Ep.01: Meet Your Hosts

In the first episode of Appalachian Outdoorosity we explain what the podcast is about and introduce you to our team. Melissa Weddell, Becki Battista and Joy James share a bit themselves as well as some stories about their time together in the outdoors.  

Transcript:

Melissa Weddell: Welcome to Outdoorosity, the get outside and keep going outside podcast, where we share Appalachian State stories to entertain, inspire, and inform listeners about living an active outdoor lifestyle. Each episode features a story with the goal to get you outside and keep you going outside to improve your overall wellness. Our goal is to promote Healthy Outdoor Play & Exercise across the lifespan or what we call HOPE.

Melissa Weddell: The HOPE Lab, where our purpose is to investigate the role of outdoor physical activity, exercise, and play on health, the environment, and human development, the vision of the HOPE Lab is to continue developing the scientific foundation for promoting and supporting outdoor physical activity, exercise, and play through interdisciplinary research. You can check us out online at hopelab.appstate.edu. My name is Melissa Weddell.

Melissa Weddell: Today, we are going to introduce your three hosts. But before we get started, we wanted to share with you some benefits of being in the outdoors. According to the American Public Health Association, people of all ages and ability enjoy higher levels of health and well-being when they have nature nearby in parks, gardens, green ways, naturalized school yards and playgrounds, and natural landscaping around homes and workplaces.

Melissa Weddell: Access to nature has been related to lower levels of mortality and illness, higher levels of outdoor physical activity, restoration from stress, and a greater sense of well-being and social capital. The integration of nature into towns and cities has secondary benefits that contribute to better health and more sustainable societies.

Melissa Weddell: Given the importance of contact with nature for well-being, the American Public Health Association and the HOPE Lab supports the protection and restoration of nature and the environment where people live, work, and play at every scale, from building sites to large regional park systems and ecologically sustainable rural areas. With that said, we would like to introduce ourselves as host. Joy James, would you like to go first?

Joy James: Yes. I am a professor of recreation management here at Appalachian State University. I teach a lot about how people spend time in the outdoors. I thought I'd share with you a little bit about how I came to love or realize the outdoors was a space that I wanted to be in. Imagine the possibilities within yourself and the outdoors, and then transferring it to daily life. And that's sort of like what Melissa was saying were some of the benefits. That's what happened to me as a young girl who was shy and lacked confidence.

Joy James: I was involved in Girl Scouts, which is already a nerdy thing to do, right? And a strike against me in the popular crowd. But I found I loved it because it was all about getting outdoors and I was learning backpacking and camping and having fun and goofing off and really making connections with the other girls. It was also something that my other classmates weren't doing. I could come back after a weekend and said, "I was learning disco," which has nothing to do with that outdoors.

Joy James: But I also could come back and say, "I went backpacking, or I went camping." One formidable experience for me was our troop went hiking to Mount LeConte Lodge, which is a lodge in the Smokeys near Gatlinburg when I was about 15 years old. This was kind of like a precursor to backpacking for me. We didn't have to bring a sleeping bag. We didn't have to bring cooking gear. The lodge provided food and a place for us to rest. All I had to do was just hike up there with a change of clothes.

Joy James: Also, it was unusual for me being from Georgia. The elevation was about 6,593 feet. And not having ever seen anything like that or hiked anything like that was a daunting task that I wasn't quite sure I was capable of doing it. I don't remember how many people were in the group, but what I do remember about the number in our troop was we had three groups, a fast group, a medium group, and a slow group.

Joy James: I was the only one that was in the medium group, because I was not very fast and I wasn't slow at the time, although my two friends here would say I'm slow now. At that time, I was a little more of a medium, and I could yo-yo between the two groups. What would happen is I would be by myself, and then I would catch up to the fast group and chat with them. And then I would wait for the other group while the fast group took off, and then talk with the slow group, and then I would take off.

Joy James: What I started to it was this sense of I