Exercise and friendship

Exercise has a powerful way of changing lives for the better — and of bringing people together. When she brought her executive experience to Las Cruces in 2021, exercise became the driving force for Georgiana Hernandez as she settled into her new community.

Looking for a place to relocate after four years in Madison, Wisconsin, Hernandez and her husband checked out Taos and Santa Fe before visiting Las Cruces.

“We loved how down to earth everybody is here,” Hernandez said.

Soon after arriving in southern New Mexico, Hernandez came across an announcement in the Bulletin about the Senior Olympics inviting people to attend a kickoff and registration event.

“I saw that there were some things to compete in,” Hernandez said. “I've always been a fast walker and I thought, ‘I've never done anything competitively, but I thought maybe I'll try and do power walking.’ I went to the kickoff, I registered for power walking. That (2022) was the first year that I competed.”

Leading nonprofits

Hernandez’s background is in nonprofit management. She has a master’s degree in nonprofit administration and a doctorate in organizational development and leadership. After a long career in San Francisco, she and her husband moved to Wisconsin to be near their daughter while she completed graduate work.

When her daughter gained access to remote work during the pandemic, she moved back to the Bay Area. That’s when Hernandez made the move to New Mexico. It has been great for her health — and a blessing for the Doña Ana County Senior Olympics.

“I've always been active, but when I was working in the Bay Area, I was commuting three hours a day,” Hernandez said. “I was not athletic, but I feel lucky. As a teenager, I started hiking. My husband and I have always hiked a lot, but I didn't have a regular regimen. When I got here to Las Cruces and got involved with Doña Ana County Senior Olympics, it was the first time that I became committed to trying to exercise every day and I feel like I don't think I'll ever stop at this point.”

Hernandez soon became a leader within the Senior Olympics organization. Her experience running nonprofits has been a major asset since she arrived in Las Cruces.

She began her career with a bilingual newspaper, El Tecolote, which started as a class project at San Francisco State University. That role evolved into leadership with Acción Latina, one of the best-known Latino cultural nonprofits in the Bay Area, based in San Francisco’s Mission District.

“When I got out of college, I traveled through Central America and I got in the middle of a massacre in El Salvador, so in 1980, I was really fired up about what was going on in Central America. I sent an article off to the LA Times and got published.”

She then wrote a volunteer column for El Tecolote. The newspaper was staffed fully by volunteers, and she joined a group of them on the leadership team to incorporate and launch Acción Latina.

After she left the organization — and five years before moving to Wisconsin — she learned that Acción Latina was facing financial trouble. She wanted to help.

“It took five years to get the organization from basically going under to becoming a thriving organization again,” she said. “I went through the succession planning, finding somebody to take over from me and training him, and then we left for Wisconsin.”

When she arrived in Las Cruces and her new friends and training partners learned of her nonprofit management expertise, they asked her to join the board of directors. She said she was happy to help with projects but had “been there and done that” with board service and preferred to remain a volunteer.

Still, Hernandez found ways to strengthen the organization. She began by providing job descriptions for event managers — the volunteers who oversee each competition.

“The Doña Ana County Senior Olympics is a very grassroots organization, which is why I just love it,” Hernandez said. “I love grassroots nonprofit organizations because they love the mission of the organization and there's no vying for power or anything. They’re just trying to spread the word about the importance of fitness for everybody but especially for people 50 and older because that's our entire population and that's what we connect on.”

Power walking — and perspective

After she started power walking, Hernandez became even more committed to personal fitness. She began attending yoga classes and doing Pilates.

“There's a whole community of people, no matter what their physical limitations might be, or their age, committed to trying to stay physically fit and I just love that,” Hernandez said. “This morning in yoga, we're all in the warrior two pose. I love the warrior two pose because there's this sense of power. I just kind of looked around the room and there's everybody in their warrior two poses. It just gives me such a good feeling.”

Her doctors believe her level of fitness helped return Hernandez to full strength after heart failure and two weeks in the hospital, at a time when her survival was uncertain. She went from playing table tennis to the emergency room with COVID-induced heart failure resulting from acute myocarditis.

“I really felt invincible before that happened because I was so physically active and taking care of myself,” she said. “I've always slept really well. I've always eaten really well. And that's what they say—sleep, diet, and exercise, right? My heart failure had nothing to do with the condition that I was in and, in fact, the doctors said that I lived because I was in such great condition.”

She had been playing table tennis and, after one game, began sweating profusely. She waited for it to pass, but it didn’t. Then came pain in her left arm and jaw.

EMTs transported Hernandez to her hospital of choice, Three Crosses Regional Hospital. She praises the medical team there for the cardiac care that saved her life.

More than medals

What Hernandez loves about the “competition” at the Senior Games is that athletes compete against themselves while cheering one another on.

“It’s really important to beat my own record,” Hernandez said. “I've done well, I've gotten gold medals, but it doesn’t matter so much. In a way, it's kind of too bad that we came up with the name of Senior Olympics because it's more like Senior Games. You don't have to be an Olympian to compete.”

She notes that retirement gives many participants the time to train.

“If you concentrate on getting more fit as you get older, you don't feel older,” she said. “I don't feel older. I had heart failure when I felt totally invincible physically and I still feel that way to be honest with you. I know now something can happen and can come along and almost take you out at any time. There's just a reality that something you have no control over like what happened to me, but I feel very committed to fitness and sort of proselytizing.”

Research consistently shows that staying physically active improves long-term health.

“Exercise really is magical,” Hernandez said. “It doesn't cost anything to get out and walk, especially here in Las Cruces. Once you start exercising and once you kind of make a commitment to it, I don't think you ever go back.”

Beyond the physical benefits, there is also the social side of working out — something formalized through the Senior Olympics community.

“So many of the people that I've met here in Las Cruces, it's through Senior Olympics,” Hernandez said. “Sometimes that turns into a deeper friendship where you go do other things. You go out to breakfast, you go out to lunch, you go out to do other things.”

In Las Cruces, a 10-member board and a dedicated group of volunteers continue guiding the organization forward.

“As somebody who has a long background in nonprofit management, I have deep respect for what has come before and the people who contributed to the development and the creation, and then the maintenance of a nonprofit organization,” Hernandez said.

She is grateful to be part of it — and looks forward to one day turning it over to the next generation of Senior Olympians.