I'm Cody — a Navy veteran, husband, father, and endurance athlete. I spent seven years on active duty as a Mass Communication Specialist, including a 2011 deployment to Afghanistan as a combat journalist. I came home physically present but carrying things I didn't fully understand how to process, and it took years before I found real ways to work through that.

In 2023, a Mighty Oaks Warrior Program retreat became a turning point — it taught me that recovery isn't about becoming who you were before something happened, but someone stronger because of it. Around that same time, endurance sports became one of the ways I learned to keep moving forward: a marathon in 2023, a 100-kilometer ultramarathon in 2024, and now the road to a 70.3-mile triathlon.

I've benefited from people and organizations willing to invest in veterans when it mattered most. Now I want to return that investment — one mile, and one story, at a time — so another veteran finds the same kind of turning point I did.