Finding Your Summit

156: Amanda Russell: Chief Marketing Officer at Valeo Technologies, Professor of Marketing, and Author opens up about overcoming the injury that interrupted her Olympic career to her expansion into the worlds of fitness and marketing.

Amanda Russell

Amanda Russell explained the importance a mentor played early in her life while growing up without a lot of financial resources and opportunities in a small town in Canada. “I had a high school gym teacher. She told me about this life-changing thing, this word 'scholarship.’ I had never heard the word before. I didn’t know what it meant, and she explained to me that it meant that you could go after high school, instead of going to work, you could actually continue to go to school and get another degree that will put you in a much higher-paying job, and that the United States of America would actually pay you to do it, as long as you could do a sport. My family didn’t have a lot of money.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Amanda Russell about her vigorous drive, ingenuity, and dedication to expand on her former Olympic running pursuits into fitness and marketing. “I look at sports differently now. It took being seen. So, when you look at sports like baseball, or football, or dance, these guys get seen, and it is slightly subjective, in terms of you actually have to be good enough for somebody to physically go see you and determine that you are good enough. She (Amanda Russell’s high school gym teacher) told me I should look at running, because running was a sport that, first of all, it was free. It required no equipment, and the time on track was the time on track anywhere in the world, and if I could run these certain times, I could write my ticket.”

What You Will Learn:

How did she manage to work her way into her athletic track success without even liking to run at all? “I don’t run anymore, and when I see people running, they make it look even more painful and I don’t understand why anyone would want to take that up. I think that is an important point because it has affected me in some many other ways, because I think there is a big mentality of like, ‘follow your passion, follow your passion.’ Well, first of all, if I followed that advice, I would have never done it, because it wasn’t fun. It was a lot of work and there were a lot of obstacles. Having gone through that, I thought, after training like that, and doing that for so many years in a sport that at the end of the day I didn’t love, made me realise that there is probably nothing that I wouldn’t do if I wanted the end-goal.”

Amanda Russell was 21 living in the United States preparing to run in the Olympics when she experienced a career-ending injury, a broken femur, and was facing deportation. “I feel like I’m the go-to person for a lot of friends whenever a crisis happens in their lives because you become very resourceful, when you don’t have anything left you become very, very resourceful and you find a way to do it. I’m a hustler in any way. So, I thought, I can’t go back to the pinnacle of what I feel like is the athletic world in running, the Olympics, then I still had this dream, which was really my dream, was New York City. I didn’t know what that meant. But I just knew that I just really, really wanted to live there and I wanted to grow a career there and it was like the epicenter of my universe. I had a few challenges though, well many, four actually. Four that stand out. One, I had no money, no connections, no work experience, and no U.S visa.”

Amanda shares a story about her innovative and genuine strategy that landed her an American employment sponsor to begin her life in New York City as a Canadian. “You can’t compete on what you don’t have. I don’t have experience, and I knew in order to get the job, it wasn’t like I just had to be the best candidate for the job. To get sponsored with no experience, you have to prove in some way, you are better than every other American applying for the job. One thing I did have a lot of, not money, but shoes. I had a lot of Nike running shoes, because that was my sponsor. So, I sent out a pair of used, worn out Nike running shoes to who I found out was the gatekeeper of each of these three firms, with this whole personal spiel in a box about how I had all of this work ethic and dedication and perseverance that I can now give solely to your company because I was no longer going to run. That got me the interview. That got me all three interviews actually.”

How did business school play a pivotal role in fulfilling Amanda’s desire to live and work in New York City? “My plan was to work there for a couple of years, go to business school. Business school requires at least two or three years of experience. I saved everything I possibly could when I was working. I was making pretty good money. But, I could also write...

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Joe Kelly about how history keeps repeating itself with racial oppression and what Joe Kelly has experienced with his own eyes.

154: Yogi Roth: Analyst on the Pac-12 Network, Creator of the Life Without Limits podcast, Author and Filmmaker, and Hugh Millen: Ex-NFL Player and Football Analyst at Seattle’s Sports Radio 950 KJR talk about ways that football teams, players, coaches, and conference are adapting to COVID-19.

