Melaleuca Customer Wins the Louisiana Marathon!

It’s typical to start the New Year off running—whether that’s enthusiastically setting new goals and finding a way to reach them, or actually stepping on a treadmill to shed some weight and get healthier. One Melaleuca customer did more than head to the gym. Earlier this month, Adam MacDowell won the Louisiana Marathon, crossing the finish line at 2 hours and 27 minutes! In a nutshell, Adam is really fast and he can prove it.

Over the years, Adam has clocked countless miles as a competitive cross country and track runner. Once the captain of the University of Missouri’s track team, Adam ran a 5k race in only 14 minutes and 26 seconds. (For some of us, that’s as long as it takes to run a third of the distance!) After he graduated, Adam ran a half-marathon in just over an hour, which means he ran a 5-minute mile for more than 13 miles! He even qualified for and ran in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in 2012. You have to feel kind of sorry for the man’s running shoes.

Yet these days, Adam isn’t running next to world-championship contenders. Instead, he’s teaching math to high school students in Louisiana, coaching cross-country runners and entering an occasional race to stay in shape and stoke his competitive fire.

“When I was training at a high level, I was running 90 to 110 miles a week,” he says. “I’ve been doing this sport my entire life, but now that I’m getting older, I’m looking for anything I can find that will help me keep doing the sport I love and help my body recover.”

After Adam had an allergic reaction to a household cleaner, he and his wife found Melaleuca while looking for safer-for-your-home alternatives. One day, Adam was reading Leadership in Action magazine when he discovered Vitality Elevate™. He started purchasing Vitality 4® with Oligo® every month, along with the Vitality Elevate™Amino Boost and a box of Access Bars.

“I eat an Access Bar before I run because I know it helps me burn fat, and I don’t want to burn any muscle!” Adam says. “After any of my long runs, I used the Amino Boost to recover.”

Until this past Sunday, Adam hadn’t seen the results of switching over to Vitality for Life. And when he toed the line for the Louisiana Marathon, he wasn’t sure how it would go. He’d only been running 40 miles per week—far fewer than the distances he’d run before past races.

“You never start a marathon thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I’m definitely going to finish this,’” he says. “Anything can go wrong. You can start with a little pain in your toe that can completely end your race after 20 miles. You just never know.”

For 20 miles of the race, Adam and his training partner cranked out the miles at a steady pace, and then his training partner suddenly fell behind. Instead of easing off the gas, Adam “threw the hammer down” and ran his last six miles even faster. He crossed the finish line at 2:27:12—and claimed the overall race win!

“I’ve never won a major marathon, ever,” he says. “That was the best I’ve ever felt after running a marathon, and I’ve run a lot of marathons.”

Already, Adam is looking at how he can take his performance even further with the Peak Performance Pack. Since hearing about the Freiburg Study and the science on free radicals and inflammation, Adam knows that it will help his body recover even faster than before.

“When you run a marathon, it can be a real shock to your body,” he says. “So I’m really conscious about the recovery process and how I can give my body everything it needs to get stronger.”

Like Adam, each of us could stand to put a little more effort into getting strong and treating our bodies better. But that doesn’t mean running a marathon, or 40 miles a week. Melaleuca advocates a life of health and wellness. That’s why we seek to provide you with products like the Peak Performance Pack that will supplement an active lifestyle and help you reach your dreams. So set some goals, big and small, to feel better in 2015. Then walk, run, lift, bike, or dance to the finish line of your choosing.