Welcome to the Vortex Nation podcast brought to you by lovers of hunting, shooting, public lands, the Second Amendment and good food. What is up everybody, Mark on the mic here.

What is up everybody, Mark on the mic here.

Uh, quick update. It is crunch time. Possibly more literally than figuratively. We're

gonna get there. I have Mr. Dustin Diefendurfer from the Mountain Tough Fitness Lab based out of the great state of Montana, Bozeman, Montana to be exact.

Dustin, we're going to talk about fitness today, related things to fitness, people's fitness journey, kind of that, like I mentioned in the open there, that that crunch time.

Like maybe, maybe you haven't been getting after it as much as you want but you do want to hit the

hills as hard as you can and what can you do to make that happen and and

perform optimally in the field.

Welcome, man.

It's good to have you here.

Thanks, man.

Yeah, I appreciate you having me on.

Give me a brief a quick hitter background on your personal background,

your personal fitness background, you the origin story of Mountain Tough and kind of like your your guys is ethos and philosophy there

for sure yeah I can't really keep it a short. I'll keep it as short as I can because the the founding story of Mount and Tuff has been a long journey and we're on our eighth year of business now. So we've we've evolved as a company over those eight years in a lot of

really cool ways but the way the whole thing started was in 2016 I founded Mountain Tough and in 2016 I had just got home from working in Africa.

My wife and I were doing missionary work in Uganda and what was the kind of the light bulb moment were a lot of factors that created Mountain Tough and I'll cover those factors briefly but I'm a

I'm a Montana kid, lifelong backcountry,

archery El-Connor, and was born and raised out here.

My dad was passionate about archery and then I have a lot of uncles and so we spent a tremendous amount of time in my youth chasing elk in September all kind of all throughout the Rocky Mountain West.

And then as I got older into that kind of college age range,

I really focused in the gym on getting better for the backcountry.

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