Welcome!

Welcome to Bullfrog 13 & Friends!  Navy SEALs call the longest-serving SEAL on active duty the honorific title of “Bullfrog.”  In 2006 Bullfrog 12 retired with 40 years service and I became Bullfrog 13.  In 2009, I retired with over 39 years service, and with a lifelong passion and knowledge for natural medicine, started on a journey to create a nutraceutical company. We’ve built this blog for the Mission Ready community to learn and engage with different personalities and experts. Our guest bloggers specialize in the areas of nutrition, health and sleep.  Here’s a little more about me, and how Mission Ready came to fruition.

As I reflect on my years as a U.S. Navy SEAL, I’m proud of the teams in which I’ve served and the work we’ve accomplished. At the same time, I realize I spent at least 10-years with very little REM sleep at all.  My sleep was very disturbed for a number of factors and it’s kind of hard to pinpoint exactly why.  I guess I drank a lot of coffee and that disrupts sleep, and if you have too many drinks before you go to bed that will disrupt sleep too. But, I also had a little PTSD left over from my experience in Lebanon, saving someone’s life and then getting burned over 75% of my body.  Sometimes when you relive this kind of experience, it puts you in a bad place, but you just deal with it.  As a US Navy SEAL, I was also working long hours.  And, when you continuously work night operations and throw in the night training missions, you don’t really have any real circadian rhythms anymore (despite the fact that I’m a drummer and I do have rhythm).  If you throw this all together it equals interrupted sleep.

Here’s how I broke the pattern … Jim McKay, “Skip” and I went through SEAL training together in 1971, and we had been lifelong friends ever since. So, about the time I was getting ready to retire from the US Navy, we had been discussing a number of things and began talking about the possibility of going into the nutraceutical business. Jim had the same problems sleeping as I did, but his was from big business. The one thing I’ve always known is that if you don’t sleep well, you can’t heal well. So, one of our first formulas we thought about was one to target those problems adults have — trouble with sleep. So, at Mission Ready we’re going to address sleep as our first issue. 

And, here we are today, a company called Mission Ready, founded by former U.S. Navy SEALs, and an organization that also gives a portion of its profits back to the military community. We will help you WIN and have fun while doing it.

Other folks you’ll meet here at Bullfrog 13 & Friends include:

Lori Tubbs:  Lori is a military nutritionist and a public health educator. She’s also a registered dietitian, and a certified specialist in sports dietetics. Lori will share her nutrition best practices with you.

Gloria Altherr: Gloria is the CMO of Mission Ready, Inc. and brings over two decades of marketing experience. As a busy mother of three children, she balances work and family carefully and shares her stories about the balance for a healthy, but busy lifestyle.

Dr. Kevin Pett:  Dr. Pett is licensed as a Doctor of Oriental Medicine (DOM) in the state of New Mexico.  He’s been in private practice since 2001, and maintains a Clinical practice of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine in Leesburg, Virginia.  Dr. Pett will share his strong and passionate interest in the study and use of natural botanical substances for health and wellness solutions.  He is my personal doctor and was the first and only doctor to ever tell me:  “I will heal you.”  And, he did.

We’re excited to share our knowledge about health, sleep and nutrition challenges, and welcome your opinions and feedback.  Thank you for stopping by Bullfrog 13 & Friends, and please feel free to invite your friends to visit our community and to join in the discussion too.