I’m Tracy Isaacs and I lead a relatively active lifestyle for someone in a thoroughly sedentary career (academic).  My main activities are yoga (hot and not), walking (slowly transitioning to walk-run),  the elliptical machine (in a pinch), and resistance training (with and without weights, with and without a personal trainer).

I have just started cycling (for leisure and transportation) and I am interested in learning tai chi over the next little while.   In the summer I like to swim, kayak, and hike.  I have to like what I’m doing or I won’t do it.

I aim to focus on enjoyment and how I feel as my main motivation, but I’d be a liar if I said that weight loss/maintenance is never on my mind.  As a feminist, I am always conscious of this as a pernicious motivation and do my best to let go of weight loss as a primary goal (as an fyi, I will say that by any “objective” measure, I am at a healthy weight for my height and age). 

I’m vegan, but not mainly for health reasons (though there are health reasons to be vegan) and not for weight loss (didn’t lose a single gram when I became vegan!).  But it does raise health and nutrition issues for me, so I might have a few things to say about food along the way here too.

I’m Samantha Brennan, philosopher, parent, and adult-onset athlete.

I like that I have no high school glory days to live up to.

My main sport is cycling, both road and track and I love to ride and race. Along the way I’ve also done some running and a few triathlons, though my swimming could use some improvement and running has given me stress fractures.

I also  like to throw large men around while wearing white robes, that is to say that I’m a serious student of Aikido. It’s a beautiful martial art really and I wish I were better at it. I’ve been lifting weights since I took a PE course in grad school called “The Fundamentals of Weight Training.”

These days I’m loving Crossfit for its high intensity, high energy workouts. I play soccer and cross country ski for fun. I love hot yoga in the winter.  I’m an above average size person who continually struggles with our society’s expectation that all athletes look like fitness models and that all fat women aren’t active.

I’d like to lose weight, mostly to make it up hills faster and to avoid injury, but I’m not prepared to sacrifice performance in either the strength or speed department to do it.  I also worry a lot about how realistic weight loss is as a goal given the stats on dieting and success and for the most part, I try to focus on fitness.

I’ve also recently started to think about sport as a philosopher. I blog occasionally at Philosophy of Sport, http://philosophyandsports.blogspot.ca/, and I’m starting to write a bit in the area. Hard to spend that much time on the bike and not, really.