Ben Greenfield, aka the Get-Fit Guy, has built a reputation as a fitness and training expert through tireless research and writing, while still being home to watch his boys grow up.
By Josh Wright
Ben Greenfield ’04 ’05 had barely settled into a taxi on one of the world’s most stunning islands, deep in southern Thailand, when he pulled out his laptop and started typing.
The fitness expert and his podcast co-host, Brock Skywalker Armstrong, were in Phuket for the Laguna Phuket
Triathlon in December, an event Greenfield has competed in several times. But Greenfield is rarely working on just one thing. On the 10-minute cab ride from their hotel to a downtown shopping district, Greenfield opened a few files on his MacBook and picked up where he’d left off: He was writing an article for a magazine.
“Where I was just sitting in the cab looking at the Thai scenery go by the window,” Armstrong said, “he was
researching and writing.”
Greenfield’s work ethic has helped propel him from a personal trainer and triathlete to a respected expert on
exercise, triathlons and nutrition. He has hundreds of thousands of blog readers and podcast listeners each month. His two podcasts — the Get-Fit Guy and the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast — have been rated No. 1 in the fitness category on iTunes. He runs a thriving dot-com business, speaks internationally, writes for popular magazines and websites, and coaches and advises endurance athletes.
Oh, and he’s competed in four Ironman World Championships.
Yet Greenfield, owner of Pacific Elite Fitness, has found a way to manage all this while still making time for his
family — a goal that also happens to be one focus of his triathlon training program for others who want to compete but don’t want it to take over their lives.
Greenfield's overarching mission is to help as many people as he can “rise above the status quo of what is accepted as ‘healthy.’ ” Along the way, he works to help his clients find the same balance among health, performance and life that he's struck.
The Lewiston native credits much of his success to his tenacious focus on his research and writing about fitness and nutrition — even if it’s in short bursts from a taxi in a tropical paradise.
He’s continually reading studies and researching in his effort to make exercise and nutrition science “palatable
for the masses,” Greenfield said recently in an interview at Bucer’s, a favorite Moscow coffeehouse and pub owned and operated by his mother.
Underpinning this daily diet of new research is the education he received at the University of Idaho, where he
earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the College of Education, specializing in sports science and exercise physiology. [Continue Reading...]
Making time for family
Greenfield’s workday begins the same way every morning. He shuts off his email, closes Facebook and focuses on the lifeblood of his business: information.
In a scramble to stay current and produce informative, interesting content, he sifts through journals, academic papers, studies — anything relevant that catches his eye. Then he translates the often-dense information into something meaningful and accessible for readers of his blog at BenGreenfieldFitness.com.
His early-morning work spurt lasts perhaps 90 minutes, then he’s done — for the moment.
Greenfield chose to start his business from his home in Spokane Valley, Wash., in large part so he could spend
more time with his wife, Jessa (Casebolt) ’04, and their 5-year-old twin boys, River and Terran.
So when the boys wake up he takes a break to snuggle with them, and he and Jessa each spend an hour home schooling them every day.
It’s an ideal situation, Greenfield said. “I’m pretty much at my house all the time. So I’ve been
getting to see my kids grow up. Every minute of it.”
Naturally, fitness and family time often blend together for the Greenfields. Jessa, who ran cross-country for the Vandals, said she’s incorporated River and Terran into her fitness routines “since they were old enough to hold up their heads.”
Now the twins have moved from riding in a stroller or bicycle trailer with their mom to pedaling beside her while she runs. The family also goes hiking and rock climbing.
“There has never been a time in their life where fitness was not a huge aspect in our family,” Jessa said.
Training to endure
Even as a child, Greenfield was absorbed by everything he tried — the violin, swimming, tennis, even stand-up
comedy for family and classmates.
He was reading by the time he was 4, said his mother, Pat. “And I don’t mean reading a word on a sign.” He buried himself in his books.
Greenfield’s persistence extended to athletics, too. 
“I tend to be relatively stubborn when it comes to sinking my teeth into a task and not stopping until it’s done,
or starting into a book or story and not putting it down until I’m 100 percent finished,” he said. “And I think these same traits cause me to both love and be relatively decent at endurance sports.”
With parents who enrolled him in several team sports as a child, Greenfield said, “I was a fan of movement and physical activity from an early age.” But he didn’t get into structured fitness until high school, “when I realized that being strong and fast could make me a better tennis player.”
He was in college, where he played tennis, volleyball and water polo, when he decided to try endurance sports
and “fell in love” with the triathlon.
Greenfield has competed in roughly 75 triathlons worldwide as an amateur and has plans for a fifth Ironman
World Championship in Hawaii this fall. The most memorable of his racing career, he said, came at the 2011
Hawaii Ironman, when he finished the 140.6-mile race in a personal-best time of just over 9½ hours — after adhering to a non-traditional condensed but intense weekly training regimen.
His success that year helped him realize that the minimalist approach to training could work for others, too.
“It was a 9½-hour Ironman at one of the toughest races on the planet,” he said, “and at that point the light bulb really went off on what the proper way is to train for endurance.”
On his blog and podcasts, Greenfield balances his own triathlon experiences with the latest research in the field, all while emphasizing that what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. This has helped him connect to a cross-section of readers and listeners.
“When you’re talking about the newest techniques and the newest science, you can often come off as a flake who doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Armstrong, Greenfield’s podcast partner.
But Greenfield, he added, has the ability to understand the science and present it in a way that’s accurate and
digestible for the public.
Getting started
Greenfield had been accepted to a few medical schools before pursuing his master’s degree, and still thought he might go that route after he joined a surgical sales company in Post Falls. Yet almost every physician he encountered told him the same thing: Unless you want to get burned out, stay clear of the medical field.
“So I got back into what I knew, what I had done for the past four years at Idaho — offering personal training and managing fitness programs,” he said.
In 2007, Greenfield helped start Champion Sports Medicine in Spokane while working as a personal trainer and setting up a wellness studio on the side. He had a hectic schedule, and was spending more and more time writing for his personal website, which he'd pieced together himself. He started an online newsletter and eventually figured out how to self-publish his first book — all in an effort to promote his personal training and spread his fitness and nutrition advice to a larger audience.
His turning point came the following year, when he was named Personal Trainer of the Year by the National
Strength and Conditioning Association and was invited to speak at a business fitness conference in Orange County, Calif. There, he heard another speaker detail how he made more than $1 million a year by publishing an e-book.
That’s all it took to energize Greenfield. Right then and there he mapped out a new business plan: He was
going to teach Ironman triathletes how to train while not neglecting their families, careers and other interests.
Within six months, he’d developed a full product line of training materials, including an e-book and DVDs, which he launched at the 2009 Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.
“I made more money in those five days than I made in a year of personal training and running a studio,” he said. “It was at that point that I began to seriously consider moving full-time into this whole dot-com business … and spending more time at home.”
Greenfield cut back from 30 personal training clients to three or four. Now, he devotes most of his time to writing for his blog, developing training programs and working on his latest startup, REV Supplements.
The popularity of triathlons and Ironman competitions has exploded around the globe — particularly among business executives and other people with time and money to invest in training. Greenfield knows this bodes well for his business endeavors.
His research-based training plans, books and products are resonating in a fast-growing market. And he continues to expand his reach.
Through all this, though, Greenfield’s long-term goal remains the same.
“Ultimately, he wants to be able to write and be home with his kids,” Jessa said. “That’s his dream.”
