I also hung around Pompeii and Herculaneum, studying the mosaics, walking in the deep ruts the chariots made in the street, marveling at the round loaves of preserved bread and sketching the women in diaphanous gowns painted on the wall frescoes. I experienced a strong kinship with these sophisticated ladies who inhabited these houses nearly 2,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until I had the opportunity to join a group exploring the catacombs that I had my VIV Moment.

Descending into the crypt, I followed the rotund monk wearing a brown habit much too short for him, his big toes poking out over his sandals, his booming voice reminding us to stay together. It would soon be dark, he said, but I have a tendency to lag behind when I’m in a museum or touring a site, wanting to “feel the moment” and embark on a time-travel trip back to that era.

This time I lagged too long. I strayed behind the group and got lost. With only a small flashlight to guide my way, I wandered around in the underground caves marveling at the bones that lay scattered in the crypts. Instead of being frightened, I was fascinated. Only the silent chant of the dead filled my ears, no movement but the crunch of my feet striking the hard dirt. I saw tier after tier cut into the cavelike walls filled with bones, fragments of drinking vessels and odd-shaped stones. That was the first time I heard the bones “whisper” to me, giving up their secrets, telling me what it was like to huddle in fear, praying Roman soldiers wouldn’t discover their hiding place, or gather around the fire with other believers and plan their escape. Or make love in a forgotten corner with a handsome gladiator.

I never forgot that. It became part of my story when I wanted to write about an archeologist turned spy in the Near East. In Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs my heroine explores ancient ruins, discovers a priceless artifact and sports a sexy wardrobe. And gets the hero.

I don’t have that faux fur coat anymore. I wore it out. But I do have the memories of traipsing around ancient ruins wearing it, what I saw, smelled, felt, touched. It all helped me become the writer I am today and helped me tell my stories about heroines caught up in sexy adventures in exotic places. And my book has been translated into Italian. For me, it doesn’t get any better than that.

And that’s just what happened. About 10 of us volunteered at a Santa Monica, CA, shelter. We cooked and served salad, spaghetti with meat sauce, apple cobbler and ice cream. It was a blast! Everyone told me what an amazing time they had and wanted to do the same thing for their birthday. We now have a little birthday club tradition.

In 2003, I had an epiphany, my VIV Moment, on a winter training run in Colorado. I looked at my reflection in a store window as I ran by and thought, I want to feel pretty! I ran home and started scribbling the basis for what is now SkirtSports, a company aimed at creating attitude- (and curve-) enhancing fitness products.

SkirtSports has grown in less than three years into an international company that provides hot, sexy, sassy fitness clothing to women runners, cyclists, triathletes and fitness enthusiasts. We also started a line of girls products, because a fit lifestyle needs to be ingrained while we’re young.

I still work out everyday and jump into races when I can, but my new passion is inspiring women to include fun fitness in their lives. I am involved in every aspect of SkirtSports and I learn more every day than I ever would have imagined. In the end, I just wanted to create something cute that I could work out in. I never expected the overwhelming response of women who claim that the “Power of Skirt” has changed their lives. It’s a great feeling.

The show caught my attention as I was channel surfing. It featured a cute guy in spandex with a few friends and a bird working out on the beach. His attitude was so inviting, I couldn’t pass up the show. It was as if he was talking to me through the TV. He said things like, “Get up off of that couch and work out! I can see you!” He also would grab the attention of the tourists who were visiting Hawaii and get them to work out in the middle of the show. His passion was contagious. I couldn’t resist working out with him, and I soon found myself in a routine of positively addicting exercise that would later be the tool that I needed to help me get through some extremely tough life experiences. I learned through Gilad from afar how to manage stress and maintain mobility, strength and flexibility. Thank God for Gilad and his inspiration!

I always wanted to write him and tell him about my weight loss and how he inspired me, but that didn’t happen until many years later, when tragedy struck my life. During my second pregnancy, I gained an unhealthy 80 pounds. Not only did I gain weight, but I developed a crippling autoimmune disorder that would change my life forever. Along with my physical problems, I also developed post-traumatic stress syndrome following my father’s suicide while I was in the hospital having emergency surgery to deliver my daughter.

It’s really difficult to express the extent of the challenges that I was facing mentally and physically. But when I felt like the walls were caving in, my thoughts turned to Gilad and his inspiring, motivational fitness routines. I immediately began to do what I could to exercise. I felt like I could win my life back through fitness. There were many days I could not do it all, but I pushed myself and struggled until I worked the mental and physical pain out of my body. I was determined to win and knew that exercise could get me through. I would often awake in the middle of the night and put on a Gilad workout video and just do it until my fears went away. Working out with his encouragement gave me hope.

It took a lot of hard work, but I pushed hard until, finally, I lost 92 pounds, gained control of the autoimmune disorder, maintained my mobility and regained my quality of life. If it wasn’t for that guy on the beach in the tight spandex pants with the bird, I truly believe I wouldn’t have known about fitness. Gilad instilled in me the empowering feeling of believing in myself, inspiring me to succeed, overcome adversity and be a success story.

Oh yeah, there’s more… I finally wrote Gilad and told him about his inspiration and the positive way it had affected my life. All I wanted was to thank him; I never really expected that he would read my letter. Guess what? He not only read my letter, but I ended up in Hawaii on an all-expense paid trip to work out on the beach with Gilad and his friends. (The bird wasn’t there. You’ll have to ask him what happened to that bird.) It was a dream come true for me. All I wanted was for him to read my thank-you letter. I got more than I ever imagined. As if that wasn’t enough, I was called back to do another promotion in Hawaii. It happened again, and I enjoyed every moment of it!

My life has taken a turn for the best. Tragedy turned to triumph and I’m no longer sulking in self pity. I have a new career path and fitness goals. I truly believe that miracles can happen and fitness is so healthy, mentally and physically.

When Gilad was inducted into the Fitness Hall of Fame, I was there for the ceremony. I also was honored to meet many other fitness celebrities such as Linda Shelton,Tony Little, Keli Roberts, and John Abdo. Meeting all of these fitness experts was so uplifting; I have never felt so inspired!

I still struggle on a daily basis with my medical conditions, but we all have obstacles. I’ve learned that you just have to keep trying, never give up, find that inspiration, believe in yourself — and dream big!

First I found out I had arthritis, then fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, a deteriorating spine, carpal tunnel, a brain tumor, hearing loss, deteriorating joints, thyroid disease, hiatal hernia, IBS, herniated discs in my neck, and now this surgery for two discs which had been crushing my spinal cord for two years, causing pain in my back, hip and leg and also causing problems with my bladder and bowels.

Yes, it hit me hard that I wasn’t going to make it back to the gym and get into the same shape I had been in years prior. I needed to finally face the fact that I was and would probably always be an invalid. The funny thing is that once I accepted it, it was like this wave of pressure to hurry up before I get too old (I’m 52), was lifted.

While I still get depressed about my health and the pain remains, I now approach everything one day at a time, doing the best I can with what God gave me to work with.

To me, menus sound like poetry, so here are the verses to last night’s eating experience:

Crackers, three cheeses and nuts; spinach salad with Braeburn apple;
Roasted walnuts, and celery;
Fresh-baked, stone-ground wheat bread, served with butter and honey;
Broccoli and three-cheese casserole;
Pork and elk pot roast with white beans, cranberries and fresh sage;
Fresh-baked gingerbread Christmas cookies

On top of that, two of our guests brought some beer and wine, making it a complete celebration.

Another aspect that added spice to the evening was the age spread among our guests — it probably ranged from 25 to 75, or thereabouts. In fact, the oldest guest, who lives right down the street, was the person who had provided an essential component to the entire gathering: a table. In addition to my table-giving friend, our guests included another neighbor, much older than us, who is a riot and a fun person to hang out with, and three of our climbing friends.

Our older friends, who have both dealt with more than their fair share of bodily damage throughout their lives, still manage to be vital and alive despite the inconvenience of not functioning nearly so well as they did when they were young. And yet I see in these two old warriors the same type of fiercely independent and self-defined personas that I see in my younger friends as well as myself: They can’t help the wearing out of their vessels; this happens to everyone, and it is our future, too. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be part of our celebration of friendship, why folks of all ages shouldn’t be able to hang out comfortably together … our minds ain’t all that different, after all. Perhaps this is something that I learned long ago from climbing, when, at 17 and just starting to rock climb, I suddenly found that most of my new circle of friends were a decade or two older than me, but they didn’t ever treat me like a stupid kid. Why does our culture tend to separate people by ages? It’s kind of weird. Older people are just like you and me, only they probably know a hell of a lot more and possess way more wisdom about the ways of the world.

