Author Archives: Hans Schiefelbein

About Hans Schiefelbein

In pursuit of a healthy and disciplined lifestyle. My goal is to help people attain and sustain their health.

Family Camp

It was an interesting year at Family Camp. We just had our third child five weeks earlier, so Katie and I had made the decision that she wouldn’t go. It would just be too hard and she wouldn’t be able to do the things she wants to do. It was a tough decision, but we are confident it was the right one. This meant that I was going to be single-handedly leading our team of three for the entire week. To say I was excited about this opportunity and challenge is a drastic understatement. I did all the packing, all the organizing, and all the planning while at camp and I loved every minute of it.

I’ve already drafted two additional posts about some more of the details of our trip. I’ll post those in the next couple weeks. And at this point I’ll also add that I’m drafting a post about the significance of leading this trip without Katie. There were significant developments with our family – all good, great actually! It was a very meaningful time for our family and I want to share it. But for now, an overview of Family Camp 2013.

The Family Campers

Swimming The kids’ favorite place at camp is the beach. We’re on Spider Lake and we have it practically all to ourselves. They mostly play in the sand but they also get into the water. By the end of the week, Sorin was out “swimming” with me with his lifejacket on and me holding him – that’s still a big deal 🙂 It’s my goal to get them out of those life jackets while they’re on the beach and use the jackets when they go on the paddle boards with me.

Crafts
Sorin loved the craft shop this year. He racked up quite the bill there… $8.50. He made a couple bracelets and even made one for Norah and surprised her with it. Video to follow – super cute. He and I also make a leather journal cover for Katie Sunday morning. Norah made a bracelet also. I can only imagine they’re excitement bringing those all around camp all week. Believe me, it was tough to make it to meals on time without the bracelets!

Campfires
Our first one at our cabin wasn’t until Monday night. Not cool. This is one of my favorite parts of camp, and I know it’s Jeff’s favorite! The all-camp fire was awesome because Grandpa Steve told a great story about boys camp. But in our defense, the bugs were pretty bad this year and things were very wet, so fires were a little more difficult.

Hammock

The biggest laughs of the trip were on my hammock. A wonderful give from Grandma Suzie, I love this part of our base camp. This kids both fit in it well and laughed long and hard as I swung them in it.

Tube Float
Katie said it was a bad idea. I confess: that statement probably added a little motivation for me to pull this thing off. Sure, I had grandparents helping me but to get two kids to hike a half mile through the woods and get down a river on a tube at this age was a pretty big deal. Oh, and it meant no naps. Remember, Katie said “bad idea.” We did it!

Fishing

I’m not a fisherman. But I’m loving the idea of fishing with my kids, especially at camp. It’s a tradition now that Steve and I take the kids to Blair Lake and fish. Sorin caught on within 3 minutes, all by himself! Norah has no fear of worms or the fish, but maybe the sun and the camera. Want to see your kids have fun fishing? Get to Blair Lake.

Family
Fort Wilderness is about family. Family, capital F. It’s that important. Uncle Tom runs Fort and he had a wonderful introduction and challenge to the campers. He challenged dads to take their kids fishing or shooting. He challenged husbands to take their wives on hikes or canoe rides. He challenged all of us to be intentional with our time. The theme was “Sow what?” The idea is that we sow things now so that we can reap the fruitful rewards later. Family camp is about spending great time with family, and we met that challenge and thrived in the process.

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kids of college friends

My college buddy’s kid, Lindson, and Sorin playing at Hoyt Park

I had a fascinating experience this afternoon. I was at Adam and Erin Turner’s going away party and Sorin was I had gone down to the playground. Sorin started playing with Adam’s son, Lindson, and it dawned on me how long Adam and I had been friends. In fact we had become friends before I even met Katie (I’m not sure when he met Erin). And now our kids were playing together. Sharing time on the swings, talking together, getting to know each other the way 4- and 6-year olds do. In my mind I imagined Sorin saying to Lindson, “our dads were friends in college?”

It’s a pretty neat experience when you build up enough years and stories so that moments like this can happen and you can see how lives weave together into beautiful art.

Farmers Market

Farmers Market (Madison, WI) @pressgram no. 4

Katie and I went to our first farmers market of the year this morning. My parents took Sorin and Norah to a farm breakfast (no relation) in Janesville, so we had Hans Christian all to ourselves.

Writing Songs about Injustice

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In April Blackhawk Church hosted their Pulse Conference for artists in the Church. I attended because Jars of Clay were performers and speakers at the event. Jars have long been a favorite band of mine and now they were in my backyard! What I appreciate the most about Jars of Clay is their ability to reflect on what’s happening in the world and write about it. They are very active on Twitter and Dan’s blog about the backstory to some of their greatest songs are fascinating insights into how artists with a Christian worldview are interacting with their culture.

