Full Transcript
Kym:
Nobody is expected to be crushing the weights, it’s just about the individual and being a healthier person.
Jeff:
Please welcome CrossFit enthusiast Kym DeKeyrel.
Kym:
25 handstand pushups, and do it all over again.
Jeff:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Handstand pushups, like-
Kym:
Actually, I love them.
Jeff:
Giving talks about how the importance of what you eat can change your life.
Kym:
I’m always trying to encourage, you know, try something, take out something. If it’s not gluten maybe it’s dairy, you know? You can always try to make a change.
Jeff:
Taking on challenges, and finding ways to get her done.
Kym:
There’s nothing now, in this world, you could pay me to have me put a Ritz cracker in my mouth.
Jeff:
Oh my gosh. Those are good.
Kym:
[laughs}
Jeff:
And now, here’s Kym DeKeyrel. Hope you enjoy.
Kym:
You know, sometimes you surprise yourself. You’re like, oh, I could totally do that.
Jeff:
I can see your new t-shirt, “Get out of your brain and do it!”
Kym:
Yes! It is, get out of your brain! Well, I was the only blind athlete, so unless I was competing against myself, our 2020 competition was cancelled, because of COVID.
Jeff:
Wah-wah-wah.
Kym:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson, and today in the studio we have the fourth fittest standing adaptive athlete in the world. Yes, in the world. She’s from San Jose, California, and she is a massage therapist and she does Cross Training, and she wants to recruit you to CrossFit training today.
Kym:
Yeah, I do.
Jeff:
She does! Please welcome Kym DeKeyrel. How’re you doing?
Kym:
Good, thanks for having me. I’m excited.
Jeff:
Well, thanks for taking the time and coming onto Blind Abilities, and taking the time out of your training probably, right?
Kym:
I just got done.
Jeff:
Aah.
Kym:
We timed it perfectly.
Jeff:
When you say, “fourth fittest standing adaptive athlete,” in a nutshell what does that mean?
Kym:
In a nutshell. So, I do CrossFit, which is, you know, kind of a functional fitness, Cross Training, I’m sure everyone’s at least heard of it whether good or bad, but it is totally amazing. Every year people have the option to do, it’s called the CrossFit Open, which is a worldwide competitive event that is a five-week long process, and you do workouts and you have to be judged and send in videos and all the things, and if you do well enough in that qualifying process, then you can go on to the CrossFit games, and in my case I made it into the Adaptive CrossFit games, or the WheelWOD games, and I was the first totally blind athlete to compete at this event. This was my first time going within 2019, it was up near Toronto, and it was hard, and amazing, and awful, and all at the same time, and I got fourth place, and people are coming in from all around the world to compete, so at this point, I am the fourth fittest adaptive athlete in the world, and the first totally blind athlete to compete.
Jeff:
So you’re also a massage therapist, and you and your husband own a chiropractic thing and that’s where you met, and I heard something that he dragged you in, crying and screaming about this athletic, fitness stuff, because the blindness, the visual impairment, you thought you probably couldn’t do it.
Kym:
Yeah. I knew I couldn’t do it. Like, I knew with all of my heart that I would smash my face, that I would be terrified all the time, I knew I couldn’t do it, and he was like, no, you’re going. Because I had really, in a sense, as I know really most people who lose their vision, it felt like I had lost my sense of identity, in some ways. I had been a dancer all growing up, and then after losing all of my vision, I had kids, and I had some other health issues, and I was just not doing anything, and he obviously sensed that, and knew that, and one day he said, “You’re going to the CrossFit gym,” and I was like I am not going to the CrossFit gym. And I cried, and I cried in the parking lot, and then I went in. All of a sudden all of these people started walking in the door saying, “We hear Kym’s first day is today, we’re here for Kym’s first day,” and I did it, and seriously, honestly, by the end of that first day I was in love, I was hooked. I just felt so grateful for a community of people that didn’t care that I couldn’t see, that wanted to help and be supportive, and, jeez, I mean now I go to the gym twice a day.
Jeff:
Wow. Now, when you talk about community, you earlier mentioned WheelWOD, can you explain that a little more?
