Not that kind of alignment, and no, your hips still are not ‘out’.

Instead, are you living in alignment with who you are, who you were born to be?

We are born into this world peeing and pooping on ourselves, not knowing where we end and where the external world begins. Everything we encounter is fuzzy and needs to be tasted and tried. Our communication is comprised of extremes, much like a modern-day political debate. We cry and scream or smile and giggle.

I think we all know that we need to develop and then hone our systems in order to achieve a high level of success, regardless of what we are undertaking or trying to achieve. What are the components of a system though?

sys·tem / ˈsistəm/ noun

1. a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.

2. a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized framework or method.

In our last blog post, we discussed the various considerations one must take into account when deciding to train for a marathon (or any race for that matter). This week, we take a moment to highlight some of the common misconceptions circulating about marathon training. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, rather food for thought to spark reflection when deciding to train for your next race.

As an avid runner, running coach, and student clinician treating other runners, I am often confronted with the question, “Do you think I could run a marathon by this date?” Every time, the answer to this question must be given having taken into account the unique individual in front of me. However, there are certainly common themes that we must consider when planning the route to accomplishing such a grand physical venture. In this two-part blog series, I am going to run through some of these considerations in an attempt to demystify the answer to this frequently posed question.

Good morning, everyone! For those of you who I have not had the pleasure of meeting yet, my name is Alex Coleman. I am currently completing my final trimester as a chiropractic student doctor at The FARM seeing patients under the guidance of Drs. Beau and Sloan Beard. I am incredibly excited to continue working alongside The FARMers as I have been through this office both as a patient and an undergraduate intern in my earlier days. 

As I write this I'm sitting in the middle of Oak Mountain State Park waiting to run a 50K. Part of me wonders why I signed up to run over 31 miles and more than likely suffer for most of it, while the other part of me relishes the selfish opportunity to spend the next 4-5 hours in the outdoors.

As more and more information pours out on a daily basis about functional training and as I call "the movement to movement" sometimes information easily becomes misinformation or missed information altogether. One of the central themes surrounding functional training, or at least it should be, is the importance of the THORACIC DIAPHRAGM.

The world has turned upside down, and any commentary I could make on that feels trivial and inadequate. I haven’t made sense of it yet, so I won’t claim to offer insight or wisdom on where we are at. I’m taking it one day at a time, like many of you.

Stable is the opposite of how the world feels right now, at least how we have come to understand what it means to be stable. That is especially true of the elderly, people of color and those experiencing homelessness. Lest we forget, access to the resources that create stability is one of the many manifestations of privilege.

As we navigate these next few weeks, I wanted to reach out to my community and provide some info on the most effective and safest ways to make use of foods, supplements and herbal remedies. We can use these strategies to avoid infection, minimize the severity if you are infected, and recover as quickly as possible. The purpose of this post is to help clarify what’s worth your time and money, and what’s not. These are the exact protocols I will be following, as well as the recommendations I’ve provided to my loved ones.

Hunting. Fishing. Trading baseball cards. Sports. Video games. These were all staples of my youth, and everyone of these things, while childish in nature are making many people millions of dollars a year.

We tend to think that as we get older that it is sensible to shed particular ideas, attitudes, and interests. Well, if our modern world has proven anything to us, it's the fact that you can make a living doing just about anything.

How do you ensure that you are on the right path? The path of living out your most authentic self, of maximizing your potential, of creating joy in your life?

Is it your faith? Is it a set of personalized principles? Is it nature? Is it family?

There are so many aspects to the thing we call life, to truly get the most out of it, you need to head in a particular direction, or you will run out of time.

As I write this entry, I am sitting on the porch of a cinder block building that is fashioned to look like it is made entirely of Legos. I am staying at Legoland Beach Resort with my sister, her kids, my mom, and my wife. Now the kids love this place, but this is about as far away from my ideal vacation spot as it can get.

This is the follow up to yesterday's blog.

There are many different ideas about what intuition truly is.

Some think that it is a physiologic response to experiences that have occurred throughout our evolutionary history. So even though it seems to have no explanation, it is profoundly rooted patterning at play.

Not many things in life are guaranteed, but we can all count on change. Those that fight it only prolong the inevitable. The question is, how do we harness change? How do we ever so slightly guide the raging river of change?

At this point in my life, changes are coming fast and furious. The good news is, almost all of them are positive. In the end, any change that is thrown at us throughout our lives is ultimately up to us to cast in a positive or negative light. Our perspective will shape our reality.

This is a recount of my dream last night.

I was hiking up an alpine trail, as I got to a log crossing the path, Ben Greenfield (yep) grabbed a speed boat, and we started hauling it up the trail. All of a sudden, we are in a vast cavern/beach area. The waves hitting the shore are massive. It's not only us now, but there is an entire group, and I get the feeling Ben is teaching us something. He jumps in the boat and shows us how to ride the massive waves into the shoreline. On the shore we can see there are openings in the cavern wall where we can see outside, and it looks to be a city or shops where people are passing by, eating and drinking and some are watching us. We don't ride in the boat, but instead, we are now on the opposite shore of the cavern walls I just talked about, and then the water goes completely flat. Ben, myself and a woman start to make our way across the water. Ben asks me my name and then we start swimming, as we reach the shoreline I can see the people outside of these glass-covered cavern walls and for the most part they pay little attention to us.

Once upon a time, man lived in nature. He slept on the grass. He lived under the trees. He hunted the animals. Man was from nature. The man decided that he should tame nature. That he should grow plants the way, he thought best. Instead of hunting the animals, he would put them in cages and eat them whenever he liked. He would take the rest of the animals and make pets of them. He would then take those animals and some other plants into his home, to remind of what it was like when he used to live nature.

We moved into a house temporarily, and it is a much smaller and simpler environment that the home we've been living in. Within the first few hours, I noticed something interesting. I felt better. I felt more at ease, and more so I felt as though I could be more productive.

I would never choose this home or the community it is in, but I've noticed these same feelings when I go on trips and stay in a hotel for a few days. I believe there are a few components to these feelings, that may be useful to more people than just myself.

What does getting back to your roots mean? Does it mean going back to the environment you grew up in? Does go beyond that? Is it something ancestral? Something primal?

I think the answer will be different for all of us, and in my case, my roots come from many trees and grow in various directions.

My first job out of college was working inside sales at a health insurance brokerage in Tampa, FL. Even though I despised sitting in a cubicle and cold-calling agents all day, I thrived, purely because of my competitive nature. That same competitive spirit allowed me to work myself into a regional manager position within six months. It only took another six months for me to realize that I had to get out of the insurance industry and more importantly, out of that office.

I was at about mile 4.5 of a 9-mile trail race, the Hotter n' Hell race to be exact when my ex-intern says to me, "this is a different kind of animal Beau Beard."

I also remember a few years back when my office manager was helping us work a trail race; she looked over at me as the first few runners finished and said, "these runners are more like animals than road runners are."