What led you to become a chiropractor?

Until about halfway through my junior year of college, I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do. I always knew that I loved the body. From the time I was in high school, I said I wanted to do something where I didn’t have to sit behind a desk, where I wouldn’t have to push papers all day or work with a computer all day. I wanted to work with people and stay involved with athletics. There’s not many careers that let you do that. Throughout all my athletic years I had been treated by Marty with the ART and chiropractic and I had seen how much it had helped me. He was my mentor, to a certain extent. Anyway, it finally clicked for me one day that chiropractic had everything I wanted in a career.

Was it your intention, from the time you decided to attend chiropractic school, to use this to work with athletes?

Yes.

When did you first have the chance to do that? I know that when you were a student here at Cleveland Chiropractic College, some opportunities arose.

I started the certification program in the Active Release Technique before I entered the DC program here at Cleveland College. By the time I had finished my first year, I was certified in upper extremity, lower extremity, spine, biomechanics, and peripheral nerve entrapment.

If you took that many additional trainings, you were clearly very focused on this.

Incredibly focused. My opinion, going into this, was that I knew what I wanted to do, and I wanted to follow all the steps from the start so that I could do it. By the time I graduated, I wanted to be really good, so that I would be ready for the opportunities that I hoped would open up for me, with professional sports teams and other top athletes.

Tell us about working with the Ironman participants. First, what is the Ironman, for those readers who may not know?

The Ironman is a grueling race that is a combination of swimming, cycling and running. The full Ironman is something like 2.1 miles swimming, 110 miles on the bike, and then running a marathon, which is 26 miles. So it’s incredibly rigorous and takes an amazing amount of commitment. There are lots of repetitive stress injuries that come along with that. In my ART training, I had studied the biomechanics of walking and running, learning how to analyze the patient’s gait so that if they don’t have good toe push-off when they run, or good heel-strike or torso rotation, or full hip extension or flexion—whatever it may be—you know what muscles are causing that inefficiency. And it may not even be a problem that the athlete can feel. It’s working with a track athlete that’s a top-level sprinter, and when you watch them run, if you see a little hitch in their step that they don’t really notice, you know what muscle to treat. You treat it and then they run more efficiently.

So this is preventive, not just treating people who are injured.

Correct. It’s preventive and it’s also about increasing efficiency. It’s not always about preventing an injury but also about increasing the efficiency to allow the athlete to perform better. So at the Ironman, which was in Madison, Wisconsin, we went up there and there were hundreds and hundreds of athletes. We set up a tent, not far from where hundreds of bikes were lined up in rows. The athletes came up and got in line, and we treated them throughout the three days we were there before the race. They would come and tell us if they had any problems, like if they felt a little tight in the hips and back while cycling, and we would work through that. We would also go over and watch them run and analyze them that way.