Hello

My Story

I started running in the 4th grade and competed through high school. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Central High School in Springfield, MO and participate in the International Baccalaureate program there. We had an awesome track and cross country program that we built from the ground up (we made it to the State Cross Country Meet for the first time in 50 years when I was a Sophomore), and it gave me a place to fit in with other kids that had also skipped a grade.  Unfortunately, I was just good enough to be competitive at the state level and thought I was hot stuff. I was the typical 4:20 miler, 9:20 two-miler, and a 5k PR of 16:0-something. And then I graduated and went to college.

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The summer between high school and college is where skipping 8th grade caught up to me. I red-shirted cross country my freshman year of college. Everyone else got their growth spurt that summer and all of a sudden the guys I was used to competing with and beating were leaving me in the dust on easy runs. I’m mature enough at this point to admit that my fragile 17-year old ego couldn’t handle not being competitive anymore and having to get a spot from the girls on the team to be able to do my pull ups in the weight room. I can’t say I’m proud about it, and I’m not even sure I really thought about it that way at the time, but that’s where I was. 

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What do I know is that I went from being a big fish in a little pond to not being able to keep up on easy runs and being extremely burnt out (I’d been running pretty hard for a while at this point). So I hung up the spikes and focused on other things. After a bit of a hiatus from training, I started doing kung-fu, the philosophical training of which was extremely important for me later on down the road. The kung-fu school is where I learned to fall in love with training again. 

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I never left the competitive running community though. I started coaching at my alma mater where I learned a lot from the other side of the stopwatch. I helped young athletes navigate the trials and tribulations of training and racing, balancing the demands of intensive schoolwork with training regimes. I would run with the athletes when they were on the roads, but I wasn’t really training anymore. I stopped coaching when I went to grad school, but the mix of coaching, training and teaching kung fu, and life lessons learned during this period still greatly impact my coaching and training philosophy.

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I still ran for fun and did kung fu when I transitioned to being a graduate student. As anyone who has been there knows, grad school can be all consuming. I learned A LOT about biology, wildlife, wildlife management, and various other related subdisciplines. I got a Masters in Biology, and halfway through a PhD in Fisheries and Wildlife (studying urban opossums, no less) before I looked up one day and went “wait a minute, this isn’t what I want in life!” This was about the same time I was falling in love with my wife (who was working on her PhD in biology) and realized I wasn’t going to be in academia OR the corporate world. Which meant I had to learn some small business skills.

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My wife got her first post-doc position at UT-Knoxville, an amazing running town with a great running community. I knew I needed those small business skills if I was going to be able to pull-in a paycheck wherever we finally ended up when my wife got a tenure-track position, so I crashed the job fair on campus and started talking to the guys at the Fitness Together table. I actually skipped an interview with a company that would have probably been a much more lucrative career to keep talking to the guy that would end up being my boss for the next two years.

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It was about this time that the old siren sang again.  I signed up for my first marathon and only had one thought after crossing that finish line: “I want more!”  There was something about facing my inner demons during a race that made sense.  Since then, we’ve moved (twice!) and had two kids, and I’ve worked at multiple gyms as a personal trainer, did a stint as a volunteer coach at the college level, and started my own coaching and training business. I’ve gone on to run 10k’s, half marathons, marathons, Boston (including 2018 in the crazy rain, wind, and cold) and 50k’s and couldn’t be happier.