Kym:
WheelWOD, it’s W-O-D, which is a CrossFit term that stands for Workout Of the Day, so WheelWOD is a platform dedicated to creating competitive adaptive athletes and giving education to coaches and gyms on how to coach adaptive athletes. So towards the beginning of 2019, a friend told me, she called me and said, “There’s this competition in Miami, and there are adaptive athletes out there, there’s people in wheelchairs that are climbing ropes and there are people with one arm that are lifting giant weights over their head, you should look into that, you should see if blind counts as adaptive.” And even then I look back and it just seems like such a world away, I was so shy, still, about even admitting that I was blind, or I wasn’t confident in anything when it came to CrossFit, I had her help me ask at this competition. And of course they said “Yeah, blind counts, you need to get a hold of WheelWOD,” so I did. Then they told me well, yeah, blind obviously counts here too, and you need to do the CrossFit Open that starts in two months, and it really just got me rolling and it was, WheelWOD was started I don’t know how many years ago, let’s just say about 10, by a man named Chris Stoutenberg, and it started with him and some of his buddies, some wheelchair athletes doing CrossFit workouts together, and then it grew and then it grew and now 10 years later or eight years later it is, there’s like a thousand, I don’t know, more than that, thousands of athletes, adaptive athletes, of all disabilities, all around the world that are part of WheelWOD.
Jeff:
And you’re still trying to get more.
Kym:
Oh, yeah. I’m trying to get more. I’m on a mission.
Jeff:
What’s your pitch to people to get them interested?
Kym:
Well, obviously my interest is in anybody that is visually impaired, because it’s really fascinating to me, as a blind athlete, that in the wheelchair division there are hundreds of athletes. In the upper-limb impaired division, there are hundreds of athletes. In the lower-limb impaired, so people are missing legs, there are hundreds of athletes. In the vision division, there are 10, maybe 10, 10 females, and it really, like, pulls at my heart a bit, because I know it’s not because we are not physically capable. In the scheme of it, being blind we are the most physically capable. But I think vision loss, it’s not like people that lose an arm, boom, your arm’s gone and now you have to adapt, and learn to live with your one arm. So often with vision loss, it is slow, it is over time, and it’s like a constant mourning process, and I really think it messes so badly with people’s mental health that they feel such a sense of loss of independence, a loss of identity, and I just really want to help, to motivate, to inspire, I don’t know, yell at you until you’re forced to listen to me that there is something out there that you can do and no one’s expecting you to be a champion or anything like that, but your life is not over after losing your vision.
Jeff:
How do I join, how do I get more information about this?
Kym:
You can go onto wheelwod.com, you can follow me on Instagram and I have all of the connections, and I am kympossible, k-y-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e, xoxo, on Instagram, and if you are interested, and I hope you all are, in signing up for the CrossFit Open, which is for the first time adding adaptive athlete onto the real, for real CrossFit leaderboard, you can go to crossfit.com. There’s so many ways to search it up, just google “adaptive athlete.” There’s so many ways.
Jeff:
You mentioned, and I’ll put some links in here for people to click on in the show notes, but you mentioned you go to the gym twice a day. What is your typical week or your typical day like?
Kym:
My typical day is I wake up early, I go to the gym by 6:30 or 7:00, I get home by 8:15, I make sure my kids are all ready to rock for school, obviously usually we are dropping them off at school, right now they’re doing online school, I jump in the shower super-fast, get everything ready, throw all our lunches in the bag, go to work all day long, and come home, either do another small workout in my garage, and that could be like yoga or some rowing or biking, nothing too crazy, mixing in dinner, laundry, all the things, and go to bed, start over again.
Jeff:
It’s kind of hard to do massages as a massage therapist virtually. Yeah, I don’t think that’ll work.
Kym:
No, nope.
Jeff:
Not yet.
Kym:
No, I’m working. We’re medical, so nope, I’m all day, hands-on.
Jeff:
Now, when we were exchanging contacts here and setting this up and all that, I found out that you too have a Concept2 rower.
Kym:
I do!
Jeff:
How do you like it?
Kym:
I like it a lot, I mean I use it pretty much every day, every other day, and it is cool, because it has accessibility options, I can hook it up to my phone, and put some earbuds in, and it can, you know, read the screen as I use it.
Jeff:
You know what, that was one of the selling points to me, was like wow, this is not only a great rower, it also has accessibility. I used that accessibility for like two, three times, and then I thought, I got this. And then I cranked on some music, some podcasts, some other things and started going-
Kym:
And that’s actually what I was gonna say, is at this point though, I’ve used it so much I know exactly how many pulls is 250 meters, I’m constantly counting, I can even judge based on my effort how many calories I’m pulling, just by counting my strokes, I’m very, obviously as most blind people are, very methodical, I’m, you know, always thinking while I’m working, and yeah, I can basically tell you, okay, 36 strokes is 250 meters, you know?