The presence of our climbing friends set my mind in motion, too, though on a totally different track, about something that’s just sort of a reality of living here in Wyoming, and that I tend not to even think twice about: They all hail from the other side of the mountains, meaning they had to drive over a snowy mountain pass to make it here. But as we were all discussing, living here we tend not to even really think about driving what would be considered huge distances in more congested areas in order to just hang out with one another for an evening or a day. Friendship and the promise of laughter and a fun time makes it worth the effort, and the driving is, frankly, beautiful, if not frightening sometimes. (As our friend Cliff noted, there were times on his drive last night where the snow was so bad he couldn’t see the road, but he was just like, “I’m goin’!”)

So as the folks from out of town rolled in, we sat down to eat, and it was just a beautiful sight for me to see: these wonderful people, young and old, interacting and laughing and being real with each other and just having a good time and sharing a meal together, with sparkling eyes and happy voices. After the older neighbors left, we hung out a little while longer, and then we all crashed out (no driving over the pass at midnight; that’s another reality of long-distance hanging out here: You often end up spending the night wherever you’ve gone for entertainment).

The next morning, I got up and lit the fire I’d set up the previous night to ignite first thing in the morning; the house was 58 degrees. I sat in front of the stove and soaked in the hot air blowing out at me while I drank my coffee and read my morning reading and meditated, and then everyone started rolling upstairs — by that time, the house was a comfortable 70 degrees. We assembled for waffles, bacon and delicious fruit brought by Aaron and Tracy that a neighbor of theirs had brought to them from California, as well as coffee for everyone else (I was saturated already). I giggled inside to watch my dog, Maple, position herself basically lying on Cliff’s feet; she was just so happy to see one of her very best buddies! She definitely has her favorites.

And then, to me, something sort of strange and unexpected but really great happened: the idea of going out and climbing in our gym (at this point, I’d been injured with some torn muscles for nearly two months and hadn’t climbed since October) for a little bit started getting tossed around. Everyone seemed game, so Matt went and kicked the heat on out there to let it heat up a little first. About 10 minutes later, we all headed out there. I wasn’t really sure what to expect … I’d hung off the pull-up bar after running yesterday, and I felt that I still couldn’t do a pull-up without doing some damage, but I thought, “Well, why not try it a little?”

Apparently, Matt thought the same thing of his injury (strangely, he was injured the day after me in a mountain biking accident); and I have to say, Matt has been working his butt off at his physical therapy routine, stretching and doing strengthening exercises with the rubber-band thingy, surgical tubing, I think. Anyway, I started climbing, and though I definitely still have to protect my injury a bit (i.e., no left-hand leading dynos, no swinging out on the roof angle and letting my feet cut loose, no really hard pulls yet), it felt really, really, really good to just move around on the wall for about an hour. I just took it easy, grabbing jugs and using whatever footholds I could. Meanwhile, Matt managed to climb a few times, and though he said it really felt like he probably shouldn’t be climbing again yet, it gave him the confidence and uplifting feeling to know that he will indeed climb again … I even saw him do a couple of moves that none of us, the less-injured or not-injured, could probably ever do. That’s Matt!

Anyhow, I felt, more than anything, not pain (though there was a little of that) but rather, just a sense of weakness in my injured area, so when our guests called it quits, even though I still sort of wanted to climb, I made myself stop, too. That’s the smart thing; I got this injury from overdoing it and not being smart. It’s not just from a single event, it’s from never taking a lengthy break to allow my body to recuperate from the constant abuse of climbing.

After everyone left (much to Maple’s dismay; she curled into a ball and looked at them with big, woeful eyes while they said their goodbyes), I did my ab workout, stretched and then went for a run. I found myself jogging along, exhausted and fighting a bone-chilling wind, but with a big smile plastered on my face. Why? Climbing.

Even that small amount of unimpressive gym climbing left me feeling just amazing, just incredible, and even more sane and excited and alive than I’ve felt in a long time … when I went to Vegas, I was still too broken for climbing to really feel that way, that fluid and natural and just absolutely me feeling, back in my own skin and true to what I am. I don’t know, it’s like climbing is an expression of me and I am climbing when I climb, and from the inside, as the one experiencing my body as it moves, it feels like a natural and beautiful and flowing experience of just movement and being in the moment, and it’s not at all like running or hiking or biking or anything else I’ve ever done. I suppose I like playing pool because it’s rather consuming in the same way, but it lacks that raw muscle power combined with finesse; it’s more finesse and motor control, but you don’t need power in the same way to be a decent pool player. So yeah, climbing … such a great, great feeling. And it was the perfect reintroduction, climbing with a group of good friends to hang with and laugh with, all of us too lazy to go retrieve a CD from the house, so stuck listening to staticky, crappy country music on an AM station.

