I’m a woman in my 50’s who has much to learn, but has also learned much along the way in her over half-century on this planet. I’ve learned what my body is capable of in completing several marathons, half-marathons, and half-ironman races, as well as having two children without pain medication. On the latter – I’m not looking for a medal, but if you want to understand your pain threshold, it’s a good way to measure it. Anytime I’ve found it difficult to continue in a racing endeavor, a workout or other physically and mentally demanding activity, I remind myself that I had two children without pain medication – I’m a strong woman.
As you may or may not have read, I am gearing up for a sizable endeavor this summer and wanted to track the lead up to the event, as well as do a daily blog while riding across the country, and provide a home base for other health related musings.
I’m a mother, a wife, a business leader, and a weekend warrior athlete. I launched this website after having my Instagram account of the same name for years. My initials were, while married to my children’s father, ‘dab’ – ‘just a little dab’ was a play on that. My initials are now ‘daw’ as I’m remarried, but somehow ‘just a little daw’ doesn’t have the same ring to it. I opted to keep the Instagram account the same because… well, I liked it.
I’ve not always been an athlete. I was somewhat active growing up, but my passion for running and then triathlons stemmed from a desire to slim-down post baby number two. I began running around the block with my infant son in a jogging stroller. I started to set goals for myself, and the flywheel of increasingly challenging goals was launched and has grown ever since.
I have, however, always been passionate about food. That passion didn’t always equate to healthy eating, but I gradually became more focused on nutrition as I aged and also had children. My children never really ate ‘baby food’. As soon as they were able to pick up any food with their hands, they were fed whatever we had for dinner as adults. I believe, as a result, they were never terribly fussy eaters.
My parents traveled significantly because of my Dad’s business, and we often found ourselves at home with our housekeeper who would come to stay with us while they were out of town. She was a woman of Ukrainian descent who grew up in a family with 12 brothers and sisters. There were things she cooked exceptionally well – Ukranian food, our Christmas Eve and Christmas dinners, Thanksgiving and other larger more traditional meals. She, however, left something to be desired when it came to day to day cooking for us children when my parents traveled. As a result, I learned to cook for myself as soon as I was old enough to do so. I enjoyed it immensely, so much so that I chose to spend a year of my early twenties training to be a chef at George Brown School for Culinary Arts. While I never became a professional chef, my friends and family have never complained about the time I spent learning to cook professionally and have enjoyed the fruits of my labor in that area when sharing in meals at our home – or when I’ve cooked in theirs.
I’ve been particularly interested food, nutrition and how it fuels the body to achieve optimal levels of performance. While I’m but a mere ‘weekend warrior’, I’ve loved learning more about this as my body ages and undergoes a number of changes throughout that process. What you’ll find here is a lot of information about those learnings as well as wherever ‘a little of this, a little of that’ takes us. Hope you’ll visit regularly and stay along for the ride!