Jeff:
Mm-hm. See, I’ve gotten that counting out of my head, I sit there thinking I’m just becoming a robot, I’m just counting, I’m counting, think about something else Jeff, so I’ve gotta distract myself. I go by time, like if I go 30, 35 minutes, something like that, I know what I got out of that.
Kym:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Because I’ve got my Apple Watch, rowing set for activities, so that’s good too.
Kym:
Ah, we’ve gotta be Apple Watch activity buddies. Yeah, I do that too, I have my Apple Watch, but with CrossFit, the thing with CrossFit, like I’ll come home and maybe I’ll just row for 30 minutes or something, but for the most part in CrossFit it’ll be like a workout of 250 meter row, jump off, do some olympic lifting, blah blah blah, jump back on the rower, do 250 meters, so there’s a lot of on and off when it comes to CrossFit workouts, that’s where my counting always comes in handy because I also don’t want and don’t need, you know, a coach or another person to stand over me the whole time saying, telling me what to do, you know, and I like being independent, and obviously I love it when a coach comes over and says, “Okay, you’re at this many meters,” or sometimes I’ll ask, I’ll say “Okay, before we start the workout, I’m gonna do nine calories, can you tell me when I’m done,” so then when we start the workout I know how many strokes that is, how many pulls that is on the rower, so that I can do it on my own.
Jeff:
Oh, wow, so you do just multiple types of activities, that’s of course, Cross Training is not just the name of a shoe. It’s actually a physical activity.
Kym:
I mean, like for example, my workout this morning was we started with heavy bag squats, and that was what we call our skill for the day, after that our workout, I had 10 minutes, and I had to do 50 double-unders, and that’s jump rope but the rope goes under your feet twice each time, and then 25 push-press, with, so that’s the barbell where you pop it up over your head, from your shoulders up over your head, then 50 more jump rope, then 25 handstand pushups, then do it all over again.
Jeff:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Handstand pushups, like you’re against a wall?
Kym:
Yeah, I’m actually- I love them.
Jeff:
Really?
Kym:
Anything like that, where there is no expectation, like nobody needs to be able to see doing a handstand pushup, right? I mean, you are in one place, you are upside-down, those are the things I truly thrive in. Like someone says do 100 burpees, I’m like sure, because it doesn’t require a lot of transitioning, and that’s the hardest part, even for me today, what I find the most, the time where I’m thinking, thinking, thinking the most is going from okay, I have my jump rope, I’m gonna put that there, I’m gonna move from this spot over to the wall, okay, touch the pole, move this way, touch the wall, you know, I’m thinking more in the transitions than in the movement.
Jeff:
Now, I’ve seen you on Facebook, you have some videos, and I had one described to me, where- let’s go to the burpees, the dreaded burpees, people sometimes, they don’t like them.
Kym:
They are dreaded by all.
Jeff:
But you do kind of a two-directional burpee thing with a box in between.
Kym:
Blind people are never, for all of those listening that I’m going to talk into going to do CrossFit games with me, that is never, ever expected of blind people. I just, you know, I challenge myself. I don’t want to become stagnant in being adaptive, yes, I do a burpee and then I jump up onto a 24-inch box, turn around, jump off the other side, do a burpee, and then jump back up and go back and forth, but I’ve worked on that a lot, and that would never be expected in adaptive CrossFit for a blind person. Even in competition, there are things like burpees over the bar, and in the competition, I’m never expected to go over the bar, because you know, you don’t want to risk injury, but in the safety and familiarity of my garage, I can focus.
Jeff:
Now, I too doubted like how can she maneuver and manipulate and jump and then come back, and you know, some people wander a little bit, sometimes, but I heard that you actually reach out and you actually touch the box now and then just to kind of reference, like you said you find things-
Kym:
All the time, yeah. All the time. I lost my vision over time, you know, I explain a lot is that if I walked into the gym and I didn’t know that box was there, I would just fall right over it, and hurt myself and die. And- but, when I know the box is there, and I have the time to explore it, touch it, and feel the height of it and the width of it, I can almost, like my brain can see it. Like it puts it there, even though I can’t see it at all really, realistically, your imagination-
Jeff:
You map it out, yeah.
Kym:
-fills it in, so I can burpee, touch the box, jump, turn, touch the box, push away from the box, go down, touch the box. Like I said, I’m always very focused. I cannot let my brain wander at all.
