Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Some folks give to charity to help those in need.
Others do something a little off the wall.
Dr. Tim Hindmarsh of Samaritan Health Services is one of the latter.
For the second year, Hindmarsh completed 10 sports in a day for his cause – promoting healthy activity, raising awareness about diabetes and helping fund scholarships for diabetes education.
Gathering sponsorships, primarily from Samaritan employees, Hindmarsh’s athletic public relations stunt raised some $10,000 this year and last when he did it the first time. That money goes to Lebanon Community Hospital Foundation to fund scholarships for diabetes education for patients who cannot afford it.
“The official event didn’t start till 7:30 last night,” Hindmarsh said toward the end of the event Friday evening, but he couldn’t wait to get started.
He was up at 3 a.m. on Thursday and jumping out of balloons in Woodburn by 6:05 a.m. He kept at it all day, up until the official start time, with a trip to Skydive Oregon.
He officially started by traveling to Hood River where he was planning to go windsurfing, but the air was still and the river smooth as glass. Instead he went “sidewalk surfing.”
Hindmarsh tried to find a skateboard, but all the shops were closed. He ended up borrowing a board from a kid and spent time riding the half-pipe. When he was told that no one rides the big ramp, he had to.
He was a little nervous about it.
“I haven’t ridden a skateboard in, like, two years,” Hindmarsh said, and there he was riding the one ramp no one used.
He moved on, riding his bicycle 10 miles and then running five miles. Up Friday at 5:30 a.m., he headed for Mt. Hood for skiing and snowboarding and then returned to Molalla for his two official jumps at Oregon Skydive.
Once his feet were attached again to the ground, Hindmarsh took off for Sabrina Lake in Halsey, a private ski lake, where he went barefoot skiing, slalom skiing and wake boarding.
He dried off and headed for his home in Holley, where he has a motocross course set up. He finished his day off running the course with neighbor Blair Reynolds.
This “started as, you know, we’re sitting in a hot tub two, three years ago, and my wife asked, ‘What do you want to do for your 40th birthday?” Hindmarsh said. His answer: “I want to do 10 sports in a day.”
That led him to Samaritan’s CEO, Dr. Larry Mullins, who found the idea interesting, telling Hindmarsh, “Let’s get ourselves a cause.”
They decided that diabetes education would be Hindmarsh’s cause. He treats diabetics and, with a growing population affected by the condition, education is more important than ever. Usually, when a doctor diagnoses diabetes, the patient needs to learn about life with the condition, and they need to learn that it can be controlled through lifestyle changes.
Doctors do some of that, Hindmarsh said, but they need more intensive information. Some of the patients cannot pay, and that’s where Hindmarsh’s event came into play.
“I can’t treat (diabetes),” Hindmarsh said. “Ultimately, the person who has the disease has to control it.”
Type 2 diabetes is adult-onset diabetes, Hindmarsh said. Most people who get it are overweight. Essentially, with a large body mass, the body has to produce more insulin and often gets to the point where it can’t make enough to deal with the entire body.
“The fitter you are, the more efficiently you’re going to be able to metabolize calories,” Hindmarsh said. Diabetes “is the number one, trumps all other factors, even smoking, for heart disease.”
High blood sugar levels irritate blood vessel walls, allowing fat cells into the vessels and leading to clogged arteries and blood clots.
Factors causing heart disease are not just cumulative, Hindmarsh said. Rather, multiple factors compound the danger — not like one plus one equals two but more like two times two equals four.
“We are literally choking on our own affluence,” Hindmarsh said of Americans.
The United States is a spectator nation, Hindmarsh said. People do not get enough physical activity.
Approximately 60 percent of people in Linn County are not physically active, Samaritan spokesman Brad Canfield said. Inactivity leads to Type 2 diabetes, and “6 percent of Oregonians are diagnosed with it every year.”
As rates for obesity and being overweight soar, the most rapidly growing group of type two diabetes patients are children, Hindmarsh said.