Growing up in a Massachusetts running family, I idolized Alberto Salazar. I grew up listening to my Dad tell stories of watching Salazar push himself so hard in the ‘78 Falmouth Road Race that he collapsed and was administered last rites. I admired the drive that Salazar had and the desire to find his absolute limit as an athlete. As a competitor you flirt with that limit all the time, you challenge it, you see how close to it you can get - that’s the nature of competition.

That’s why we all love sports, we get to witness the triumph of the human spirit over what is believed to be humanly possible. It’s why we marvel at Simone Biles landing a triple double that seems to defy physics, it’s why watching Allison Felix surpass Usain Bolt for most World Championship Gold medals less than a year after giving birth to her daughter was so profound, and it’s why we loved watching Mary Cain smash national records as a high school student.

I was coaching high school girl’s track and field in New York at the time Cain was doing just that - breaking long-standing records by nine and ten seconds. Records that had previously only dropped by a second or two every decade. Every girl on my team knew Mary Cain’s name; her athletic prowess is one of those things we can only hope to witness in our lifetime. As a coach and athlete team, Salazar and Cain appeared to be an unbeatable combination. But as quickly as she rose to fame in the track and field world, Cain's notoriety faded just as fast. This morning The New York Times published an Opinion piece written by Mary Cain. The sports world has been buzzing about it all day. If you haven’t read the article and watched the video of Cain’s testimony yet - take some time to listen to what she has to say.

Mary Cain’s experience and the experience of other athletes coached by Alberto Salazar in the Nike Oregon Project (NOP) bring up several important conversations. Conversations that are important to women, coaches, and the world of sports as a whole. Immediately, this story prompted me to have some of those conversations with fellow coaches, former athletes, and colleagues. I love sports. I love the good that sports can bring to people’s lives in the form of joy, purpose, and opportunity. That’s why it is so hard and frustrating to see abuse occur in athletics, in a sport I care about, and to a runner I admire; the overwhelming response of every conversation is that coaches, athletes, and fans are sad. We are sad that something so good was turned into something so horrible for Mary Cain and that no one did anything about it.

At Rise Nutrition we promote our product as a tool to give athletes every advantage possible; but as a fan of sports - I hope that it can also be used to prevent athletes from being taken advantage of.

As a public health professional and the co-founder of a Sports Nutrition company, I talk about performance a lot. The prospect of improved performance is what sells Rise Nutrition’s product. We talk about how winning is a matter of seconds and inches and you can leverage your nutrition to capitalize on that much more of your potential. You can’t take the pursuit of limits out of sports, it is at the core of what makes competition so good. There is a thin but very clear line between pushing athletes to achieve what they are capable of at their peak and pushing them beyond their limits mentally and physically. There are a lot of things that need to change in the world of sports so that the abuse that happened to Cain does not continue as a systemic problem.

At Rise Nutrition we promote our product as a tool to give athletes every advantage possible; but as a fan of sports - I hope that it can also be used to prevent athletes from being taken advantage of. It is problematic that in Cain’s situation, there were no medical professionals present to protect her health and well-being. In her case, the team could have been armed with every resource possible to safely and ethically aid her training and performance.

Knowledge, resources, and data should be used for athletes but instead, in the all-consuming pursuit of winning - athletes are the ones being used.

For teams striving to optimize nutrition for performance Rise Nutrition provides them with data-driven tools developed by medical professionals; and we also want to provide that for teams and athletes who would not otherwise have the resources to adequately understand their nutrition and health. I want sports to get better, and faster, and more awe-inspiring, but I also want athletes to get there in a way that values them instead of abusing them. Nutrition can have a drastic impact on health - and whether intentional or not - it can be misused. A transparent view of nutrition can help illuminate and prevent abuse on all levels.

This is an appeal to coaches: use the resources and knowledge you have for the good of athletes. When you don’t have all you need for the good of your athletes seek out expertise and protect your athletes over your power and your team’s record or reputation. There is brilliant, innovative technology and research in the field of sports - seek it out, have the humility to identify and admit when you need more for your athlete instead of more from them.

We at Rise Nutrition are excited to announce that we are semi-finalists in the Converge Impact Challenge! The Impact Challenge is a business competition specifically aimed at academic entrepreneurs and their start-ups who are aiming to make a difference in the world.

The Impact Challenge is for innovative, new projects with a social or environmental mission at their core.
- Converge Challenge Website

The Impact Challenge is one competition out of the four Converge Challenges, which are some of the toughest academic business competitions in Scotland. Check out their promotional video below for more information!

Rise Nutrition was started with the goal of making a difference both on and off the field, and this is a big step towards our dreams becoming a reality! Thanks for all the support we've received so far, and here's to everything more we'll accomplish in the future! 🎉

Rise Nutrition is the joint project of co-founders Kristan Papirio, Jesse Papirio, Bridget Korpanty, and Greg Blackburn.

For those of you who have had a conversation with one of the four of us at any time over the last four years, you’re probably privy to “The Dream” as we’ve called it. And for anyone who hasn’t shared a cup of coffee, late night drink, or come within 500 feet of one of us, you are among the few who haven’t heard us gush about our grand plans and schemes. For a long time we just called it The Dream because that’s what it felt like. Something bigger than us, and almost too good to be true. That’s mostly because it is bigger than us – in reality, it’s not our thing, it’s the Lord’s thing. That’s why we have all fallen in love with it. That’s why so many people have joined us in rooting for, cheering on, and helping with the dream, and that’s why it’s now becoming a reality – because the Lord invited us into this awesome adventure to use who the four us are to show how great he is. We really do serve a wild and gracious God. His love for us IS too good and too big for me to fathom. Let me let you in on it a little bit.

We still call it “The Dream” but officially, the company is named Rise Nutrition. The company and our product, the Ideal Nutrition Construct (INC), are the product of my work with athletic teams and communities in developing countries as a nutritionist as well as Kristan’s master’s dissertation in data science. Bridget and Greg have traveled, translated, and chosen their undergraduate majors all for the dream.

We have a lot to say, and a lot to do – but the basic mission is this: build relationships; feed people.

The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.
- Ann Wigmore

All of our products, programs, and interventions are born from a people first mentality. No program or product, no matter how good, serves people well if it does not first consider the person. We are storytellers at heart and our favorite stories are all the ones that show us God’s great love for the world. We want to live and look like Jesus, who fed and healed people before he ever preached to them.

Being a poet and a writer, I’m fond of Ann Wigmore’s words about nutrition “the food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison” or as Kristan the data scientist might put it input = output. Every person from the elite athlete to the malnourished child can be made better or worse by what they put into their bodies. Whether it be the physical tax of malnourishment or the physical demand of athletics the quality of nutrition can be the difference between rising or falling. Around here, we are dreamers – so we’re intent on getting people exactly what they need to rise.

Through this blog you can join us on the adventure and hear more stories about the team we are building and just what it is we’ve got cooking.

🌋, Jesse