ORM Staff

Matt B. Davis

Matt is the face of Obstacle Racing Media and widely considered an obstacle course industry expert.

His office? Knee-deep mud, 8-foot walls, and 20-ft. rope climbs.

Matt doesn’t just write, talk, and produce obstacle racing content, he lives it. Since doing his first Warrior Dash back in 2010, he’s completed over 130 obstacle races of all distances. Matt has had his finger on the pulse of the sport of obstacle racing from all perspectives, be it elite athletes, weekend warriors, or first-time race participants.

Matt wrote a book about OCR, has been quoted in countless publications, and featured in the obstacle racing documentary, Rise Of The Sufferfests.

You can find Matt sharing his stoke as the talent behind Obstacle Racing’s most popular weekly podcast, or on-location at race events – running his butt off, and/or doing awesome ORM Instagram stories.

A former stand-up-comic-turned-sort of-athlete, Matt lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his beautiful (and patient) wife, and three kids, Emma, Jax and River.

Learn even more about Matt’s life through his LinkedIn page.

Reach out to Matt at [email protected], he’d love to hear from you.

Dario Cantatore

Dario, aka “Dario”, has been a runner since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. It turns out that after 15 or so years of running you can get a little bored sometimes. One day a few years ago he bought a Groupon for a Spartan Race while browsing the web late at night. Then he promptly forgot about this until he was notified by email that the race was the coming weekend. It was so challenging and different that he was instantly hooked and within 5 months had completed his trifecta.

 

Now he is ORM’s web guy. Does all that coding and cleaning up and make sure stuff runs right.

When not finding new races to run he is a photographer, web developer, and SEO specialist. Located in NYC but always yearning for the trails – if you have a house outside of the city please invite him to come crash on your couch.

Jeff Marier

Starting out as a video professional in the corporate world, Jeff, filmed his first obstacle race in 2011 – the Tough Mudder in Georgia.

After the experience of watching his buddies kick, slide, crawl, pull, and fight their way to the finish, he became intrigued and set out to train his body for his own OCR experience. He conquered the next year’s Tough Mudder, camera in hand, and found his niche in the sport.

Once Jeff decided to stop making videos for the ‘the man,’ his skills started to skyrocket. He finally has the opportunity to shoot something he loves – obstacle course racing.

Check out his genius at work on the Facebook Videos Page.

 

Kayla Coons

Kayla is the content editor and race relations liaison for ORM. Fancy ways of saying that she gets runners to the races and then cleans up their typos when they write a recap.

Kayla has worked as a copy editor for years, but her real passions are photography and obstacle racing. Her first race was the Georgia Warrior Dash in 2011. She took a few years off to have a kid and change cities and careers but got back into racing in 2016 and has fully immersed herself in it since then.

You can reach her via email or on Instagram!

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Christian Griffith, Co-Founder

A longtime surfer, skateboarder, ultrarunner, and all around individual sports junkie, Christian came to obstacle racing as a way to test some of the functional training he was developing as a follower of the CrossFit training methodology; and like most people fell in love with the sport after the first obstacle.

Unusual people tend to find other unusual people pretty quickly, and it wasn’t long before Matt found Christian (or maybe Christian found Matt), and a media idea was born.

As Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy (read: “geek”) for 10 years at an advertising agency in Atlanta, Christian gained a deep, day-to-day understanding of digital strategy, media, and search engine marketing; and using that expertise, oversees the foundation for which Obstacle Racing Media lives.

In 2015, Christian launched Live for a Living. More a career philosophy than traditional company, Christian is bucking the traditional approach to business and “the work day,” determined to prove that when one puts people and experiences ahead of financial gain and power, great things can happen.

While no longer affiliated with Obstacle Racing Media, Christian may still check in from time to time with articles and commentary related to the sport.