Running out there (where yesterday, prepare for an aside here, but yesterday, I was running and these cows were on both sides of the road, and they’d dropped a fence on either side so that the herd could flow from one side to the other, but some of the herd had moved away from this passage; anyhow, two cows started getting herded by Maple and me, and I was thinking to myself, “What are they going to do? They have nowhere to go but away from the herd … ” and I was feeling kind of bad about this, but then, much to my surprise, one of them jumped the barbed-wire fence, choosing a spot where it was maybe three-and-a-half feet tall and a downhill jump, and the other one followed … I didn’t even know cows could jump at all, and it looked pretty funny but was very impressive at the same time; it’s so cool how ordinary things can do such unexpected things and just wow you, if you watch your world) …

Anyway, running out there today, I was thinking about how ebullient I feel just from one hour of totally meaningless climbing (as if any climbing really has any sort of meaning), and I realized that I will climb for the rest of my life, until I can’t. And I will try to take a month off every year from now on not only to heal my wounded body, but also, to recapture the truth of why I climb and why I ever started climbing and what it is that I love so much about it: the movement, the movement, and the movement! There is no other activity I’ve ever done that even comes close to feeling like what climbing feels like; it is absolutely the most incredible and amazing experience to move up vertical terrain that way, like water, flowing, finding the path of least resistance and basically being like an anti-gravity waterfall.

So I didn’t make it for the whole two months off from climbing, and you know what? That’s just fine … I’ve learned to not be too attached to these sorts of structures and definitions; they’re just ideas, and it’s better to just let things unfurl as they will instead of clinging to parameters when they become irrelevant. Today’s climbing, after the evening of feasting and enjoying each other’s presence, was the perfect way for me to start climbing again. It was time. That’s not to say I’m going to go back at it full force, but I’ll be dabbling a bit here and there, testing the shoulder/armpit as I build it back up gradually.

Those words and that moment have stuck with me since then. I discovered how important it is to love and be loved, and how fortunate I am to have people in my life, who I love and who love me. It made me realize that love is strong enough to make someone who is dying feel lucky.

Soup kitchens in America could only afford soup and bread as the meal. After one intense day, I relaxed at Fitzwilly’s with my margarita and a potato-skin appetizer. Suddenly, I wondered, “What happened to the insides of this potato?” That flash of inspiration changed my life.

The chef explained that, while selling various potato dishes, they still had leftovers daily. I told him our soup kitchen across the street could really use whatever they wanted to give. He smiled.

The next day 30 gallons of cooked potato insides thickened our soups! Later, 10 perfect quiches arrived. “Why?” I asked the chef. After printing the “Daily Specials” with a ham-and-cheese quiche, he had forgotten the ham. He made a business decision to donate the hamless quiches while the new ones were baking.

I wondered if other food companies would periodically have good perishable food left over that they chose not to sell. Maybe food was thrown out and wasted all over town, nourishment that my guests really needed every day.

Three months later, our gourmet soup kitchen served appetizers, salads, beef, chicken and seafood entrees with desserts — all donated by local retailers, restaurants and Yale.

My epiphany came when I realized we should use all this good food from every city in America and the world! From Yale’s Food Salvage and New York’s City Harvest, which feeds 53,000 hungry people daily, to 122 Harvests in America and 818 around the world — that today will pick up and deliver enough food for another 900,000 meals today for the hungry men, women and children of each community, and another 900,000 meals tomorrow — the best food in each city would otherwise go to waste without these programs.

Recently, I was lying under one of her cozy handmade quilts, having just cooked one of her recipes, pork chops in milk for my husband, and I could hear her laugh — and I realized that she is still with me.

Shortly upon arriving we were invited to the mahout compound, where we introduced ourselves and enjoyed the many smiles and giggles that followed our attempt to communicate in Thai. We were anxious to meet the elephants and pleased it did not take long before we were led to an open-walled structure where they were held. It is here that we began our relationship offering enormous clusters of bananas and lengths of sugarcane, marveling at what stood before us.

After feeding we were invited to approach and touch them. I remember standing in front of this magnificent creature, gazing into eyes that were so kind and thoughtful and thinking how fortunate, how truly honored I was to be in this position. I wrapped my arms around her neck, pressing my cheek to her lovely weathered skin, and breathed in my surroundings. I will never forget all the scents and sounds of that moment. It was a reminder in how undeniably privileged we all are to share this planet with such creatures, and how important it is to protect them, as well as the spaces they inhabit.