Always Moving (Column 3)

She gives the Energizer Bunny a run for his money and challenges most birds with her free spirit on how high they can fly. With batteries that only require minimum charge time you will see my friend Melissa always moving. Whether she is running by the beach or pacing in the kitchen while eating her favorite snack, her feet cannot seem to quit going. It’s almost like the stop/go switch programmed in her brain is permanently stuck on go, because the only time she stops is if she is sitting at a red light.

Ever since I’ve known her, Melissa’s idea of relaxing was doing something active. If there was a hint of daylight outside you’d better be making use of it. Her time here at Kearney was spent playing on the women’s basketball and softball teams, and yes she even participated in a college golf tournament when the team needed one extra girl. So as a three-sport athlete, calling her well rounded doesn’t even give her justice. As a former teammate I’d never seen anyone work so hard at something in my life. Moving, moving, moving meant coming in the gym at 12 am to work on her game or running some extra sprints just for the fun of it.

After college days she decided she would keep her moving streak going and just go ahead and move right on over to Costa Rica. With a journalism major, she landed a job there with a newspaper where she found out fast that sitting at a desk was torture. While living there her and her quick feet trained with marathon runners which of course made things at the office not seem quite so bad. Her stay there was short however as she knew her and that desk would not be able to get along. So two months later she arrived back in Nebraska wondering where her and her feet would go next.

Then personal training jumped in the picture with an unexpected leap. Well, what better way to keep on moving then to teach people how? So going back to grad school and being a trainer was the next step on her busy road to success. After a semester of kickboxing, boot camp, abs, water aerobics, and some of those nasty anatomy and exercise science classes, Melissa decided she would up and move elsewhere with her personal training experience.

These days you will find her on the sunny beaches of San Diego, still moving. While most people think of the beach as a place to go and relax and catch some rays, Melissa thinks of running, playing football or sand volleyball, or maybe even doing a handstand or two. Her newest workout/hobby involves a ten foot board. You guessed it, surfing. This girl was meant to live where there’s water. Skiing, her old love is something of the past as she now flies through the air on a wakeboard and balances herself on the waves amongst the rest of San Diego’s surfing citizens.

Her day begins as the alarm wakes her at 4:30 every morning to train her first client. After a few hours of training in the morning she has a tiny break, where the couch rarely gets to see her bottom, as she would rather go get in a workout or maybe grab her board and hit the beach running. Her afternoons are filled with fidgety gestures as she sits impatiently in class waiting for the professor to tell her to move on with her day. Her afternoons are always filled with activities that vary from day to day but one’s that always keep her and her feet on the go. Oh and her definition of a nap? Ten minutes long.