Dana Burland

Dear Legs, You deserve a high five, an afternoon out for frozen yogurt or perhaps a birthday massage. You’ve really stepped up to the plate lately and deserve some public praise. I feel like we’ve gotten to a point in our running relationship where we can drop the formalities and maybe even make rapper-inspired nicknames for each other (you can be Lil Hammies And The Wonder Calves, no? You don’t like it? Ok). It took a little while to get you on board with the idea of this half-marathon, and I totally get that. We didn’t really have a primary election over the topic, and I’m sure you were banking on some R&R after the holiday run streak  I roped you into. So, we had a couple of jaunts at the start that felt more like a hobble, limp and crawl around town than a run—and Legs, I forgive you for that. My first 11 miler But we’ve also had some awesome, monumental runs where you seem to wake me up even earlier than planned—alert, rested and ready to kick some asphalt. Sometim...

In April 2011 a position opened at one of the companies I had interned at. It was the role of ‘digital coordinator’ to the CEO’s blog, which fell oh-so-close to the project and team I did my internship with. I was thrilled to rejoin with Rodale as a full-time employee. Helping Maria Rodale expand her blog, Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen , felt like a project that was created just for me. I took her small-scale Wordpress blog from a handful of readers to thousands and launched social media pages for additional marketing opportunities. I increased the content from three posts a week to five and single-handedly redesigned her blog transforming it into a multi-page environment readers could get lost in. Four months into my role, my former  Rodale.com supervisor put in a request to bring me back in to some of the exciting changes and projects that were going on there. I took over the social media channels and started forming marketing, outreach and content repurposing plans to help b...

This unusually warm winter has put a total kibosh on my standard winter cooking—I’ve used my Crock-pot twice this winter, made only one vat of baked potato soup and have a collection of similarly warm and comforting recipes I haven’t felt cold or…uncomforted (?) enough for. It’s bumming my taste buds out. Yesterday felt like a brisk spring day and when my mind turned to dinner (you know, at like 2:30 pm) I immediately thought of soup—and lentils. This is silly since the closest contact I’ve had to lentils is sewing them into homemade heating pouches. Anyway, I took to the interwebz to find a recipe to start from and quickly found one that tickled my fancy . I’m definitely a lentil newbie but I am definitely   no stranger to kale . My modification on this recipe will be a new spring, winter and fall staple in my kitchen. The ingredients are simple, the process is long but low-fuss and the result is a light—since it’s broth-based—yet filling. The only downfall was ...

In college, my friends and I use to long for breaks in the school year. Each time a vacation would approach we would note how perfectly timed it was; how we wouldn’t be able to physically, emotionally or mentally tackle one day past the start of vacation. In retrospect I think years of a set school schedule had conditioned us to anticipate time off. Heck, last fall I had dreams about buying books and missing exams—I’m STILL conditioned. In the working world, months can pass before I realize I’m mentally due for some time off. Even when I do cash in on my vacation days, if I don’t plan to be somewhere other than my apartment, I wind up spending my day off catching up on cleaning or cooking. That’s why when B and I realized we both had a long President’s Day weekend free, we should make use of it and jet out of town. New Hope, Pennsylvania Train Ride So we did, down to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We hammered a tune at the Ringing Rocks Park , stayed at a bed and breakfast with a ...

September 2009-March 2010 Is there anything more invigorating than sleekly designed office furniture? I’ll let you twirl that one over in your mind for a bit. To be honest, when an internship popped up at Steelcase, I didn’t do a happy dance around my college apartment. Almost all of my other internships had been so in line with my health and fitness background—this one seemed a little too off the beaten path—but I ran with it anyway. I worked with the communications team to relaunch Steelcase.com ; which, for a global company with several unique country websites worldwide and thousands of web pages, was no small task. My experience was three-fold—four-fold if you count the life-altering comfort experience of spending eight hours in a Leap chair—meet with various Steelcase teams, mock-up a web design given their needs within our new site’s functions and in some cases build it out in the content management system. Oh, and I appeared in a 'stock image' photo for the new s...

Nope, not the band, the BIRDS. They’ve invaded the downtown area and it’s driving everyone a bit batty (specifically me, who is not a fan of how bat-like they look at night). My friend Jill—hi, Jill!—lives downtown and not only has to deal with the stench (oh the stench!) and terror, but the insanity and chaos it’s bringing out in her neighbors. She told me she woke up last weekend to the sound of an older man who lives near by hitting a street sign over and over with a pole of some sort. When she asked him what was up with his crazy old man antics, he replied “THE CROWS! They are suppose to leave but it’s been too warm this year!” Yes, this is a true story. Strangely enough, the Alfred Hitchcock-esqu infestation is only downtown; I’m safe in my apartment three blocks away, but my running route has been painted white, if you catch my drift. A picture from black crow craziness in Bethlehem (from www.crows.net)

