Speaker 3:I'm waving. You can't see it. I'm waving my Oura Ring at you. So right, yeah, no, I find it. I've worn it for years now and it was interesting, even when COVID first happened and before there were vaccines.
Speaker 3:I got COVID in the very early days and my aura ring for two days prior to my like feeling bad and really bad and getting diagnosed with the test, my aura ring, like my numbers, were just terrible. Right, my body temperature was up, my HRV was way down, my heart rate was elevated. It knew I was getting sick. So that was a real kind of interesting. So I listen to it now. If I see things are off in it, I pay attention.
Speaker 3:But I also think it's a great governor because, as Shannon was saying, you know, if you eat something like late in the night, that's not good for you, or you consume an extra glass of wine, you're going to see it in your numbers in the morning. You know, do I think it's? Do I live by it? As you know my Bible, like if I, if my ring says I've had a rough night and I still have a workout to do in the morning and I feel, okay, I do my workout, it's not like I'm like oh, I'm going to not listen to my body and how I feel, but I do think it's a very helpful tool to just make me accountable to myself. And Shannon I don't know if you feel the same way or, melissa, if you wear one too- yeah, I wear one too, and I would agree with you on the COVID thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wear one too, and I would agree with you on the COVID thing. I had seen my stats before I got sick and same thing, my numbers were looking funky. It's been great for me. I love that I can track my sleep. And you said something, wendy, that I'm going to do today. I didn't have a good night's rest, but I'm still going to do strength training tonight, so I'm glad you said that. I think somewhere along the lines I was supposed to hear that message.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, that was the reason we talked today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a good, almost an accountability thing. You see, it helped me understand the why behind decisions I'm making right, and you start to really pair the behaviors to what your HRV score is the next day and start to chase. I just became passionate about chasing an incredible night's sleep. Yeah, start to chase. I just became passionate about chasing an incredible night's sleep, hacking the environment every possible way to get as much deep sleep as I possibly could, and I found that the ring really helped me stay in line.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good use of it. I mean the other thing I wear and I'm not diabetic, but I wear a continuous glucose monitor to monitor again the glucose regulation in my body, and I started doing that just after my numbers were. My glucose numbers were ticking up slightly. They weren't quite in pre-diabetes range, but I didn't understand why. I was eating what I thought was a great diet and exercising all the time. I was like, well, how is this happening?
Speaker 3:I decided to wear one to get some information and it was very enlightening to me and things that I thought were super healthy were actually triggering these surges of my glucose in my body, and things like a healthy fruit smoothie which, when you puree fruit that has, the sugar concentration goes up, and that caused it for me at least, because it's very personal for individuals, but that was causing elevations.
Speaker 3:And I loved sushi with white rice, but it turned out white rice was a big culprit and so by wearing it I was able to really bring my numbers down. There's a number they track called A1C, and I was able to just see what different foods do and then also what different forms of exercise do to it, because you can exercise in a kind of low zone two cardio way and it'll actually. You know your glucose will come down. But if you're, when I run these races and my heart rate's really elevated and I'm going at a fast clip, then the numbers are jacking up. So you just kind of learn again how you have to balance everything. I think that's been a very interesting tool for me as someone that we wouldn't have necessarily had that years ago, to be able to watch that part of our health.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've experimented with it as well. You wear yours all the time I do. Are you using levels or are you just using it like the Libra link or whatever?
Speaker 3:I have Libra and I tried Nutrisense. I've had that for a while, but I also can just use the Freestyle Libras app as well.
Speaker 2:I've done the same thing, but I only do it as a course correction and then I've quit and I think maybe that's a good best practice. It becomes addicting to every time you scan it and see what the reaction is. And I also found I don't know if you see this, but like, if you just go for a walk for 10 or 15 minutes, the same exact meal will impact you differently, and then you can see that right there in the app.
Speaker 3:Yep, for sure, for sure.
Speaker 2:Cher, it was just such a coincidence. Your doctor recommended it right and I was, like I know, Wendy.
Speaker 1:That's right, dr Meredith McClure, ut. I was in there for a physical and I'll just say this real quick I was kind of having I don't want to say midlife crisis, but I was like, oh my God, I used to play rugby and soccer. I mean, I was so athletic I could heal in a day. And she's like you got to read this book. So Shannon and I were talking about it and, lo and behold, you know he was, he had read it, his mom had read it, and I'm just so grateful that you were able to find time to come on and talk with us. I mean, this has been extraordinary.
Speaker 3:Well, I would have done anything once. Once Shannon and I bonded out there in the desert, I'd have done anything for him, and now that I've met you, I feel I feel the same for you, so happy to come back at any time and I'm appreciative to your doctor for recommending it and just for the two of you, for asking questions that are important for all of us to think about, and especially those of us in the tech community.
Speaker 2:So thanks for having me. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, and I'll close this out with just please remember to subscribe to our podcast on the various platforms, such as Apple, spotify, iheartradio and many others, and check out our website at wwwtechexecwellnesscom. Thanks for.
