Our Story

The Roots

With two high school run coaches for parents, Kelton Cullenberg began running in local road races when he was five years old. His mother Kelley was his high school coach.

Kelton went on to run Division I at the University of Maine. Throughout high school and college, Kelton’s training was often limited due to numerous injuries. 

He eventually strung together 2 consistent years of solid training and had a great last 2 years competing in college, winning the America East Conference 5k 3 times and qualifying individually for DI XC Nationals in 2013. While his main goal was to run professionally, his times ultimately were not fast enough for him to be able to commit to running as his job post collegiately.

The Dream

Knowing how much progress he made with just 2 years of consistent training, Kelton always wondered if he could have made his dream a reality if he had been able to avoid all of those injuries in high school & early college. 

With these regrets, Kelton decided that his new dream was to help as many runners avoid his mistakes as possible. From his own experiences he knew that the key to running performance and longevity was consistency, and that injuries were the main thing that prevented runners from staying consistent.

He decided to pursue a Physical Therapy degree with his eventual wife Ashten at the University of New England in 2014. Between undergrad and grad school, Ashten & Kelton did 7 years of school together, studying together daily and always bouncing ideas off each other. 

Kelton’s goal was always to open a running specialty clinic that was operated for runners, by runners. After 3.5 years of working in a high-volume insurance-based orthopedic & sports PT office, he decided he had had enough with the traditional physical therapy model, that emphasized seeing multiple patients at once, which made proper education and strength progressions impossible. At the end of 2020 he finally opened his own performance physical therapy clinic, Cullenberg Physical Therapy & Performance.

The Reality

The initial quick success of Cullenberg Physical Therapy & Performance allowed Ashten to join Kelton after just 6 months.

They quickly realized that the outcomes their clients were achieving with this new model were far superior than the outcomes that runners and active people would get at all of the previous in-network clinics they worked at.

With both parents having been teachers, Kelton realized that they could help many more runners throughout Maine & the United States if they were able to bring on and teach other Physical Therapists their methods.

This is when Steady State was officially born!