Jeff:
It’s really great that you’ve found this passion because you’re really excelling and I think you’re gonna be a great ambassador, talking- you’re talking me into it.
Kym:
Yeah!
Jeff:
I think Cross Training could probably help someone who’s focusing on hockey, because-
Kym:
Oh, definitely! Even in our gym, it’s so many athletes of different sports, they’re training, off-ice training. We do have a lot of hockey players, actually. Even though we’re in California, we have a lot of hockey players at our gym, and-
Jeff:
Go Ducks.
Kym:
-off-ice training- we’re northern California-
Jeff:
Kings, Kings.
Kym:
We’re Sharks.
Jeff:
I was moving up the state, I was getting there.
Kym:
Yeah, yeah, yeah [laughs]. Yes, it’s great for any athlete, for just mobility, strength, overall fitness, and moms, dads, grandpas, I mean, anybody, truly anybody, can do CrossFit, I mean that’s why it’s called functional fitness. I mean, some people are doing back squats with 10 billion pounds on their back while others are just squatting to a box with maybe just an empty barbell on their back. Nobody is expected to be crushing the weights, it’s just about the individual and being a healthier person.
Jeff:
Speaking about being a healthier person, when we’re talking and setting up what we’re going to be talking about, I mentioned you are what you eat, because you know, you’re in fitness so you’re probably concerned about that, but you had a, quite a revelation about food, diets, because of an illness that you had.
Kym:
I did, I wouldn’t even be doing this now if it wasn’t for changing my diet, changing my entire relationship with food. To make a long story short, when I was in my early, mid-ish 20s, so I was a dancer, I have a degree in dance, I was a ballerina, I was a modern dancer, I worked as a choreographer, at the time I was even still working as a choreographer, obviously with my vision loss it was becoming harder and harder, but I was still hanging on, and then I truly woke up one day and was crippled. And I thought at first, oh my gosh, I’ve ruined my body by dancing all these years. And then it just got worse and worse, and it got to the point that I couldn’t even step off of a curb without my knees buckling, and I’d fall, and I started having, like my hands would turn black like they were hypothermic and then they would swell, huge, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming because I would bend my knee, so obviously I started going to doctors, I ended up being diagnosed with lupus, with the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, I was put on a cocktail of 10 billion drugs, like chemo, Prednisone, all these things, and for two years or so I lived on all of these drugs, it just made me sicker, I would just throw up all the time because I was on the chemo, and I lost so much weight and I was already tiny to begin with, I had no muscle mass, I was just so sick all the time. It made, truly that sickness made being blind seem like nothing, that- it was terrible. I would still force myself to kind of like walk on a treadmill, but I had no fitness. And the doctor was saying like well, all of these medications are starting to shut down your organs, so let’s take you off, and I’m like oh, well I still feel like crap, and nothing’s changed anyway, so why am I taking all of this, so we left, and I told my husband that I can’t do this anymore, I can’t live like this. And I certainly wasn’t gonna go jump off a bridge, but it truly, I was so defeated. The next day he came to me and said, “We’re changing your diet.” He took me off gluten, then we did some allergy testing and found out I’m allergic to egg whites and beans. We really revamped my diet, but when it came down to it, it was gluten. Within four months of not having any gluten, and that even takes a process because you truly find that there is gluten in everything, I mean it’s in sauce, it’s in everything. So within four months, though, I was running again. I was running, I was stepping on and off of curbs, and then one day I accidentally ate something with gluten in it, and I thought oh crap, I’m gonna be sore. No, within a week I was in total liver failure, and through some surgeries- I almost died of blood loss, and there was a big disaster, and when I came out of that I had no vision left, gone, because of the blood loss, so that’s when, like, oh, so now I can move again but now I see nothing, and that’s when he drove me to the CrossFit gym.
Jeff:
Kicking and screaming.
Kym:
Yeah. Yep, because I needed something, I needed, I don’t know, I needed a sense of life.
Jeff:
That’s amazing. I mean, it’s amazing to come to the realization of how important it is that what you put into your factory, you know, is affecting you.
Kym:
Yeah! And I tell people, you know, in my massage therapy practice, I’m with people all the time that are inflamed or have so much pain, or have irritable bowels, or endless symptoms of things, and I am always trying to encourage, you know, try something, take out something, if it’s not gluten maybe it’s dairy, you know? You can always try to make a change.
Jeff:
Mm-hm.
