About PATHFINDER
PATHFINDER is a ruck endurance fitness company that started by accident in 2013.
We challenge people to do things they may have never done before, or may have only done when they got paid to do it in the military: walk with weighted backpacks.
Our athletes train with our unique mix of miles, workouts, and Challenges to create one of the most unique fitness programs out there.
We are Lyell and Amy Petersen, and we've been running PATHFINDER for over twelve years now. Lyell picked up a ruck in 2013 to train for a GORUCK event, pulled some friends together to figure out how to do it, and that became the program. I was already a personal trainer and endurance athlete, and they pulled me in anyway. Rucking stuck.
What started as a way to help friends train for GORUCK events became something bigger -- a real training system for athletes all over the world, from Singapore to Brazil, England to Canada and a lot of countries in between. We've helped over 10,000 athletes since we launched, and we're still a small, family-run operation. That's intentional.
I'm Amy, and I run the programming, coaching, and athlete side of things. I'm a certified personal trainer and nutritionist, a former endurance athlete, and I am -- people mention this occasionally with some surprise -- pretty girlie for someone running a ruck training company. I don't have a tough exterior to hide behind and I've never wanted one. What I have is a lot of years coaching real people through real life: jobs, families, injuries, and goals that mattered enough for them to keep showing up for.
I got hurt after years of endurance training and had to figure out what smart training actually looks and feels like when pushing through it isn't an option. That's where the PATHFINDER philosophy came from. Smarter doesn't mean easier. It means strategic. It means the rest day you really don't want to take. It means the unglamorous week that doesn't feel like progress but is building something that holds.
Our rosters have finished just about every GORUCK event there is, not to mention hundreds of local, regional, and international ruck endurance events. I've had personal training clients place at the Bataan Death March and Boston Tough Ruck, to name just a few. But the results I think about most are the less obvious ones: the athletes who tried training on their own, found out it was harder than it seemed, started PATHFINDER, and (maybe finally) finished something they were proud of.
Those are the people PATHFINDER is built for. Not just the best athletes, or the hardest ones. The most consistent ones.
We're easy to reach. Lyell is lyell@pathfinderrucktraining.com and I'm amy@pathfinderrucktraining.com.
-- Amy & Lyell