As part of my new web series, The Role Model In You, here is my most recent interview. The Role Model In You series discusses how individuals were influenced as a child to lead a healthy lifestyle. It covers who influenced these individuals, the changes they made in their life to be healthy, and the message they would like to convey to the youth of today. Our guests include doctors, soccer stars, Super Bowl champions, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and just regular people looking to share their story. I hope you enjoy it!
1. Your name, title, and age? What do you do (or did you do) for a living?
Kevin Foster, Realistic Dreamer, 52. I turn my Dreams into Reality.
2. Who was the person that inspired you as a child to eat healthy and stay fit? What was their relationship to you?
An accident inspired me to be physically active. As an eight year old child in 1968, I was electrocuted, receiving 65,000 and 30 amps from a live high tension wire. To put that in perspective, it would take half of one amp to kill someone in an electric chair. My parents were told by their doctor that I would never walk or talk properly again; that I’d spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. Institutionalizing me was suggested, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it, taking me home to care for me (as well as my three other siblings) instead. I spent the next four years trying to free myself from the wheelchair, and even more years to speak properly.
3. What did they do to inspire you?
What inspired me to keep going was film footage of then President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Tse-tung walking on the Great Wall of China in January 1972. At that point I was just getting back on a bicycle with training wheels and from there the idea just came… to one day become the first person to ride a bicycle atop the Great Wall from one end to the other. 18 years later in the Summer of 1990, that dream became a reality, earning me the Cyclist of the Year over my friend, 3-time Tour de France champ, Greg LeMond, and changed my life forever.
4. How did their lesson change your life?
Seeing the leaders of two powerful nations come together in peace and friendship inspired me to one day do the same, although with a bicycle.
5. Do you convey their message to kids in your life presently?
What I convey to people of all ages through my motivational talks, is that if you have a dream that you’re passionate about, take the proper steps, and perservere, you WILL turn that dream into reality. I use my own life experiences to convey my message.
6. What would be your main message to children today to lead healthy lifestyles?
Be Active. Connect with Nature. Dream…
7. Do you have a web site you would like to promote….web address only?
A remarkable person!