Kym:
And see if it’s better. I was never a foodie, not by any means, I was totally chicken strips, pizza, whatever, there’s nothing now in this world you could pay me to have me put a Ritz cracker in my mouth.
Jeff:
Oh my gosh. Those are good. However, I went through the same- not the same thing, not that case, but I had an impaction in my esophagus, and I had to go to the emergency room, and 17 hours later everything’s fine, and through specialists, they noticed something in my esophagus that was building up but something could get rid of it. I watched this video about- what’s it called, it’s about juicing, and something about fat, sick, and about to die, or something like that. It had quite the punch to the title. And I decided to get off gluten, that was one of the main things, the grains. And so I did it, and I dropped like 45 pounds, my cough, my irritation in my throat and esophagus all disappeared, everything disappeared, and it was because of the food intake, the stuff I was putting into my body was creating all this stuff, over the years it probably build up pretty good, and the impact of the food changes, I noticed it like in three days, and you know, after a while I started playing hockey, doing all sorts of stuff, it was really cool, and I kind of weaned myself back in thinking well, maybe it’s not milk, maybe it’s not the wheat, maybe it’s not this, and it came back, and now I’m back on it again, not strict juicing, but it’s the wheats, the flours, the- all that. Ritz crackers.
Kym:
Yeah. Yeah. And I even noticed, I used to have, with my eyes, terrible nystagmus, like when I could still see enough to read large print, words would jump all over the page, and my eyes would bounce constantly and people would say all the time, like, are you looking at me? Because my eyes would be all over the place. Now, I obviously, I can’t see to read anything, but my eyes don’t bounce at all anymore. I think it’s just that I have so much less inflammation in my body, and so when it comes even to CrossFit and doing box jumps and things like that, yeah, I think it’s really cool that I can do that because I can’t see it, but man, I just appreciate that my body can do that, because I certainly couldn’t do that 10 years ago, or however, you know, 12 years ago, it just was so life-changing.
Jeff:
So you had sight when you were going through K-12, and schooling.
Kym:
I did have sight. I did have a teacher’s-aid in the classroom with me, because I couldn’t read the board, and I still had to have large print, but I could still see, yes. And I started, because I was diagnosed at five, and my parents were told I would most likely be totally blind by 18, I was fast-tracked. I started learning braille right away, cane travel, mobility, learning how to be an independent person, life skills, early. By the time I went to college, I, you know, I could kind of function on my own.
Jeff:
What’s your choice of tools? Like, PC, the Mac, Android, iPhone?
Kym:
Oh, I am Apple all the way. Everything is Mac. I don’t actually use a computer very often, or like at all, and I’m a massage therapist, I use my phone, really, for everything, like voiceover, and the keyboard, I can do everything, emails, Instagram.
Jeff:
Hey, once you’re in the orchard, right?
Kym:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff:
I think one of the biggest fears that people have about weight training, or Cross Training, is the gyms. You go twice a day, but some people, you know, I use a trainer sometimes, once a month I use a trainer, just so I can get kind of that Cross Training over to another machine that does something different, just to change it up so I can inform myself about more types of things I can do. What would you say to someone who is thinking about joining a gym but has that fear that the weights are dangerous or navigating the gym is impossible?
Kym:
I would very much recommend, and it’s not just because CrossFit is what I do, I used to go, back when I could even still see, I used to go to like a 24-Hour Fitness, and I still had much more vision, and I was never comfortable at a regular global gym, because I couldn’t tell if there was something actually on the treadmill, I couldn’t navigate really on my own, realistically, I didn’t have a guide dog and I wouldn’t have brought it, really. Anyway, I would truly at this point recommend, if somebody wants to get into fitness and is visually impaired or blind, to look into your local CrossFit gym. There are so many of them, it seems like they’re popping up around every corner, which means you can even shop around. I would recommend that you call them before you go in, and be open and be honest and be confident, and tell them that you’re blind, that you would be interested in coming and checking out the gym, and what are their thoughts? Because if they are in a sense, terrified by you, move onto the next one, and then once you find your place that sounds like you’ll have a- they’re welcoming, you go, and even if you have to take an Uber to your CrossFit gym, and you go in, and they’re gonna help you, they will, they will show you, they’ll guide you around and say okay, here’s gonna be the rack. When I first started, I would have to wait for people to bring me weights or kind of set things up on the rack for me, even to this day my husband is there and he’s always kind of moving things around behind the scenes where I might not even notice, or coaches, and even at this point, I’ll be standing and someone will just kind of grab me and guide me to another location, but