B3B3 
SPORTS, FITNESS &SPORTS, FITNESS & 
HEALTHY LIVINGHEALTHY LIVING 
Mountain Views-News Saturday, February 21, 2026 
B3B3 
SPORTS, FITNESS &SPORTS, FITNESS & 
HEALTHY LIVINGHEALTHY LIVING 
Mountain Views-News Saturday, February 21, 2026 
SLEEP ON IT 

UNLOCK YOUR LIFE 


Michele Silence, M.A. is a 37-year certified 
fitness professional who offers semi-private/
virtual fitness classes. Contact Michele at mi-
chele@kid-fit.com. Visit her Facebook page at: 
michelesfitness Visit her Facebook page at: 
michelesfitness. 


ALL THINGS by Jeff Brown 

BOY'S LIFE by Robert McCammon 

Boy's Life is an award-winning masterpiece,a richly imagined 
coming-of-age novel that blends mystery, nostalgia, 
and touches of magical realism into a deeply moving portrait 
of childhood. Set in 1964 in the fictional town of Zephyr, 
Alabama, the story begins with eleven-year-old CoryMackenson witnessing a scary event: a man drives a car into 
Saxon Lake, apparently the victim of murder. This shocking 
moment forms the novel’s central mystery, but the book 
ultimately becomes something much broader and more 
profound. 

At its heart, Boy’s Life is about growing up—the slow, sometimes 
painful shift from innocence to awareness. Cory 
narrates the story with a voice that captures both youthful 
wonder and adult reflection. His world is filled with comic 
books, baseball games, bike rides, and colorful townspeople, yet beneath the surface lies racism, 
economic hardship, cruelty, and fear. McCammon skillfully balances the warmth of nostalgia 
with a realistic portrayal of the darker truths that shape a community. 

Zephyr itself feels alive, populated by memorable characters who add texture and depth to the 
narrative. Cory’s father, Tom Mackenson, stands out as the moral center of the novel. His quiet 
strength, integrity, and compassion provide a powerful model for Cory as he struggles to understand 
what true courage means. Their relationship grounds the novel emotionally, offering 
moments of tenderness that contrast with the tension of the murder investigation. 

McCammon’s prose is lyrical and evocative, often drawing comparisons to Ray Bradbury. Like 
Bradbury, he captures the magic and myth of small-town life, where ordinary places can hold 
extraordinary secrets. Subtle elements of fantasy—such as eerie legends and dreamlike encounters—
blend seamlessly with reality, reflecting the way children perceive the world as both wondrous 
and frightening. 

What makes Boy’s Life enduring is its emotional honesty. The novel acknowledges loss and 
disillusionment but also celebrates imagination, friendship, and resilience. Cory’s journey is not 
just about solving a mystery; it is about learning empathy, confronting prejudice, and accepting 
that adulthood carries both beauty and sorrow. 

Ultimately, Boy’s Life is a powerful meditation on memory and identity. McCammon crafts a 
timeless story that reminds readers how formative—and fragile—the years of childhood truly 
are. 

This wonderful book can be ordered at Fables & Fancies Bookstore in Sierra Madre 626-665 
8856 


Most people think fitness results come from what you do during a 
workout. How many reps. How much weight. How hard you sweat. But 
there’s something just as important that happens after your workout—

and most people don’t know about it. It happens when you’re asleep. 
Not resting on the couch. Not scrolling on your phone. Sleeping. 

Sleep doesn’t just help your muscles recover. It helps your brain learn 
movement. That learning is called muscle memory, and it’s one of the 
biggest reasons people get better—or stay stuck. 

Muscle memory doesn’t actually live in your muscles. It lives in your 
brain and nervous system.
When you learn a movement (like a squat, a golf swing, swimming 
strokes, or balance exercises) your brain creates a pathway. The more 
you repeat the movement correctly, the stronger that pathway becomes. 
That’s why beginners feel awkward at first. The pathway is new. 

That’s also why experienced exercisers move smoothly and with confidence. 
Their brain already knows the pattern. Here’s the part most 
people don’t realize: Sleep is when those movement pathways get 
locked in. 

During sleep, especially in the deeper stages and during REM sleep, your brain does something remarkable. 
It replays what you practiced during the day. It’s almost like hitting the save button on a computer. 
If you shut down without saving, your work can disappear. Sleep is how your brain saves movement. 
Studies show that people who sleep after practicing a skill perform it better the next day. They move 
more accurately, learn faster, and remember the skill longer. In simple terms, sleep is what turns practice 
into real progress. 

This matters more than most people realize. Many think sleep is only for physical recovery, to reduce 
soreness or boost energy. But it plays an even bigger role in balance, coordination, technique, and injury 
prevention. If you’ve ever felt like you were practicing but not improving, or that you felt awkward even 
though you were strong, poor sleep may be part of the reason. 
Your brain may not be getting the chance to store and refine the movement patterns you worked on. 

Learning does not stop in childhood. Adults continue building new movement pathways throughout 
life. Whether you are picking up pickleball, returning to swimming, or working on balance after an injury, 
your brain is still adapting. As we age, that process becomes even more dependent on quality sleep. 
Without enough rest, reaction time slows, balance declines, and movements become less precise. That 
increases the risk of falls and injuries, especially for older adults or anyone restarting an exercise routine. 

This is especially important for people who feel discouraged by slow progress. Many assume they are 
uncoordinated, too old, or simply “bad at exercise.” In reality, their body may be capable, but their brain 
has not been given enough recovery time to learn. When sleep is short or broken, improvement feels random 
or nonexistent. With better sleep, the same workouts often start to feel easier and more controlled. 

Many people make the mistake of cutting sleep while increasing workouts. They believe pushing harder 
will bring faster results. In reality, the opposite can happen. When you are short on sleep, your brain 
struggles to store new skills. You may repeat mistakes instead of correcting them. Your form can break 
down, and your body may compensate in ways that lead to strain or injury. You might feel tired and 
accomplished after a workout, but improvement may stall because your brain never had the chance to 
finish the job overnight. 

The good news is that small changes can make a difference. Training earlier in the day can help protect 
your sleep. Focusing on quality movement instead of just more repetitions gives your brain clearer patterns 
to store. Limiting screen time before bed allows your mind to settle so it can cycle through the 
deeper stages of sleep that support learning. Keeping a consistent sleep schedule also helps your brain 
move through the sleep phases needed for memory and skill development. When you think of practice 
followed by sleep as a team, you start to see that the workout is only part of the process. 

This helps explain why some days movements suddenly feel smoother or easier. You may think it was 
the extra effort in the gym, but often it was the sleep that followed. Overnight, your brain organized the 
information, strengthened the pathways, and cleared away some of the confusion. Improvement does 
not always happen while you are exercising. Often, it happens quietly while you are asleep. So remember, 
sleep is not optional in fitness. It is a necessary part of making exercise actually work. 


Lori A. Harris 


NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN 
YOUR WELL-BEING 

"Nothing is more important than my well-being." 

Sam Bennett wrote that affirmation in Start Right Where You Are. I 
want you to sit with it for a moment before we go any further. 

Nothing is more important than my well-being. Say it again. Nothingis more important than my well-being. Now let me ask you something:
Does that statement feel true, or does it feel selfish? 

Because for a lot of us, especially high-achieving women who have spent 

decades showing up for everyone else, that sentence lands like a foreign 
language. We say we believe it. Our choices tell a different story. 

What are you treating as more important than your well-being right now? Your partner? Your children? 
Your job? Your inbox? Being liked? Being needed? Being indispensable? Let yourself know, 
what your body has always known. 

Here's what I know from the courtroom and from coaching sessions: we are remarkably skilled at 
building a case against ourselves. We call it dedication. We call it loyalty. We call it love. But somewhere 
underneath all that noble language is a woman who hasn't been to the doctor, who sleeps on 
pain instead of addressing it, who keeps a warm body at the table long after she should have gone 
home. 

I know because I was her. I broke my foot at work and stayed at the office. I suffered multiple miscarriages 
and kept my calendar full. And then one day, a doctor held up an X-ray of my shoulder 
and told me the pain I had been managing, medicating, minimizing, and muscling through was a 
broken bone. Untreated. Fused. I stood there, and I cried. Not from the pain. I cried for the woman 
in that X-ray. The woman who had decided, somewhere along the way, that her position at work 
mattered more than her body. That the case on her desk was more urgent than the case her body 
was making for help. 

I had loaded up on OTC medication, whimpered through the nights, and showed up anyway. Because 
that's what we do. And nobody stopped me. Not my supervisor. Not my colleagues. Not the 
institution I had given years of my life to. As long as there was a warm body at counsel table, that 
was one less problem for management. The office was never going to tell me to go home and rest. 
That was never their job. It was mine. 

Here's what the research confirms and what our bodies already know: mindset is not separate from 
health. It is healthy. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's research demonstrates that positive emotions 
don't just feel good; they literally expand our capacity to think, heal, and make better decisions. 
When we practice affirmations real ones, repeated with intention, we are not doing feel-good 
exercises. We are intervening at the neurological level, quieting the stress response, and signaling to 
our nervous system that we are safe enough to heal. 

Studies on positive self-talk consistently show lower rates of cardiovascular disease, stronger immune 
function, and faster physical recovery. The mind and body are not separate systems sending 
each other memos. They are in one conversation. And what you say to yourself is part of your treatment 
plan. 

I reversed the effects of that injury. No frozen shoulder. No chronic limitation. Because I finally 
started telling my body the truth: you matter. You come first. Nothing is more important than your 
well-being. 

But here's what I need you to understand, and this is the part that took me the longest to learn: 
awareness is not enough. Knowing you've been neglecting yourself doesn't heal you. Feeling guilty 
about it doesn't heal you. You have to take action. That's the work. 

Within our circle, we build awareness, and then we move. We learn to shift our state quickly, to 
bring calm to a nervous system that has been running on fumes. We learn to recognize "fight or 
flight" for what it is: a signal, not a sentence. We learn to recognize "fight or flight" for what it is, asignal, not a prison sentence. We care for ourselves. We care for our bodies at home and at work. 

Because no supervisor, no institution, no deadline, no client, no relationship is coming to do it for 
us. So let's go back to where we started. Say it with me, and this time, mean it like your life depends 
on it. Because it does. 

Nothing is more important than my well-being. 

Nothing is more important than my well-being. 

Now live like you believe it. I would love to hear from you. If you really believed that nothing’s more 
important than your well-being, what is one small change you would make? Please write to me at 
lori@loriaharris.com and let me know. 

Lori A. Harris is an award-winning coach and podcast host. Learn more at her website loriaharris.com 


Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 
Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com