I was sifting through some unread blog posts last month when I saw one that caught my eye. My former college newspaper editor has been piecing together her family tree on a website that helps connect similarities in… leafs, I mean ancestors, from different users. And just like that a new impulsive ‘project’ was born. Similar to my spontaneous purchase of a cheep sewing machine to make my own clothes from curtains a la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music , I decided to jump head first into my own genealogy hunt. My sister just so happened to be the next person to email me after this light bulb went off, so I roped her into the project with me. I’m retracing my mom’s side of the family while she documents my dad’s. I started exchanging emails with my mom and uncle last week to build the bones of the tree. I knew some things—like my mom’s name is a combination of her material and paternal grandmother’s names—but there are lots of details I didn’t know. Scandalous, dramatic and fascinat...

June 2009-August 2009 I never went somewhere warm, tropical and booze-filled for a spring break in college, so for my last summer before graduating, I opted for an exciting away-from-home adventure—in Pennsylvania. I did my research and found an incredibly opportunity interning with Rodale.com . The small health and environmental website is one of many health and fitness focused brands in the publishing company responsible for    Men’s Health Magazine , Women’s Health Magazine , Prevention Magazine , Runner’s World Magazine and many more. The headquarters of Rodale Inc. was situated in the rolling, small-city land of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half west of their second office in New York City. Rodale.com is the smallest of all the Rodale brands, but quite possibly the most valuable. It’s updated daily with new news and feature items on living toxin-free, environmentally conscious and in a healthy and sustainable way. Rodale.com often dives into new s...

In a recent conversation with my mom, she asked if I found my half-marathon training intrusive yet. Intrusive? I wash my running socks more often than I wash my hair (and trust, this by no way means I have a smelly scalp). I'm way past intrusive. Having completed a half-marathon of her own (my mom = awesome) she’s no stranger to giving up weekend mornings for long runs and feeling like your life revolves around the battery life on your sports watch. Although I jumped right into my training program from a 39-day run streak , every week since I started training has felt a little more intrusive than the last. I run almost every day, and even when the run itself is done, the aches still linger in my muscles. Two Sundays ago I ran my longest run ever—a seven-miler around the local parkway with my friend Jill. The run went well; the following hours and next morning, not so much. Last week I went out for what should have been a standard three-mile loop and had to stop after my hip cha...

"The Eskimos have 52 words for snow because it is so special to them; there ought to be as many for love!" - Margaret Atwood  A year or so ago, Kendal  and I were chatting about measuring affection. We were both at the start of relationships and trying to wade through that fawkward (fun + awkward) does he like me as much as I like him period. I think all relationships—professional, friendly and romantic—at all stages can benefit from regular check-ups like this. Let’s face it, time doesn’t equal stability and we all want to lie down at night knowing we’re emotionally getting back as much as we’re giving out. So I shared with Kendal my weird theory. (This, in retrospect, isn’t such a strange theory considering I’ve been known to find a theoretical comparison between life’s trials and tribulations and a game of Mario Kart. I love a little creative philosophy.) To me, I told her, a balanced relationship seems a lot like baking muffins. We’re all stirring up d...

May 2008-December 2008 There is no joy quite like working from home. In the case of my internship with MLive , all of my work was done from home, including several phone interviews conducted in my pajamas. I think fleece pants really inspire me to do my best work. Between my athletic background, past internship experience and flexible college student schedule; blogging about Michigan health and fitness for MLive was an exciting position for me. I delivered a mix of news—like introducing the new walkstations at Steelcase, AARP results on the fittest and fattest cities in the state, and various health and fitness events statewide—and service pieces—like healthy recipe ideas, at home workout ideas and what to look for when choosing a gym. Most of all, I tried to motivate. I raced more often than usual and invited readers to join me at registration time. I challenged readers to take the 100-push-up challenge with me and my family. Hey, my 50-something year old dad can knock out 50+...

I want to like yoga, so. Very. Badly. I daydream of being a regular in a class where I’m friends with a 70-year-old man in tights and sometimes afterward go out for a cup of free trade coffee with a co-yogi named like Ki, or Sunbeam or something. I want to bend like a banana peel does when it gracefully rolls off the fruit. I want to be so in tune with my third eye that I can use it to read a book and cook dinner at the same time. But dannnng can those classes get pricey. There’s a yoga loft near me (you know, in a cool building just like the videos), but fulfilling my yoga dream there would cost almost the same amount as my weekly groceries. A homemade roasted chicken  > yoga. One time I took a hot yoga class. There’s an awkwardly sweaty reason why I only took one. My office gym has a Thursday yoga session, but it’s at a bad time for me. My personal gym has yoga, and it also has 9,000 muscle meatheads that clink and clank excessive amounts of weights right outside the studio ...

"What's that?" "A sprinkler head in the mulch, I think." Hint: Don't disrupt me from my bed, unscrew me gently.  Our first geocache find!