even starting out, a CrossFit gym is a community, and if you are open with them, and say yeah, I can’t see, you are gonna be surprised about how many people want to help and want to be a part of your journey, and that was really, really huge for me, because I was terrified to even admit that I couldn’t see, and I started realizing that once I told people, it’s not that they even would just help, it’s they were happy to help, they wanted to help. It made them feel good for me to ask for help, you know, then I learned how to set up my own boundaries. I used white towels on the ground for texture and sometimes I can kind of catch some of the contrast, because the ground is black, so I set up that so I know I have a barbell at this white towel and I have this at that white towel, and okay, if I take two steps back there is the rack, and the good thing about a CrossFit gym is you are in one place, really, your whole workout. It’s not like 24-Hour Fitness, where, okay, the cardio is way over here, and then the weights are in a whole not her room, you have your space. You can be comfortable, and I promise by your fifth visit you won’t even need that Uber anymore because somebody in the community is gonna be like “Hey, you go to the 7:00 a.m. class? So do I! I’ll pick you up.” I crack up- the coaches, we laughed at, I was the best recruiter for the endurance class at our gym because nobody wants to do it, but I did, and so I would always try to sucker people in, like “Don’t you want to do endurance class? You should do endurance class. You should pick me up on your way to endurance class!” And then you become, like, somebody else’s accountability buddy, because, well, they need to pick me up to go, so even if they’re feeling lazy, well, we can’t disappoint Kym! And people love that, and that’s like one of my biggest pieces of advice to people who are losing vision, or are blind, is don’t isolate yourself, don’t push people away because you don’t think they understand, because of course they don’t understand, nobody can understand. But they want to help, and if you give people the chance, you’ll find that they’re really kind, and that they really, really want to see you succeed and want to see you happy, and want to be a part of your journey, and be proud of, you know, the little things that you do. I mean, I am still truly more comfortable pushing 120 pounds over my head than I am going into a store and asking someone to help me find the milk. I’m really focused on being proud of what I can do and helping other people understand, blind or not blind, to understand that we’re all just trying to live our lives.
Jeff:
Well said, well said. I think all of us need someone in our lives like that, that keeps us grounded but actually gives us some wings to actually expand, to check out the horizons of possibilities. I like that you used the word possibilities in your Instagram-
Kym:
Yeah, my Instagram, kympossible.
Jeff:
Kympossible!
Kym:
Yeah. You know, I just think anything could be possible, but anything you do is something to be proud of.
Jeff:
Of course! Think possible, I like that. I like possible, instead of what’s not. It’s easy to figure out what you can’t do, but it’s hard to make that shift into saying how can I do it?
Kym:
Yeah. No matter what, I probably say, I don’t know, once a week, even at the gym, outside the gym, well, I can’t do that, what are you thinking? I can’t do that! And then I sit in my brain for a few minutes and then I realize well, I might as well try, and then, you know, sometimes you surprise yourself. You’re like, oh, I could totally do that.
Jeff:
I can see your new t-shirt, “Get out of your brain and do it!”
Kym:
Yes, it is get out of your brain! And that’s for everybody, you know?
Jeff:
Oh, yeah. Well, Kym, I want to thank you so much for coming onto Blind Abilities and sharing with us, recruiting some of us hopefully, hopefully people will click on the links.
Kym:
Yes, the CrossFit Open starts March 11th, so look into it and sign up!
Jeff:
All right. Kym, have a great workout today, and thanks for being on the show.
Kym:
Thank you for having me!
Jeff:
Such a great time talking to Kym, kind of gets you going and wants to make you take on that challenge of CrossFit, or some type of adaptive training. If you want to find out more about Kym check her out on her Facebook page at Kym DeKeyrel, and that’s spelled capital K-y-m space capital D-e capital K-e-y-r-e-l. You can also follow her on her Instagram page at kympossiblexoxo, that’s k-y-m possible, xoxo. And to find more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @blindabilities, and download the free Blind Abilities app from the app store and Google Play store. And if you want to give us a call, leave us a message, give us some feedback, you can get a hold of us at 612-367-9063. And a big shout-out to Chee Chau for his beautiful music, you can find Chee Chau on Twitter @lcheechau. And from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times, to you, your family, and friends, stay safe, stay informed, and stay strong. I want to thank you for listening, and until next time, bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
Contact:
You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities
On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com
Send us an email
Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Storeand Google Play Store.
Check out the Blind Abilities Communityon Facebook, the Blind Abilities Page, and the Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impaired group