One of the hardest things at CWD Friends For Life (FFL) was deciding on which session to attend for any given pocket of time.  Each session ran for an hour, or an hour-and-a-half, and there were usually six or seven to choose from at any given time.

On Wednesday morning I listened in to Kerri & Amy do a great presentation called “Finding Your Online Voice”.  I loved it.  I thought Kerri & Amy were perfect hosts and leaders, and that the information was well received.  There were lots of questions, ranging from “how do I do it?” to “what about privacy concerns?” I hope that a few people found the inspiration to start sharing their stories.

After the session, I jumped on Kerri’s coattails to go meet Charlie Kimball, which snowballed into having lunch with him and some of the group he was with.  It was really fun to have some “down time” with Charlie and get to know him.  He’s really down to earth, and as nice as anyone could be.

At some point during lunch we started talking about his workouts, and he said his trainer is a real hard-core “basement gym” sort of guy.  You know, making use of all sorts of crazy things in the name of physical fitness:  Tractor tires, sledgehammers, bags of sand, that sort of thing.

He mentioned something called a “slosh tube“, which is a big PVC pipe about 10 feet long, filled 2/3 with water then capped at both ends.  He would have to hold this thing up above his head and walk around.  He said the water would be sloshing around in the tube making it almost impossible to keep steady, not to mention heavy!

Here was my chance to brag about having survived a workout with a record holding competitive power-lifter (Ginger Vieira)!  As soon as I mentioned “turkish get-ups”, Charlie’s face went very serious, as if he was having a traumatic flashback, and he said “turkish get-ups are tough.”  Never-mind the fact that his trainer probably makes him hold a slosh-tube while doing his…

It was also a lot of fun to get to know a couple other folks while at lunch.  Deb Ruppert, who was very familiar to me, but neither of us could place from where or when (maybe from my time at Cozmo and her time at Dexcom?), and Andy Bell, who has done a bunch of diabetes & fitness writing all over the place.  Ambre Morley, chatted with us for a while too, but had to zip back to work before I could get to know her more.

The whole time I was there, I just kept thinking how cool it was to be sitting with Kerri, between Charlie Kimball and Andy Bell just talking.  We should have used Charlie’s awesome iPhone 4 to take this picture, it surely would have turned out better!  I think Kerri must have been off changing a diaper or something, otherwise I would have made her get in the picture too.

I spent the rest of the afternoon visiting with Kerri and Chris, and cuddling their beautiful baby.  I loved it.  And while I do regret missing the First Timers Reception, I wouldn’t have changed a single thing about how I spent my time.