She tried everything until it finally clicked

Somewhere on the far side of Mount Hood, three days into a forty-five mile loop, Ahava's phone was a dead brick at the bottom of her pack and she hadn't thought about it once. Her next meal was whatever she carried in on her back, and up ahead, a stranger is about to be inexplicably lovely to her, because nobody out here has checked their email in days.

"It's so disconnected in the best way and connected in the best way” she recounts, and she means both halves of it. Cut off from every screen she owns. Wired directly into herself, into the people on the trail, into something considerably bigger than either.

This is freedom for her, and it’s been a wild journey to get here 🙃

The year everything she tried made it worse

When Ahava got out of high school, she gained thirty pounds, and didn’t know the first thing to do about it, so she did what she thought anyone would would do, and went from diet to diet — the grapefruit one, the cabbage soup one, probably one that was just lemon water and vibes.

When that didn't work (which it never does), she went hardcore into CrossFit, counting every calorie and macro, trying to move the scale. She went full speed into yoga, barre, and Pilates, but nothing stuck, until she found her real interest: strength training. 

And she'll tell you she loves what it does for her body, which is true. But it's not the reason she does it, and this is the whole crux of who she is as a coach: she trains for her mental health. Sometimes it can be as simple as that ✨

Now she’s committed to helping other people get from where she started across that great divide without having to go through the years of agony that she did to get to where she is now 😌

This is her whole thing now

She went and got a bachelor's in healthy lifestyles and fitness science, then stacked a national board health coaching program on top of it, because nobody should have to go through what she did. And because she’s a self-proclaimed learning nerd 🤓 

Her latest obsession is her somatic practitioner certification — the study of how stress lodges itself in the body and how movement gets it back out.

Ironically, her last job was entirely remote trying to coach people into their healthiest selves all while sitting at a desk the entire day 🤪

Two kinds of people she's dangerously good with

Although she loves working with everybody, her first love is the people who count. Every gram, every calorie, the app open at dinner, she’s lived it all and knows how to move you out of the numbers and into your body.

The second one is a woman deep in perimenopause or menopause since she can more than relate with some of her own hormones falling into that territory. She’s got a shocking amount of perspective for a 28 year old.

Everything else

She gardens in summer, snowboards in winter, proudly reads romance novels and is working her way through Portland one restaurant at a time. She joined West Coast Fitness as a member first, since like the rest of us, she loved the community (and because there’s so much equipment). She’ll backpack alone, but you can also catch her backpacking with her boyfriend, because nothing tests a relationship like three days without a shower or a real bed. 🛏️

Eventually she’d love to share this liberating joy with members who’ve never spent days outdoors, but for now, she’s perfectly content carving West Coast Fitness members into their best selves, inside and out.

Say hi! Stop by the front desk to see about setting up an intro session, or just say hey while she’s cranking out squats in the cage. She’ll be happy to meet ya as soon as she finishes her last rep— or possibly one rep after that, because there's always one more 😉

The trails are calling,
Your West Coast Fitness Family

PS: ​Hood to Coast was this weekend, and if you're not from around here, that sentence means nothing to you, so let us explain. Every August, roughly 12,000 people form teams of 8 to 12, start at the top of Mount Hood, and relay-run 196 miles down to the beach at Seaside, each person taking three legs in rotation, day and night, until someone finally staggers onto the sand. It's called the Mother of All Relays, it involves an astonishing number of cramped vans that smell progressively worse over 24 hours, and somehow people sign up year after year and describe it as one of the best weekends of their lives. Oregon is a strange and wonderful place, and this is peak evidence 🏔️🌊