Fighting the current

I feel like I'm swimming upstream through quicksand this week.
While that might provide a good cardiovascular workout, it is not very much fun. I think the biggest issue is that I am out of my element. This weekend's installment American Heart Month project will focus on early education and lifetime prevention of risk factors.
I started, naturally, with my usual suspects at the hospitals and institutions I deal with throughout the year as healthcare reporter. With a few minor exceptions, I got some good stuff from them. But since school systems dominate so much of children's lives, I feel it will be important to include school-based programs and wellness policies in the story.
Now I have covered a few school districts over the last few years and have good contacts there, but I thought I would try to start in some of the more rural areas.
That's when I got into the quicksand.
Maybe it illustrates the issue that has made Cambria County the second most-obese county in the state, but many of the school administrative offices seemed confused about who is in charge of these programs. I admit it is a broad spectrum of issues: Nutrition education, tobacco prevention, physical fitness education and physical activity schedules are all involved in heart health. Some districts seem to delegate the programs to individual school buildings, scattered throughout the health, physical education and consumer science departments, with help from the school nurse and food services director.
So what has been happening: I explain what I'm looking for, and I get told someone will call me back or transferred to someone's voice mail where I explain the whole thing again and ask them to call me back.
Mostly, they haven't called back. When they do, it is to tell me I really should talk to someone else. Then I get transferred to a voice mail or told the new contact will call me back.
And now it's Wednesday; and school is out.
All this may explain why I did not post to this blog on Tuesday (I hope someone missed it). It simply got pushed off the schedule. In addition, I covered an airport authority meeting for a story in today's editions.
Despite the setbacks, I have been inspired by the passion of those working with children to improve their health and develop healthy lifestyles. It is also heartening to see different organizations like the Greater Johnstown Community YMCA, Windber Research Institute, Highmark and Alternative Community Resource Program working together and with schools to reach at-risk children.
I am confident the project's child-focused stories this weekend, although likely less voluminous than previous installments, will be informative and useful.
The personal reward of gathering information and completing stories for the Heart Month project has been enhanced by learning more about how to improve my own heart health.
Sometimes the knowledge is hard to use, though. Especially the fitness advice. But I'm doing better.
I didn't have a chance to blog on Tuesday, but I did get out for a quick walk in the rain with my Lovely Bride after working all day and then going to church functions until almost 9 p.m. We may not have been at a cardiovascular pace for the full 30 minutes, but it was a healthy loop of the Richland Town Centre sidewalk, with an extra circuit of the adjacent Starbucks-Five Guys plaza.
The Shrove Tuesday all-you-can-eat pancake and sausage dinner may not have been the best heart-healthy choice, but it was part of an uplifting evening of preparation for lent.
But if the church dinner, service and evening walk provided a rewarding end of Tuesday, it didn't start out so well. We had a tragic loss at our house Tuesday morning: My 20-plus-year-old coffee grinder died after a couple seconds of use, leaving me with no brewable coffee in the house. I thought it might be a message that I should give up coffee for lent, but decided it was just a burnt motor.
Tomorrow, I will try to get back to those weight-loss tips I promised on Monday.