Yogi Roth and Hugh Millen

How does returning guest to the show Yogi Roth feel about the word ‘limits?’ “To me I never believed in limits, right? You can’t play major college football? Screw you, I’m going to play it. You can’t coach at SC. Yeah, I can, watch me. You can’t call big games. Watch me. Like, that was always a mindset. But, now it’s like, well if our 5-year-old is like, ‘Hey, I want to go bombing down the street on my bike at rush hour.’ There are limits around that, dude. That’s not allowed.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Yogi Roth, Analyst on the Pac-12 Network, Creator of the Life Without Limits podcast, Author and Filmmaker, as well as Hugh Millen, Ex-NFL Player and Football Analyst at Seattle’s Sports Radio 950 KJR. Hugh Millen shares his opinion on both of his athletic sons’ coping with the restrictions that have emerged in response to COVID-19. “You control the controllables, and we don’t know what is going to happen with this pandemic, and the one thing we can control is our response to it, our attitude about it. Whether it is a few months like we have had or a few more months, whatever it is, it is our choice.”

What You Will Learn:

Yogi Roth talks about growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania with his mom’s parents being holocaust survivor’s and how that pushed him to be strong, resilient, and to never give up. “The harder it was, the more obstacles that came in front of me, the more joy I would get out of it and it wasn’t healthy at first because it became about proving others wrong. But, eventually as an adult, it has turned into proving myself right. That is a challenge I think every athlete and competitor probably goes through in some form. Most of us deal with that later in life. I try to tell high school kids, deal with that now because it is much more of an enjoyable process.”

How is Hugh Millen controlling his attitude as a dad around his kids losing a season or even playing amid the pandemic? “It is two-fold in different ways. My oldest son at Oregon, it is actually somewhat of a blessing for us selflessly that he is home now, and so, what I’m doing I’m out there throwing with him, coaching him up and he is coming off an injury, a shoulder surgery. So, we’re making sure his mechanics are where he needs to be.”

Hugh Millen discusses talking about sports careers with his kids. “First of all I say, ‘What is your goal?’ If they just tell me one time, hey, I don’t want to be an NFL quarterback, then I change. When they say I want to be an NFL quarterback, my first response is, get in line. Right, Yogi? You aren’t going to talk it into existence. You are going to work it into existence, and it is going to get into how do you prepare and how do you perform. Very simple. It is as simple as that and that will declare whether or not you have that opportunity. But, the message I try to say is, let your work ethic match your goals.”

What is Yogi Roth hearing as the path for college football after the pandemic? “I interviewed every head coach last week in the conference. Talking to a bunch of people. Everybody is optimistic. Like, there is this narrative out there that, yes the SEC is going to play. They don’t care. They’re going to put fans in the stands. You're in Texas, fans in the stands. But in the Pac-12, they’re not going to play, and that is the furthest thing from the truth. The truth is, is that everyday the conference commissioners get on the phone, along with their liaisons, with their support staff, medical representatives, etc, and everyday the people leading the conversation around the medical side of COVID-19 and college football are the people on the west coast. It is the Pac-12 conference.”

Hugh Millen makes an insightful point about convenience versus fatality as it pertains to COVID-19 by using flu season deaths as an example. “If we really cared about cutting those deaths down, we could have said our entire lives, none of us grew up wearing masks on an airplane. But it could have been. There is another universe that we could have lived in where all of our lives we were used to wearing masks during flu season, because we want to say, wait a minute, 40,000 deaths is not tolerable for the flu. We have to try to cut that done.”

Post-Pandemic Sports Fans

Yogi Roth talks about what college football stadiums might look like in the fall. “Fans in the stands? Packed? I don’t know how many fans are going to want to be in the stands, packed. I don’t know. I’m sure conferences will make those...

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Scott Mellin, Global General Manager of Performance Sports and Global General Manager of Mountain Sports at The North Face. He talks about the role he holds at the company.

