I was born in 1974 and grew up in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona.
After graduating high school, I joined the United States Army and served as a Cavalry Scout. My assignments included South Korea, Fort Hood, Germany, and a deployment to Bosnia in 1995.
After leaving the military, I eventually settled in Texas. I earned a degree in political science from the University of Texas at Dallas while building a career in pharmaceutical sales.
Later, I attended law school at night at the University of North Texas College of Law while continuing to work full time. That season of life taught me a lot about discipline, endurance, pressure, and doing hard things when there was no easy path through them.
Along the way, I became a husband, a father of twins, and eventually a survivor of a serious motorcycle accident.
That accident caused more than one injury.
The traumatic brain injury was part of it, but it was not the whole story. There were broken legs, a broken hip, back injuries, an injured arm, surgeries, hardware, pain, and a long road through recovery.
The accident affected my body, my mind, my memory, my work, my family, my faith, and the way I understood forward motion.
Some recoveries are not clean. They do not happen in a straight line. They do not end with a single appointment, one final therapy session, or a dramatic comeback moment.
Sometimes recovery is slower than that.
Sometimes it is measured in steps.
That is part of why this Appalachian Trail goal matters to me.
Today, I am preparing for one of the biggest challenges of my life: a southbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2030.
The Long Walk Ahead is a record of that preparation. It is about training, planning, learning, adjusting, and building toward something that still feels almost impossible from where I stand today.
But impossible things have a way of changing shape when you keep moving.
This site is not just about hiking from Maine to Georgia. It is about testing what can still be built after life breaks more than one thing at a time.
For anyone interested in the longer version of that story, I wrote about it in my book, Start Here, available on Amazon: