Well With: Amy Klobuchar

How does our busy lawmaker prioritize her own health? Sen. Klobuchar shares her favorite trails, how she beat breast cancer, and how she champions health and wellness for Minnesotans.

by

Our Well With series chats up notable locals to share their fitness routines and what wellness means to them. Someone you’d like to hear from? Send their name to edit@mspmag.com.

Vogue calls her “personable, popular, and pragmatic. The New York Times calls her a “former prosecutor with made-for-state-fair charms.” Valedictorian of her graduating class at Wayzata High School, she now works in the U.S. Senate, representing Minnesota when it comes to critical issues such as modern agriculture, climate change, education, and health care.

But has anyone asked Sen. Amy Klobuchar what she does in her (likely scheduled) downtime? How the recently declared YMCA Congressional Champion gets her 10,000 steps in? What she does to keep her body moving?  

Klobuchar details some of her health journey—particularly as it relates to her battle with breast cancer—in her new book The Joy of Politics: Surviving Cancer, a Campaign, a Pandemic, an Insurrection, and Life's Other Unexpected Curveballs, which hit bookstores in March.

As for the rest, we wanted to know ourselves. Here, we pick Klobuchar’s brain about her favorite hiking spots (which mostly include our scenic state parks!), her health-focused legislative action, and a historic 1,100-mile bike trip with her dad back in the ‘80s.

You work long hours at a job that’s known for being incredibly stressful. What does your typical fitness and wellness routine look like? How do you keep your body moving?

In the old days, I took really long bike trips, and that takes a little bit more time than I have right now. So, what I've been doing is, one, I wear a Fitbit, and I'm always checking that and trying to get my 10,000 steps in. [I] don't do it every day but, certainly, running around the Capitol adds a lot of steps. I also love hiking, so sometimes I take hikes on Capitol Hill, or I'll take hikes in Minnesota. My husband and I got to know a lot of state parks during the pandemic, and we've kept going there. Frontenac State Park near Red Wing is very cool, and we went to a number of other ones. We are hiking this Superior Hiking Trail five miles at a time. [Laughs] It’s going to take a long time because it's over 300 miles. But I think we've done about a hundred-some miles of that, so we're about a third done on that. So, I do a lot of hiking. Then the third thing is, I try to do some fitness classes, especially barre classes [such as] Barre3—some of the ones out there. I’m not really going to any one class, but whenever I can I try to do that.

Nonprofit Energy Efficiency Act and the Comprehensive Cancer Survivorship Act. How do you champion health and wellness initiatives for others in the state of Minnesota?

Yeah, it was great to get that award. I actually used to be on the board—way, way back before I was a senator—of the Ridgedale Y. In the Senate, I really tried to focus on a few things. One is nutrition. That's part of the Farm Bill actually, and school lunches—things like that. A second thing is cancer and other disease research. And we've increased the funding for NIH [National Institutes of Health] every year for eight years. That's everything from cancer research to Alzheimer's research to rare diseases. I'm head of the rare-disease caucus [​​Rare Disease Congressional Caucus]. So, we've done a lot of work in that area. And then obviously, some of the work we do on environment, climate change, is also really important.

Also bike paths! I always carry the provision on the recreational trails, which includes biking—it's everything. It's cross-country skiing, ATVs, snowmobiles. Luckily, they're all together now, the coalition, so we try to make sure we have the recreational trails funded.

That's what my job is: to improve people's lives. –Amy Klobuchar

On top of the other incredible work you do as the first woman to represent our state in the Senate, you’ve actually beaten breast cancer—which inspired your legislature on early detection screenings. How did you prioritize your health—both physical and mental—while undergoing treatment? What advice would you give to others going through a similar experience?

So, for me, a lot of it was my family were so supportive and incredibly helpful, and my husband—getting up at four in the morning and taking me to radiation. So that was the first line of defense. And then the second was I did find solace, eventually, in talking to other women who went through the same thing. That's been helpful after I made it public a few months later. And then the third is just knowing you're helping other people. That's what my job is: to improve people's lives. And so that's part of, for me, [what made it] really rewarding when I made my breast cancer public. I got a flood of letters [from] people who had put off their mammograms during the pandemic like I did, and [they] went in and got it. And a few of them found out they had cancer. They also wrote about that, that they were getting treatment, and one in particular, that I've just written about in my book that I just put out: Melissa. She wrote me that she put it off, went in, and found out that she had Stage 2 cancer, she lives in Maple Grove. And then about a year later, when I was fact checking for the book, I called her to see if I could use her first name. I had never talked to her before. And she was in the waiting room waiting to get her results for her annual checkup. And then she called me back a few days later and said she was 100% good. So that was pretty rewarding.

I was reading about some of the experiences you’ve had in the past staying active. As a student at Yale University, you once went on a 1,100-mile bike ride from Minneapolis to the Teton Mountains. What are some of your favorite memories of that experience?

Well, that was with my dad, and he wrote about it for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and now Star Tribune. We embarked on this 1,100-mile bike ride, and it was this incredible thing because we averaged 100 miles a day. We had all of our gear on the back of our bikes, we tented out about two out of three nights. We got through some of the most memorable things. The first night in southern Minnesota, we found ourselves right in the middle of a tornado. A [farmer] took us in, and we stayed overnight in [their] house. Downed crops everywhere. We had several flat tires—luckily, not near any rattlesnakes. Probably the most memorable thing was going over the Togwotee Pass in Wyoming, which is right at the end. And then that feeling of when you get to the top, you're going over the Continental Divide [and] it's all downhill to Jackson. That was really fun.

You mentioned earlier that you love to hike, and you’ve mentioned especially during the pandemic, you explored many of the state parks in Minnesota. I was curious, what are your favorite places to hike around the state?

I’d say the state parks, and I especially like Frontenac. I don't know that everyone's gone there. It's pretty cool. There are some prairie lands where you feel like you're in some kind of, I don't know, like some kind of Wizard of Oz situation. There are so many interesting flowers, I just love it there. And then the views of Lake Pepin. Jay Cooke Park, we did some very cool hiking there, as well as, of course, all the way up the North Shore. But the Superior Hiking Trail is my other favorite because my husband and I have been slowly but surely [trying] to hike the whole thing. And we're about 100 miles in.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Be-Well Newsletter

Inspirational interviews, health and fitness tips, and upcoming events delivered every two weeks.