I was listening to Charlie and Matt early Saturday morning while Dan was doing his talk on “writing songs about injustice.” Just this week I got to listen to his talk and I think you may enjoy some commentary from a man who has been a driving force in their band for over almost 20 years.

My favorite line: “Great art should lead us to ask better questions.” Enjoy!

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/93583156″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Pressgram no. 2 (the coffee post)

Almost done with coffee and almost beginning the day.

Bridging Grad school to the real world

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Graduate school is done. I’ve poured over two years into earning a masters degree in kinesiology and I am very proud of the work I produced, the friendships I made, and the growth I experienced.

As I begin to process my time as a grad student and how it will transition my career, I keep asking myself what I learned. The coursework wasn’t as straight forward as I was expecting. But the two years taught me a ton about myself and the process of learning and working. I’m a naturally reflective person and so when I say “learning and working” I mean “how will I take what I’ve learned and apply it to a career?” This begins with a mental framework.

I keep visualizing a bridge. Graduate school was full of scientific papers and grant proposals. A bunch of the material was stuff I will never look at again. And all along the way I kept asking myself, “how do I apply this to make people healthier?” I learned from and worked along side brilliant professors, researchers, and other graduate students. Most of them are spending their careers in research, conducting experiments and writing in scientific journals. I don’t have a passion for that. But each semester I was coming across literature and data that was begging me to be applied to the clinical world. I often used the term clinical because we worked with so many doctors and it was easy to compare the research world with the clinical hospitals. This is where the bridge kept showing up in my head.

The scientific community is not perfect. They are not all-knowing. When you get into many of the topics we learn that we don’t know as much as we think we do. Or that there are conflicting reports about an issue. Nonetheless, there are brilliant papers and concepts in the literature that need to see the light of day. They need me to get them into the real world so that they can help make people healthier. And who knows, maybe my applications will lead to follow-up studies so we can make our adjustments and make the field even better.

The next step isn’t clear to me. But I am confident that I’m about to create a bridge to connect the scientific community with the real world.

Hans Christian

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On Friday May 17, 2013 at 8:52pm we brought Hans Christian Schiefelbein into this world. I am so proud of Katie for all her hard work and dedication bringing our third child along in such great health. She is very strong. And Christian has such a story! His name, his birth, his first hours with our family are a series of subplots that I can’t wait to share. But for right now, I want announce the birth of our son with a few of our favorite pictures.

Rob and Lisa (part 1)

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Wednesday 10:52 pm
Tonight, probably for the last time ever, I got to hang out with Rob and Lisa. Schedules, jobs, life… from here on out they will most likely just get in the way and prevent the three of us from sharing each others’ company and a beer together. Tonight ended a season that spanned four semesters with Rob and Lisa. We entered grad school together and became friends fairly quickly. We struggled though classes together and battled to earn our Masters degrees. Now all the work is complete and three of us will be moving on to the next best thing, something bigger, something better.

But I need to document this. I need to reflect on my friends and put a rock down to remember this moment. I guess this post needs to be part one so that I document this specific moment when we said goodbye. Then I can come back and write part two and talk about the story we created together, the story we will take away from our grad school experience. Story is important. People and relationships are important.

I’m ok being sappy. Even if the three of us and our families are the only ones that get something out if this, that’s fine. That’s why it’s nice having my own blog. It’s mine! So when big life things happen, I’m compelled to mark the moment. Rob and Lisa marked a big moment in my life and I am honored to have made such great friends.

Tonight I had good conversation over good beer with great friends.

Celebrating Success

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Last week I wrote about a failure in my training. I had a swim workout that was horrible and kind of caught me off guard. I was surprised and then I was frustrated. When I walked away for a few hours, I was able to process what happened and knew it was all part of the learning process. But I still didn’t have any first hand evidence that learning was going to take place, I had no success under my belt.

Yesterday I found that success. I had another swim class and things started to click again. It wasn’t easy. In fact our first 400 meters I thought my legs were going to fall off. And that was our first 400! After that we did a bunch of pulling technique where you can’t use your legs. Now I was worried about my arms falling off! Welcome to swim practice. Even through all this, I had a very successful workout. At the end our coach told us we had done 2100 meters in under 48 minutes – apparently that’s pretty good.

I have a long way to go as a swimmer. But actually after that workout for the first time our coach called me a swimmer. Kind of cool to reach another level in training.

It is really easy to get caught up in both the successes and failures in training, learning, growing. Getting better is a very cognitive process. And I think it’s critical to celebrate the successes. We need to know when we’ve done well.