Hi Mammas! I’m Erika, lucky mama to Eloise (21 months) and wife to my husband, Casey, of 4 years. I was born and raised in Virginia Beach, VA then, attended University just outside of DC where I put down roots for the next 13 years before a change of heart and cross country move.

Long before becoming a mom and meeting my amazing husband, I was career driven and seeking to be part of an innovative organization with a global mindset, that aimed to do business with integrity and make a positive impact in their community. I was blessed to land a position working as an Enrollment Consultant for Online Educational options for K-12th grade students that were remarkably still free of cost, something I truly believed in because it allowed me to offer an alternative solution to students with unique needs that couldn’t be met in a regular public school. The best way to improve a community and change the world is to start with young minds and offer them options!

I somehow finagled my way into working remotely in 2014, which gave me the opportunity to pursue an active life of adventure, traveling all over the US and abroad to run road races and eventually ultramarathons for fun with friends. At one point, I determined it just wasn’t worth keeping an apartment in the DC area while I was never home, so I packed up my belongings into a storage unit and took off for a year of planes, trains, automobiles, a lot of hostels and couch-surfing! I eventually planted my feet back in Northern VA for a few years to plan my next life changing adventure of driving down the Pan American Highway in an outfitted truck camper. Then 2020 happened. My nine to drive plans of adventure never became a reality that year.

Instead, I drove cross country to move to San Diego, CA in June of 2020 to be able to spend more time trail running in the mountains. Within two weeks, I met my amazing husband Casey and like a psychopath, I sent him THE ring preference two weeks later. When you know, you know! We spent as much time as possible in the mountains and even got engaged on a trail run. We married two years later, got orders to move abroad, left my remote US position and started our new adventure together in Naples, Italy.

Our biggest adventure came when we had our beautiful daughter, Eloise! We joke that she’s the best souvenir from Italy.

She’s a little warrior! Early on, Eloise wasn’t gaining weight adequately for weeks, she breath-held as a newborn, rarely slept throughout the day and screamed bloody murder in the car (up til 1 yr old!). It was tough! At only two months old, after a fender bender on the way to the military base, Eloise had a B.R.U.E. episode. A Brief Resolved Unexplained Event. Eloise was pale, turning color, cold, her whole body was limp, and she was completely unresponsive. She stopped breathing. I had to pull her out of her carseat to give her chest compressions and perform CPR while my husband drove 120 mph on the autostrata to get to the base hospital. We didn’t even stop at the base gate to show ID to the guard, just a slower roll yelling our baby was dying. We are so lucky the gate guards didn’t draw guns, throw spike strips or raise the emergency walls. We actually blew two gaskets in our engine from the crazy driving on the way, but the car held out and clunked right up to the ER entrance before breaking down. Hearing code blue being called immediately over the intercom for my baby was an unreal out of body nightmare experience. Within less than a minute there was more than 20 military corpsman and doctors working to get her breathing. Eloise was initially unresponsive to sternum rubs and pricks on her body from the trauma team. I never thought I would pray to hear my baby cry and thank God, we finally heard her cries after a few minutes!

As a new mom, I already had so much anxiety and was sleep deprived, always thinking about the worst possible scenarios. The trauma from that event sent me further into a deep postpartum depression and anxiety spiral. I suffered from insomnia previously but now I rarely slept because I HAD to watch my baby to make sure she was breathing, which brought on extreme postpartum rage that I took out on my husband.

In Italy, we didn’t have sidewalks to walk on near us and we were quite removed from our community. The driving in southern Italy is the Wild West meets Mario Kart and I could not emotionally handle my daughter’s screams the whole car ride, so we stayed at home. I was just surviving and constantly in a fight or flight state.

When we got orders back to San Diego it was like a light at the end of the tunnel! We could not wait to get back to our run family to start hiking and trail running again. I hadn’t run or attempted to workout after pregnancy in Italy so when I finally did jump back into it in San Diego, I found that my back would have sharp pains around 2 miles into a run and even sometimes walking. I spent months trying to work on my health without proper guidance but would find myself very discouraged and unmotivated.

At 17 months postpartum, I ended our breastfeeding journey and Eloise finally started sleeping through the night. I started sleeping more than 3 hours a night, my post partum rage dissolved and my depression & anxiety lifted. I just started to feel like myself again when I found FIT4MOM through Instagram. I knew I needed to build muscle before I could really start running at the intensity level I was previously accustomed to, so I figured why not try it out?

FIT4MOM has easily become such a foundational part of this season of motherhood for me! It has given me so much confidence, connection, support, and accountability! This is the village I’ve always heard women talking about! I wish I had found it sooner because I truly feel like a happier and healthier wife and mom.