152: Laurie Adami: 13-year Cancer Survivor, Software Company President, CAR-T Trial Patient, and Immunotherapy Fundraiser talks about overcoming cancer after the struggle of relapsing seven times.

Laurie Adami

Laurie Adami not only a 13-year cancer survivor, but she fought and overcame 7 cancer relapses during the course of that fight for her life. Before this tumultuous experience began, she unfortunately had her gut feelings ignored by doctors. “I was 46-years-old and, as you said, I was running a company. It was a financial services company, traveling a lot. Every month, on the road, London, New York, Boston, wherever. I had a little kid who was 4-5-years-old, and I just started to get really tired. I just thought something was really wrong. I couldn’t get the doctors to take me seriously. I think it was a combination of the fact that I have blonde hair and maybe there are hypochondriacs out there or something. But, definitely my concerns were dismissed, over and over and over again.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Laurie Adami, 13-year Cancer Survivor, Software Company President, CAR-T Trial Patient, and Immunotherapy Fundraiser. Laurie wisely trusted her instincts and worked with a doctor that finally diagnosed her with the source of her bad feelings. “I just knew in my heart that something was really wrong with me. Come to find out, I had to finally get rid of the doctors I was seeing who would not listen to me and go to a whole new set of people, who finally send me in for a CT scan, and come to find out, I had a mass the size of a grapefruit in my abdomen, and I was stage 4 cancer. It was throughout my body, in my lungs, on my scalp, in my teardrop ducks, in organs. It was everywhere.”

What You Will Learn:

What exactly was this rare form of cancer that Laurie Adami was dealing with? “Here I am, whoa, wait, I’m not ok. Come to find out, it’s an incurable type of cancer. So, it was a form of blood cancer, Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, that I was told, ‘look on the bright side, it is treatable.’ And I would say, ‘yeah, but it is not curable.’ ‘No, it is not curable, but it is treatable.’ Well, that is all fine and good. But, if the treatment works, and you can get a break, and you can be well.”

Which type of treatment did Laurie proceed with? “But unfortunately for me, the story was, I would get a treatment, and then it would come right back. So, I was what they call, a frequent relapser. This diagnosis back in 2006 was something, at the time, that had a brute force chemotherapy treatment and a bunch of other things that they were trying. But nothing was really that effective yet. So, that’s when I learned that it wasn’t such a pretty picture.”

Laurie Adami opens up about what it was like to be a mother facing the potentially fatal dilemma of stage 4 cancer. “I just lost it. I immediately thought of my kid, right? My little boy who was 5 at the time, and immediately thought, oh my God, he is not going to have a mom, because one of the things that were being painted to me as a possibility was fatal in a month. Like no treatments. That was like, boom, you're done. So, that is of course where my brain starts to go.”

At the time, physically speaking, did Laurie feel worse having this form of cancer infested all over her body or chemotherapy drips that are like poisoning herself to cure herself? “I didn’t feel that rotten on chemotherapy. Now, there are so many things that they can give you to prevent side effects. So, for example, I never got nauseous. So, that to me, you know, I didn’t feel great. I was tired. That was probably my biggest complaint was the exhaustion. But, I quickly decided if I kept moving I would feel better physically.”

Laurie talks about some of the nightmare scares that occurred during her cancer battle. “I had some scary stuff happen. Like the day after my chemotherapy, I developed a urinary blockage and I had to go to the ER, and then a couple of weeks later I got a blood clot in my lung and I had to go to the ER. So, there was stuff that I had to deal with. But, I kind of looked at it like, you know what, this is really like a bump in the road. This is going to end, and even if I feel crappy, it is going to end.

Never Giving Up

Laurie Adami shares her personal passion and motivation to survive and overcome the painful grips of cancer. “Bottom line, I kept thinking about my son, you know? I kept thinking. I had someone say to me, ‘oh, kids lose their moms all the time and they are fine.’ And I was like, that’s not ok. That is not ok. My thoughts just keep coming back to my son, and my husband would say, ‘Well, what about me? You aren’t worried about me?’ I was like, you will find another wife. But a child can’t get another mom. They have one.”

