And this is me with my wonderful family, Lisa and Grey.
Read on to learn how I went from athlete to entrepreneur...
I conceived Kryofit Sport in the summer of 2015, started my LLC in January of 2016, and had our first son in April of 2016. All the while, I plugged away at work and developing our startup. Since our son, Greyson, was a 28 week preemie, we had an extreme amount of stress with his medical needs and it ate up every second of the day. So, how did we continue to make gains on the startup while balancing a full-time day job and nights by his bedside?
I call it Provider Power, and you can read more about it here.
As an athlete, I struggled with overheating and felt terrible after workouts. There was literally nothing available to help me stay cooler while I trained and competed. Plenty for afterwards, but afterwards wasn’t the problem.
After some research and using my 15 years of medical experience, I developed my own solutions. They look a little different from what’s out there so it raised eyebrows and soon my prototypes were being used by my training buddies. Questions lead to testing. Testing lead to improved performance. Improved performance rode hand-in-hand with simply “feeling better” after training. One tester gave me a wary eye after his first run with the TTS sleeves and said,“I can’t put my finger on it…but I feel different after the run. I feel like I could keep going or I could have run harder…What is happening??”
That did it. I was hooked. More research, more prototyping, more testing.
Then I suddenly became a father and spent 4 months in the neonatal ICU. After our day jobs, my wife and I would spend every night with our son, Greyson by his hospital bed and I harnessed my nervous energy into building the bones of Kryofit Sport. It was a scary time, but between my stress reducing workouts and my mind focused on a task like figuring out how to reduce dangerous overheating and improving athletic performance, we got through it as a family.
By the grace of God, our son grew and became a beast! We also had a potentially life-saving, game changing product. Our family motto is “Whatever It Takes”. And we think that’s especially true to keeping athletes healthier and performing at their best in an ethical, natural, and safe way.
If you’re a parent, a coach, or an athlete, we hope we made something that can help you and yours. We love feedback, so don’t hesitate to tell us where we need improvement…or maybe where we did something well? Kudos never hurt! Thanks for helping us make something that will absolutely change how athletes deal with dangerous heat. It’s about time sports takes heat illness seriously and we appreciate giving us a chance!
Thanks for reading!
Al (Inventor and Dir of Day Dreaming)
Lisa (Chief Awesome Officer)
Grey (VP of Adorbs)