Rebecca Fallihee

Eugene, Oregon

I have an MS in Clinical Nutrition with a concentration in Herbal Medicine from Maryland University of Integrative Health (MUIH). 

Currently, I am a nutrition educator through my county extension office (OSU extension service) part time, which means I teach nutrition and cooking to SNAP-qualified audiences, and have my own nutrition practice seeing both remote clients via video conference and locally. Though my experience is fairly broad, I tend to work primarily with endurance athletes, often with food allergies/intolerances, autoimmune or chronic conditions, and/or digestive health/healing. 

 


My favorite places to run.

Ridgeline Trail System. It is a quick drive and a great escape from the city of Eugene below. Especially in the spring and early summer, the wildflowers and dense foliage are incredible. 

I have absolutely wonderful memories of running the grounds of UCD (University College Dublin) years ago when on study abroad. The university site is on acres and acres of turf fields and little secluded wooded sections which were all once part of some grand estate(s) in South Dublin.

A little more accessible and now a destination is running at Bald Hill in Corvallis, OR. This is the first trail I ever ran, where I’d skip biology lecture in favor of clearing my head while in undergrad, where my husband proposed, and where I used to do early morning tempo runs (on the flat section) from my apartment. Running here is like the old comfy sweatshirt of places, kind of worn out or unremarkable, but also absolutely still the best.

 Why I Run

There are so many reasons, but ultimately there’s just something about being in motion and the ease/flow that comes with it, and conversely, running can often be really hard and I’ve found that I really desire to be routinely challenged and to overcome.

 

The last five or six years, I’ve been working through a challenge that has markedly changed my life. It began as what appeared to be a mysterious running injury which countless specialists couldn’t figure out, and has ended up seeming to be a combination of an autoimmune condition that I’m managing too well to officially diagnose and some biomechanical asymmetry. The result is that I’m often in pain, and tend to have ‘flares’ that show themselves in many ways but particularly as increased pain and limited range of motion at times when I’m overextending myself with the combination of work, life, and running. I’ve learned to manage it with the whole spectrum of wellness tools including stress reduction, taking more time to relax (or attempting to), eating an anti-inflammatory diet, body work, herbal medicine, and probably just as importantly, working to change some of my beliefs about my health ‘story’ and internal dialogue. This particular challenge has been and sometimes still is, quite the trip.