Happy Birthday, Samantha! The bloggers wrote a collective post of joyful celebration for Sam, well-deserved. But I want to send a little birthday wish of my own because the paragraph I submitted doesn’t express the whole of it. Not that this will either.
Back when Sam and I started the blog in 2012, two years prior to our 50th birthdays, we had the modest objective of tracking our road to 50, with the goal of being the fittest we’d ever been in our lives by the time we got there. We expected it to be a two-year project. We thought we would wind down the blog when we turned 50. And here we are, 12 years later.
As anyone who has been following the blog for awhile knows, Sam is prolific. I’m always in awe of how she comes up with things to write about, week-in, week-out. One of her signature approaches when we started was to write “six-things” posts. For example, “Six Things I Love about Aikido and Six Things I Struggle with” from the second month of the blog. The longevity of the approach has proven itself. See her “Six Things Sam Wants to Blog about.”
Sam is also a big fan of gratitude, and so am I. So here are my Six Things that Make Me Grateful for Samantha in My Life:
- We are like-minded in so many ways, but just different enough that I keep on learning from her. When I say we are like-minded, it is hard to capture the extent to which this is true. From our philosophical sensibilities to our basic sense of academic values, from our commitment to family to our appreciation of a good sleep…more often than not I don’t have to explain myself to Sam because she already gets it.
- Picking up on this, we have an ongoing conversation that we pick up and drop and pick up again, about little things and important things. It started about 31 years ago and has never stopped. Without that conversation, we would not have landed on the blog idea, the fittest by 50 challenge idea, or the Fit at Mid-Life book idea. I am grateful for the ongoing conversation and the many years of friendship that has made it possible.
- Her energy for keeping the momentum of the blog going for so long. I am so grateful to have been a part of the co-founding of this wonderful community. But it’s obvious that Sam is the main driver behind the blog’s success. Because of her efforts, we have an amazing group of regular bloggers, many subscribers on various social media platforms, and have built something that we can all truly be proud to be a part of.
- The opportunity to co-author with her. I have never in my life enjoyed any writing project as much as I enjoyed writing Fit at Mid-Life with Sam. We spent a few days at the Banff Centre together to write the proposal. And while writing the book, we literally used our writing sessions as breaks from work. We went to an on-campus lounge, opened up our laptops to the shared google document, and wrote together.
- Her patience, care, optimism, and sense of adventure and fun, all of which combined to get me to try triathlon, to learn how to ride a road bike with clipless pedals, and formulate my fittest by 50 goal of completing an Olympic distance triathlon (I did two!).
- She is practical and has integrity. It isn’t easy to be a dean, and it wasn’t easy to be a department chair. Sam does lots of things that are not super easy, and I’ve learned a lot from watching her do them.
I should add a bonus thing, which is that because of the blog and the book and our friendship, one of my favourite photo shoots ever was the one Sam and I did together with Ruth Kivilathi. It yielded some amazing photos that always lift my spirits when I look at them. So I’ll end with that. Photo credit in all the photos below goes to Ruth.
Looking forward to Sam’s party this afternoon — another talent of hers is bringing people together!
