About Rob's Path

I'm Rob. I'm 58. I live in Australia, and for most of my adult life I was exhausted without knowing why.

I looked fine from the outside. More than fine.

In my younger years I was a state mountain biking champion, touring Tasmania and riding from Rockhampton to Brisbane on two wheels. Then I went overseas and kept going. Free diving and spear fishing in New Zealand, skiing, hiking, climbing mountains. In Argentina I walked over the Andes, climbed Mount Tronador, rode a Siambretta scooter through the summer heat of the north from Corrientes to Salta, pushing it more than 30 kilometres when it gave out on me. I rode bicycles around Patagonia near Puerto Madryn, climbed mountains in Bariloche, hiked all over Tierra del Fuego.

Every night after those hikes I would lie in bed with my body pounding and my heart beating hard, slowly recovering enough to sleep. I thought that was just life. I refused to let exhaustion get in the way of adventure.

What I did not understand was that the exhaustion was not supposed to be there at all.

Behind all that activity I was running on empty. Collapsing on the couch every evening. Slumping at the dinner table. Falling asleep in meetings. And worst of all, having nothing left when my kids pulled on my arm and asked me to come and play.

Every blood test came back clean. Doctors told me I was healthier than average. No diagnosis. No explanation. No fix.

So I went looking for one myself.

What this blog is

Rob's Path started as the record of that search. It has grown into something more expansive.

These days I write about three things, which are pretty much the same thing. Getting my health back. Raising a family. And building a business that can support us without selling my soul to do it.

Health was the way in. Sleep, energy, sugar, movement, the supplements that helped and the ones that did nothing. The one change that gave me my energy back is where a lot of that starts.

But health was never the whole story. I also write about family. About raising two teenagers, and about discovering at 58 that I have more stamina than my 13 year old daughter.

And I share the truth about money. About building this blog. About the four years I spent chasing one shiny idea after another, each one certain it would be the one that finally worked. About network marketing, what it really is, and why I stayed in it, even though it isn't paying me anymore.

This is one story. The health, the family, the business, and the faith underneath all of it. They are not separate things. This is my story.

Before I started writing here

I have had a few lives before this one. Motor mechanic. Teacher. I built and sold a computer and network maintenance business. I built multilingual websites for nonprofits. I spent 20 years as a missionary with YWAM across Argentina and Chile, where I learned the language, lived in cities and on farms, and learned what it means to build something slowly and with purpose.

For years, while living overseas, I also built and wrote a blog at samafas.com. It was about life as I lived it. That was something I loved doing, and it is the reason I started fresh here.

These days I manage an accommodation building in Australia and run my own business. I have two teenage kids and a wife who has put up with every dietary experiment I have dragged us through with remarkable patience.

My goal for Rob's Path is simple. I want to help other people learn from my own experiences through the stories and the things that happen along the way. What I have learned is unfiltered, shared, and meant to be used.

New posts go out by email when they're ready. No schedule, no filler, just the next thing worth reading, and some names and some identifying details have been changed to protect people's privacy.