CAR T Immunotherapy

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151: Jim Mora: 25-Year NFL Former Head Coach, Assistant Coach, and Defensive Coordinator talks about overcoming the challenges of changing teams, finding the inner motivation and inspiration when times feel bleek, and having the flexibility to keep moving forward.

Jim Mora

Jim Mora opens up this episode by addressing the COVID-19 pandemic that has impacted all of our lives, and he shares some advice on how to manage our expectations while staring ahead into the unknown. “I believe as human beings there is a strength to us that allows us to overcome and I think this concept of embracing uncertainty is very difficult. It runs counter to who we are and what we believe. But, it is so important right now, because if you don’t embrace uncertainty and look for the good in what is happening, you are going to spiral, and I see so many great things happening.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Jim Mora, 25-Year NFL Former Head Coach, Assistant Coach, and Defensive Coordinator. Jim Mora talks about how adverse situations reveal who we are when we come face-to-face with them. “Adversity turns weak people into victims and strong people into competitors. We all are going to go through adversity, different types in our lives, different levels. But weak people shrivel, you know, lay on their couch and watch TV, or hide or look for an out, and it takes a strength of character to compete in adverse times.”

What You Will Learn:

Jim Mora believes that our attitude and mindset are key factors when it comes to experiencing hard things. “I think I’m like everybody. I have some really good days and I have some really challenging days. The fight is to always work through those challenging days and make sure the next day is a better day, and I have always been a ‘glass is half full’ guy. But sometimes that is hard when you get fired. I got fired at UCLA.”

Why is coaching so important to Jim Mora in his life? “I don’t know what is up next for me. I hope that it is coaching. The reason I love to coach is that I love to have an effect on people. But if it isn't coaching, it will be something else where I can influence people.”

Jim Mora explains the way that he differentiates between sacrifices and commitments and investments.“If you want to get somewhere, you have to make an investment. You have to make a commitment. It is not a sacrifice. A sacrifice to me is not a positive word. It is a negative word, where investment and commitment are powerful, positive words. I am going to make a commitment.”

Opportunity and preparation are two key components to the success of any champion. But, they both aren’t things that we can personally guarantee. Jim Mora walks us through how we can approach opportunity and preparation. “You don’t always control opportunity. But you do control preparation. You can always be ready. You can always be learning. You can always be trying to get better. You know, for me as a coach, I’ve always, as you know, stored a lot of information. I always had a plan in place.

How did the NFL superstar of the San Francisco 49ers Ron Lott’s champion-level approach to playing football transition over to his approach to life? “I will say this about Ronnie, I got the great pleasure of meeting Ronnie when I was in high school. My dad was recruiting him at the University of Washington and he ended up going to USC. As we all know, great career there, great career in the NFL, Hall of Famer, now a great businessman. You know Ronnie. Ronnie never compromises his standards, and I think that is one of the things that makes him so successful. That doesn’t mean he can’t be fluid and he can’t be flexible. But, he doesn’t compromise what he believes in, and what he believes in has worked for him. He treats people with great respect, with dignity. He is always honest.”

Pressure is a Privilege

What is Jim Mora’s key advice to people that are making the transition from high school to college? “It is still considered a game. But you have just entered into the world of business, and the expectations and the demands that are going to be put on you are far greater than any you have ever had in your athletic career, and I say, embrace that. I say, it is a lot of pressure. But, pressure is a privilege. You have attained something through your work ethic, through your talent, through your attitude, your mindset, that has allowed you to get a scholarship to go play college football, and there is a lot of pressure with that. But, man, what a privilege it is to be in that situation.”

30 Hall of Fame Players

During this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, Jim Mora also talks about the commonalities he noticed that the greatest NFL football players hold dear. “In my NFL career, I was fortunate enough to be around. I believe it is 30...

150: Ed Rush: CEO of Ed Rush & Associates, Speaker, Advisor, Author of The 21-Day Miracle, Speaker, and Marine Corp Fighter Pilot from the Top Gun program talks about overcoming early struggles in elementary school to becoming a successful F-18 pilot and entrepreneur.

