Equip Products – A Story About Mark S. Harris & Dana Askew-Harris

What do you get when you have a widowed entrepreneur and a former Anti-Terrorism expert? Believe it or not a story about Adaptive Fitness & Therapy.

You see Dana lost the one and only true love of her life in 2003, and had to scrape and struggle just to feed and house her two small children. Her late husband, David, was a great guy and ran a business in the St. Louis, Missouri region of the United States. He scaled the business, with Dana’s assistance, and had sixteen different groups who went out daily and did a variety of paint and touch ups jobs at new and used car dealers throughout the region.

One day David came home feeling sick and laid down for a while. David never did that so it had to be something serious when he stopped moving. Not long afterward Dana convinced him to go to the local emergency room and get himself checked out. Skipping ahead, David never left the hospital and was buried a week later.

Needless to say Dana and her two children were devasted. A few days later Dana and several of her employee’s hit the road and went back to doing what David use to do. Learning a new skill was tough but there wasn’t really an option for her if the kids kept wanting to eat and live in a house.

Roughly ten miles away from where David and Dana had built their lives, I was living in a neighbouring community and had heard about their story. I knew some people they knew, and even realized later, we were at several events at the same time. Never imagining what the future holds I was busy in the post 9/11 era running around the world training various Military personnel how to respond after a major incident.

Fast forward to 2010 Dana and I met and while I realized early that I would never be her number one guy, we decided to get married.

A week after our wedding Dana’s daughter Alysa, now playing college soccer and overachieving in academics, went on a mission trip with her college to Haiti. A recent earthquake left Haiti devastated and she felt the call to go and serve on that little island in the Caribbean.

Having travelled up a mountain to minister to orphans and widows in a small village in Haiti about twenty students from the college and a couple Haitian guides took the tut-tut truck back down the mountain. About a third of the way down the mountain the trucks brakes failed and the driver could not stop. He crashed the truck into a hill to avoid going over a huge cliff. The truck flipped, and most of college students and guides were severely injured.

A couple of the lesser injured students were in nursing school and immediately started to triage the scene. One of the worst injuries was Alysa. They saw her condition and had to move on as she appeared highly unlikely to make it. A while later they heard her gasp and take a huge breath. Somehow, with her face mostly missing she started breathing. They packaged her up the best they could with medical equipment they had in their backpacks and worked to get her down the mountain.

Miraculously Alysa made it to the Port-Au-Prince airport where a University of Miami plastic surgeon was getting off the plane for a disaster mission. They did what they could for her and arraigned a private medical plane to take her to Miami and complete her recovery. Naturally Dana and I flew right to Miami and worked with Alysa to get her home a few weeks later.

Almost one year later, my Son, a US Marine who flew in Huey Helicopters, was involved in a training crash at Camp Pendleton, California. I received a random text from a number I did not recognize, saying “I’m alright I’ll call as soon as I can.” I literally turned on a national news channel to see my son being hauled away on a stretcher from the crash site. Off we went to San Diego.

You might ask what all these stories have to do with what we do today. In a word, everything. From my time working around a lot of traumas, seeing our own children severely injured, I myself grew up with two disabled parents, Dana losing her first love, not to mention losing several friends in wars, we have a huge burden not only for the injured but how they recover.

In 2016 we were in Carson, California working at the CrossFit Games for a company we were interested in. We saw several former military types with prosthetic legs, and a few in wheelchairs and it occurred to me that there is a lot that can be done in the hospital for people who have injuries and disabilities, but very little outside of that. And almost nothing in the fitness space.

Before we left Carson, we ran into a young man in a wheelchair who had been paralyzed at a fitness event with a bad setup for doing snatches. That kid was Kevin Ogar, some of you may know him. In our brief conversation he mentioned that he must adapt everything and there was nothing available off the shelf for him to train in the CrossFit Space.

We took that as a challenge, and a year later at the CrossFit Games in Madison, Wisconsin Kevin and Chris “Stouty” Stoutenberg did an exhibition event in the coliseum between events on Saturday. They used the very first LapMat’s™ to protect their legs when they used a barbell.

From there we had requests from dozens of athletes asking us to come up with something that could help them. We decided to take our experience and past lives and turn it into a business to adapt fitness and therapy equipment. With Dana’s entrepreneurship, my background in working with trauma, we both felt strongly that we needed to create equipment that not only supports the adaptive community but also change the way you think about fitness.

We’ve seen first-hand what people go through after trauma or being born with a challenging illness or impairment. When you come head on with challenges in this world you can either move forward or become stagnant or worse yet decide to quit.

Our mission is to give everyone the tools to always be moving forward in the Fitness & Therapy world.

Mark

@EquipProducts