Infinity Health and Wellness

My name is Rick Copley and I am really fit. Was I born that way? No. I became that way because of choices that I’ve made from the time I was young. I chose to be fit. That is what my company is about. You make the choice and we make the plan. Then it gets done.

I was in 3rd grade when it all started. I set the class record for pull ups in gym class. That became my obsession. I wanted to get better at pull ups! Then the presidential physical fitness tests came along with a whole new set of challenges to work towards. When I was 9 my aunt took me to my first 5 mile road race. I finished in just over 50 minutes. I did the race again when I was 10. I was becoming a fan of the sport of fitness.

As my elementary and middle school years wore on I struggled to find a sport that suited me. I wrested and played baseball and soccer ; all with varying levels of success. Then I moved the summer before my freshman year in high school and made a decision that would affect the rest of my life. Before I moved from Connecticut to Cape Cod in June of 1987 my aunt (yes, same aunt, THANKS Martine!) invited me to do a little race from the local high school. While doing other sports I really hadn’t run very much. I completed the race and fell back in love with running. Within a few weeks of living in my new state I’d met the cross country coach, he coerced me into running cross country and the rest is history.

By the fall of my junior year I had established myself as a top runner. That season I led my cross county team to the first of two state championship titles. As a senior I won the Class B State Championship in the mile run and ran a school record in that same event. A record, incidentally, that still stands today 16 years later. After a successful career in high school as a distance runner it was off to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

At UMass I competed in cross county, indoor track and outdoor track for 4 years. I was a captain for all three sports as a senior. By the spring of 1995 I was a college graduate with a degree in Sport Management. Now it was time to head off to graduate school at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley.

As a grad assistant at UNC I coached track and cross country and continued to run and race. These three years, however, became a real transition for me as an athlete and a person. I was starting to learn the ropes as a coach and I was really enjoying it. Also I was, for the first time since 8th grade, not concentrating soley on running. I was starting to swim in the pool a bit and I started putting in a lot of miles on the bike. I was evolving into a triathlete. An evolution that would take a LONG time.

While at UNC I coached a national champion and five All-Americans. I had success as a coach and I enjoyed it a lot but after 3 years and a Master’s degree in Coaching it was time to move back to the east coast. That I did in 1998.

I left New England in 1995 as a runner and returned in 1998 as a cyclist.

For the next couple of years I did dozens of bike races. I moved up to a Cat. III on the road and an Expert on the trails. I experienced a great deal of success as a cyclist while putting running on the back burner. While I wasn’t running a lot I did keep myself involved in the sport by coaching one season at Dennis-Yarmouth High School (my almamata) and one season at UMass, Boston. I even managed to squeeze is a Boston Marathon. As the decade and century changed so did my life. In 2000 I became a husband and a father. My focus would have to change.

At the end of 2000 I moved to New Hampshire with my new family. It was a dream for me to move to the mountains. We bought a big old fixer upper house and spend the next five years trying to fix it up. During those 5 years I would fall to the low point of my career and then rise to the high point.

While in New Hampshire I spent 5 years as a track coach at Kennett High School. It was a marvelous experience suffering in the cold every Saturday all spring. The cold weather never dampened the spirits of that wonderful team. I would learn to again love coaching over this half decade of my life.

While I was experiencing the joy of getting married, having a baby, and moving to a new state I was also developing a career. In 1999 I got certified to be a personal trainer. The career I would grow to love.

For several years I worked at a part time personal trainer, coach, and athlete and full time dad. Personal training was great and family life was as well but something was missing. The first couple of years after my son was born I didn’t race a whole lot. Travel with an infant/toddler is hard. When he was getting close to 3 I decided that I needed to give my career as a triathlete a shot. I did all kinds of races and had a lot of fun. I did a bunch of triathlons, mountain bike races, road races and bike races until everything came to crashing halt in 2003. Asthma.

I went from being at the top of my game and winning races in several disciplines to not being able to complete a 30 minute run without walking. It would take a year of trial and error but I got better and, in the meantime, made another big change in my life.

I was working as a personal trainer at the Cranmore Sports Center in North Conway, New Hampshire and getting bored and frustrated doing it. I had no support from the management and didn’t feel I was ever going to get it so I left and opened up my own place: Rick Copley’s Ultimate Fitness. It was a “functional training studio”. During the 2 years that I ran my studio I learned a lot. I learned the hard way how to and how not to run a business. I became a proficient writer and I spend hour after hour studying the concepts and healthy eating and proper nourishment. I had become an expert in the discipline of functional training and nutritional research. 2005 brought about another change as my family and I moved from the intense cold of Northern New Hampshire to the intense heat of Central Florida.

After my recovery from asthma in early 2004 I decided to put a new intensity into my training and racing. In August of 2004 I decided to try an off-road triathlon. I did a race in central New Hampshire and finished 3rd place. I was within a minute of the leader. I was even happier with my race when I realized that the winner would later that year go on to win the X-Terra (off road triathlon) World Championship for my age group. The guy who was second would go on to finish top 3 in his age group. I decided at that moment that I now had a sport to concentrate on. I was an off-road triathlete.

In July 2005 we packed up our Jeep Wrangler and drove south. Along the way we stopped in Richmond, Virginia so that I could compete in the X-Terra East Championships. I raced and finished 3rd in my race group. I was a little shocked at that finish in the 100 degree plus heat. I had qualified to race at the World Championships in October in Maui, Hawaii. In Hawaii I finished 63rd in the world in only my 2nd ever X-Terra race. I was now at the top of my career.

I spend some of 2005 and all of 2006 in Florida training, racing and working as a painter to pay the bills. 2006 became the year of the plane trip. 2006 was the year that I gave it a shot as a triathlete. I raced all over the country: Alabama, Louisiana, Utah, California, Nevada and Hawaii. The highlights of my year was probably finishing 19th over-all at the X-Terra Mountain Championships and finishing 85th overall at the Ironman 70.3 World Championships.

The end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 again brought major changes as we moved to a new home and I decided that I needed to get back to my roots… in more than one way. I’ve decided to focus this year on being a runner only. The bike and the swim goggles are in the garage. Also on April 22, 2007 I launched Infinity Health and Wellness and started working at the Golden Traingle YMCA.

 

Now in 2008 am the Wellness Director at the YMCa and focussing all me energys on making the YMCA the fitness destination in the Golden Traingle. I have never been more happy at a job in my entire life!