Ed Rush

Where did Ed Rush’s qualities of vision, clarity, and mission really begin to kick in? “My number one goal in life is to fulfill the calling that I feel like GOD has put me on this earth to do, and so I wake up in the morning with ‘mission’ on my mind. That is why I think that the military was functionally such a good place for me. It wasn’t always easy. I failed kindergarten. I don’t like admitting that fact, frankly. But, it is a fact that I wasn’t always the sharpest tool in the shed growing up. Got in trouble quite a bit. But, I found my way into the marine corp, found my way into the cockpit of the F-18. So, something went right. Yeah, mission was really, and still is really, a big part of the driving focus behind my life.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Ed Rush, CEO of Ed Rush & Associates, Speaker, Advisor, Author of The 21-Day Miracle, Speaker, and Marine Corp Fighter Pilot from the Top Gun program. Ed Rush opens up about two of the most important mentors in his life, his father who was a basketball referee in the NBA, and his mother, who is in the Basketball Hall of Fame as a basketball coach. “1972, the year that I was born, she (Ed’s mom) was coaching a small Catholic university in Pennsylvania, their girls basketball team, and they were awful until my mom showed up. The year she showed up they went to the national championship, and the next year they went to the national championship and won, and that was the year she was pregnant with me. She went on to win three national championships.”

What You Will Learn:

How did the Marine Corp prepare Ed Rush for the fly that he is able to live right now? “I went into the Marine Corp and had this amazing group of mentors, starting with drill instructors, who I thought hated me. But, I found out later on that they were training me to live. Like, they were teaching me not to die, you know? Then I had flight instructors, who I thought hated me and I found out that they didn’t hate me, they loved me, to the point of which they weren’t going to let me make mistakes. Really, all those things put together, turned me into a good human being, and a good dad, and a good husband, and a good pilot, and a good speaker.”

What is Ed’s perspective on making mistakes and gaining an acute sense of focus? “The interesting thing about flying airplanes, and it is true for life, is that it is not so much about not making mistakes. Pilots, by no means, are not flawless. It is just what you do with those mistakes. I think that most pilots would admit that every flight is a constant adjustment, every little move. When you are dogfighting for example, you are turning at about 60 degrees-per-second. Every single move, every twitch, requires a second adjustment after that.”

You will get to hear Ed Rush share personal stories of what it took to learn how to fly and land airplanes during his Top Gun flight training. “I landed, and as I rolled out of the aircraft carrier I breathed this big sigh of relief and realized that I was alive. Now, I would love to tell you that I was alive because I was the second coming of Iceman, Val Kilmer from Top Gun. But the truth is, I’m alive because of a really great idea taken into implementation, and the truth is, I’m alive because of training. We were talking about just the pure discipline of just getting it done. Sometimes training is nothing more than repetition.”

Ed Rush offers a great comparison between seeing the reflection of stars and the curve balls that life can throw you every day. “When you fly out over the ocean, especially if the ocean is fairly calm, the stars actually reflect off of the ocean and it gives you this parallax that you, for a moment, your brain thinks, man, I must be pointed directly up. So, there is a lot of pilots that actually push their airplanes down, thinking that the ocean that they are looking at are actually stars.”

Ed looks at the down time during the global coronavirus quarantine as an opportunity for people to either get lazier or get better, and why some of the best growth opportunities take place when you are terrified. “I remember when I was a freshman in high school, I showed up and there were all these seniors there, and I’m like, you got to be kidding me. I’m going to smash into all of these guys? Pushing through that terror is what made you catch that ball in that big game. People think, oh man, you must feel a lot of pressure when you are out there on the big stage. No, you don’t feel the pressure when you are out on the big stage. You feel the pressure...

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Tracy Perlman about the expansion of her career at the NFL for over 27 years, in such a massive economic ecosystem.

148: Josh Sprague: Founder & CEO of Orange Mud talks about the struggle of trying to live a balanced life outside of the usual 9-to-5 workflow, while being a husband and father that is simultaneously running a company.

