Free State Founders
Rise of the republic
Our Story
Here’s the quick story about who we are and what we’re about. Perhaps it will resonate with you to lubricate the friction you’re feeling about beginning a new routine with people you don’t know…yet.
I spent most of my childhood and teenage years moving around the southeast, but to keep it simple, I was born and raised in Louisiana. I loved being outside and doing anything physical and challenging; equally content to explore the deep woods or compete with whatever sport the neighborhood kids were playing.
From an early age I found that I enjoyed pushing myself. Self imposed daily disciplines, like calisthenics routines, and personal challenges, like seeing how far I could run without stopping felt empowering. Maybe it’s innate. Maybe it’s all the training montages I watched from 90s action movies. Either way I loved it.
After college I drove out to Los Angeles on an adventure to find myself and see what life I could create. It seemed the best place to be exposed to the full spectrum of the human experience. A few years into it, I found my calling as a personal trainer and health coach. Soon after I opened a private training studio.
Lauren was born in Ohio, and like me, moved around a lot as a kid with her family ultimately settling in Camarillo, California. She was a competitive swimmer who loved the personal test of physical exertion and mental toughness to perform her best that swimming represented. But, within that individual framework existed a community. Teammates pushing you in training and cheering you on at meets (that comes into play later).
Coming from a big Italian family, she also loved being social and bringing people together over food, friendship, and ball busting.
In her late twenties, Lauren moved to Los Angeles to pursue her own adventure to create something new away from the familiar, so she enrolled in school at NPTI to become a personal trainer, which is when our stories intersected.
We met in a completely unexpected way at the right time. A chance meeting. Life opened a door of possibility we walked through.
Life came fast, but we found love, partnership, family, and purpose on the other side. The energy that has sustained us on our journey together.
Within a year we welcomed our first daughter into the world and opened our first gym together the same year in 2013 in Santa Monica, California. (It was a lot in a short time.) The gym was our desire to share our love and enthusiasm for physical culture, fitness, self mastery, and bringing people together. The most formative aspects of our lives.
Our intention from the beginning was to inspire people to reconnect to the joy of movement, like we all had as children, and to reveal to them their innate physicality, strength, and resilience and how empowering it feels to express it. And, most importantly, to create a meeting place where the bonds of camaraderie could be built through the shared experience of doing hard things together.
The experience of finding your most powerful self; your true nature and the feeling of freedom it’s imbued with, that we’ve found through the joy of movement, the discipline of training, and the camaraderie with our brothers and sisters that climb the mountain with us.
Like the sages, mystics, and prophets of old, we believe that no man or woman is free who has not mastered themself, and that physical fitness, and the character it develops, are a cornerstone of that process.
Another cornerstone belief is that fitness and self mastery is a lifelong journey, not a destination; and not one we walk alone. If we’re open to it, life blesses us with guides that lead the way and traveling partners that make the journey more enjoyable and inspire us to keep moving, even when the way forward seems incredibly challenging.
From a practical perspective we teach these foundations through an intentional process that includes daily movement, mindset, and health practices. Then we support and amplify it by bringing together a high vibration community.
Back in California we broadcast the message through personal invitation and word of mouth only. The signal was received by those called by their inner voice to extract the greatest version of themselves for the roles they fulfill as parents, partners, entrepreneurs, leaders, creators, and citizens.
Then at the peak of the community’s success, our training was put to the test. State authorities responded to COVID by shutting gyms down and making community strictly prohibited.
We were forced to leave the business we’d spent over a decade and every extra dollar building. Like many of you, our home in California no longer felt like home, neither aligning with the definition nor spirit of freedom, and certainly not our vision of it.
It’s in those times of change you meet yourself to find out if you can work with the challenge Life gave you to mold it into the blessing with which the gift was intended.
A blessing indeed! In the pioneering spirit of adventure we moved to Eagle, ID where we found freedom, friendship, natural beauty, and so much more. Through the whole experience our faith and resolve has been strengthened, and our passion and inspiration increased.
Now, we turn the page to the chapter where we share our knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm for health, fitness, self mastery, and tribe with the Eagle community that’s already given us so much. This is where we want to build something special that has a massive positive impact.
Join us in making our community stronger, healthier, happier, and freer by embodying those qualities in ourselves.
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