My passion is in helping outdoor enthusiasts fulfill the adventures of our dreams, by aligning the essential areas of body, mind, life, logistics, and skills in our training -- so that we can become our best selves in and through our outdoor pursuits.
My mission with this Center and the resources, programs, and experiences I create within is to help make this possible for you.
Whether you already love to go on adventures, or you love the idea of it but aren't sure where to start, I promise you'll learn from and be inspired by this community and by the educational content in the Center as the foundation of these memberships.
We can all benefit from sharing our experiences and learnings with each other.
If you're interested in learning more about your body, mind, and life in the context of your experiences outside, and becoming your best self through your adventures, this Center is for you.
Here's what using an integrative approach to adventure can look like:
The ALIGN Center and everything within is a blending of the last 15 years of my education and experience, drawing from the fields of physical therapy, neuroscience, wellness & performance coaching, life coaching, somatic integration, and energy medicine; as well as my decade-plus of experience and education as a professional athlete in multiple backcountry sports.
[And yes, ALIGN is a philosophy and also an acronym: Adventure Lifestyle Integrative Group Network.]
The "ALIGN Community Membership" is our basic offering, where you'll have access to the community and to bite-sized versions of my educational content on an ongoing basis.
It's sort of like Patreon, where you can join for a small investment amount ($9.99/mo) to have access to the bite-sized versions of my integrative educational content all in one place, and access to the ALIGN community.
Investing this small amount helps to support my work in creating, editing, processing, and sharing my educational material and making it available, both in this format and free of charge for those who can't afford any level of investment.
[Click here to learn more about the ALIGN Community Plan.]
The "ALIGN Premium Membership" is our highest value offering, and where I'll be dedicating most of my professional time and energy in teaching and coaching for the foreseeable future.
The Premium Membership gives you access to the Community and my bite-sized educational content, as well as expanded premium content, more live coaching opportunities, and my flagship course Movement Medicine: Foundations. It has two options for investment: monthly, and a deeply discounted yearly investment price.
For a limited time to celebrate the launch of the ALIGN Center, I'm offering both the monthly and yearly Premium plans for a discount of half-price. If you invest now, you'll get to keep that price for the duration of your membership. (If you cancel and then re-subscribe after this promotion ends, you'll have to pay the full price).
[Click here to learn more about the ALIGN Premium Plan.]
Integrative Adventure is a term I started using to describe both my personal philosophy and my ambitions for my professional career; somewhere around 2012 when the lines between my sports medicine physical therapy practice, my adventure performance coaching work, and my life and work as a professional endurance athlete began to blur as I recognized the need for a more holistic and integrated approach to rehabilitation, wellness, performance, and adventure in general.
In each of these separate areas of my professional life, while observing both myself and the people I was serving, I had started to identify missing links and limitations that were negatively impacting my ability to help create a sustainable positive impact for people through my work. Some of these limitations and missing links were systematic, some were a product of others' influence, and some were personal as I didn't yet have the skills or tools I needed to work and teach differently.
I was an ambitious and curious outdoor enthusiast determined to be at my best in my chosen adventure pursuits. I learned and developed integrative toolsets for my own benefit, both through trial-by-fire in my adventures and through the timely and priceless mentorship of others who had already walked my path in their own way and shared their wisdom with me.
I sharpened these tools through falling splat on my face and achieving huge wins both in adventure and in life. Through practicing, being terrible at it, and slowly but surely improving. The process of pursuing my potential in the outdoors was making me not only a better, stronger athlete, but a better, stronger person in the rest of my life.
Over the years, parallel to my pursuits of backcountry adventure, I navigated challenges, hardships, and "little t and big T" trauma in my personal life as well. A heart-wrenching divorce, starting over and reinventing myself at age 28, complex physical injuries requiring surgery and intensive rehab, intimate partner abuse, having all my financial assets stolen while living in a foreign country where I didn't know the language, a life-threatening experience, a major episode of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, reinventing myself again, losing all my income due to our global pandemic, a diagnosis of severe ADHD as a 37 year old adult, and most recently a mild traumatic brain injury complete with ongoing post-concussion syndrome impairments.
Through all of these physical and psychological hardships, I directly and intentionally drew strength and wisdom from my experiences as an adventurer: taking the learnings, tools and strategies I'd developed through my backcountry pursuits over the course of my lifetime and translating and adapting them to my personal life challenges.
Combined with the essential support of mentors who helped me facilitate this translation and level up my mastery of these tools, my integrative adventure skills have helped immensely in my process of navigating through, adapting for, overcoming, and growing from these rough times; finding the gold nuggets buried within them to use in my own life moving forward (and eventually to share with others).
Sometimes we need a mentor to help us cross these tools, strategies, and learnings over between disciplines, especially when it's new. But the crossover isn't a far reach at all: They directly translate. I used the exact same skills to become a doctor and scientist, that I used to succeed in a difficult month-long Alaskan expedition, that I used to recover from PTSD, that I'm using to create an amazing life-partnership with my love.
This "gradual epiphany" blew my mind, and I realized this is what it's all about for me. It's who I am, and what my entire life has revolved around. Adventure feeding life, and thus, life enabling adventure. Parallel journeys having a positive impact on each other when integrated. Using my outdoor pursuits to become the best version of me.
For many years I kept this to myself, turning inward and focusing on my own personal development, athletic career, adventure ambitions, and life trajectory.
Slowly the separate lines of work I was doing to help others, that fit neatly into very well-defined conventional boxes of "physical therapist" and "endurance coach" and "mountain bike skills coach," started to feel very confining. So did my own adventure pursuits. My adventures were making me a better person, but I had a growing desire to share what I was learning to help others in a more integrative way, and I had no outlet for that. I knew my work needed to evolve.
Over the next years I dedicated myself to learning how to teach the "softer skills" that involved mental, emotional, and energetic management, optimal lifestyle design, and facilitating cross-discipline translation. I sprinkled them into my physical therapy and coaching practices where I could, while still mastering and emphasizing my foundational education and work with the physical body, and pursuing my own adventures and athlete goals that kept me inspired and learning from experience.
Since evolving my work in this way, I've noticed a much greater impact and higher level of success and fulfillment with the people I serve. "Training for adventure" doesn't just mean completing workouts to improve fitness, going to the gym to get stronger, and rehabbing the injuries we get along the way.
With an integrative philosophy and approach, aligning all essential elements, the pursuit of adventure and adventure itself can become, and create, so much more. The possibilities to explore are endless.
Inside the Integrative Adventure Center, positive change happens on both the individual and the community level. In community, we can inspire each other and lift each other up to be greater as a whole than we can on our own.