Josh Sprague

Like most every brilliant business idea, there is an initial spark, a pain point that needs to be soothed. For Josh Sprague, it wasn’t just the typical focus on making money. He explains that it was the value that he placed on his time and his wife’s time. “We started Orange Mud about 8 years ago. It was actually on an adversity note. It was after we had our first boy, and he was 3 months old at the time. I had just finished an Ironman, and I basically wanted a way that, forgetting Orange Mud or anything else, I wanted a way that my wife or I both didn’t have to work mad hours. She was a corporate lawyer and I was a vice president of a medical device company.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Josh Sprague, Founder and CEO of Orange Mud who gets into the nuts and bolts of his business. “Life is a special thing and you don’t want to screw it up by just never being around. It really kind of forced me to kick off an idea that I had set back in my head for a really long time which was a bottle-based hydration pack that would allow me to carry my fluids, my cash for the Beer Garden after a race, some electrolyte gels and maybe other back-up nutrition, and my car keys so when I train or race I had just the bare essentials.”

What You Will Learn:

How long has Orange Mud been a reality for Josh Sprague? “I thought that would be a cool little product to at least have as a side hobby. I thought at least it would keep my wife busy or myself busy. Who ever quit their day job? Then 8 years later as of January 2012, is when we started, as of January of this year we have been in business 8 years and man, we’ve got over 100 SKUs on the market, and we have two kids now, and no more for sure. It has been a wild ride, designing packs for runners and cyclists all around the world.”

Orange Mud clearly has the mind of an active athlete begin it. What do Josh Sprague’s own athletic interests consist of? “My background was adventure racing, it was kind of the core of what one of my favorite sports is. I love to trail run. I love to mountain bike. But, adventure racing combines them both, plus navigation and rope work and all kinds of fun stuff.

Why did Josh Sprague decide to design the hydration packs for Orange Mud to be worn over the shoulders as opposed to around the waist? “The really cool part of all of that as a designer, even when I wasn’t a designer, is that I stared at my teammates' backs. You’re racing with a team, always, in adventure racing. You are only as fast as your weakest link, and that is just the way it is in adventure racing. I spent just tons of time behind my teammates running because I was usually one of the weaker runners, and paying attention to how the pack moved and where it moved. Something that I consistently noticed is that your upper torso just doesn’t move very much. It is basically just a slight up and down movement, and I always hated waist packs, like despised waist packs.”

Josh Sprague digs into the practical and health benefits of not utilizing a waist pack. “I cut a waist pack with water bottle holders apart. I took a ratchet strap from the back of my truck and I took a hotel sewing kit from one of my travels, and I sewed together this crude little concoction that was in my form that I wanted and mounted the bottle high up on my back. I believe that fluid should be stored on your back because that is where we carry weight. It doesn’t make sense to carry weight on your chest. It is pulling your neck down. It is pulling your spine down.”

If you are wondering how much money it cost Jeff to get started with Orange Mud, he has the answer. “It took $54,000, if I remember right, that first year, of investment between just trademarks and patents and design and all that stuff. But, we got our product launched. It took 10 months. We launched our first pack in October of 2012. In the end of 2012 at the Somo Half Ironman, and man, it just spiraled from there in the triathlon trail-running world.”

Going Full-time with Orange Mud

Josh worked his day job for the first three years of launching Orange Mud and his wife worked the first year and a half of the company being started. What was the conversion like for Jeff when he doubled down on Orange Mud and made it his full-time effort? “When I quit, I budgeted $100,000, and I had it just sitting. I’m like, you know what, we burn through this, there is a Plan B. Not sure what the Plan B was going to be. I would probably be going back to work. I wasn’t going to burn more than that. But, I knew if I could actually work 100 hours a week on Orange Mud...

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Kenyon Salo, Lead Trainer and Keynote Speaker of Kenyon Salo Speaking, ‘Checklist Destroyer’ and Founder of The Bucket List Life, and Denver Broncos Skydiver, talks about what it means to him to be phenomenal.