Inside Travis Pastrana’s Road to Launching His CBD Brand
Travis Pastrana has done a lot of things in the 37 years he’s been on this planet so far. He’s been a motocross and supercross champion and multi-time X Games gold medalist, he’s backflipped motorcycles into the San Francisco Bay and the Grand Canyon, and he’s jumped the fountain at Caesar’s Palace. He was named Motorcyclist of the Year by the American Motorcyclist Association, starred in his own reality show, and invented the Nitro Circus. He now has two young girls with his wife and fellow action-sports hero, Lyn-z Adams Hawkins. These days he’s even taken up powerboat racing! And most recently he cofounded Just Live, a company focused on CBD-based wellness products. If that seems like a left turn, he tells us it’s actually a direct response to his life as a family man with an eye on the future.
“Being a father and a husband, I want to be there for my kids—I want to be able to walk, run, play soccer—and for me, it’s being able to provide a way of life that actually allows them to live,” says Travis, whose daredevil career has left him with a fair bit of pain to manage as he approaches middle age.
Starting Just Live and becoming a vocal advocate for CBD weren’t decisions he took lightly. And people let him hear about it.
“I’ve never taken more crap than I have for promoting CBD,” he says. “To be fair, at one point I didn’t believe in it at all, but I went down a dark road. I’ve been hurt a lot; so has my family, and so have my friends. When you get tired of painkillers and there’s nothing else to turn to, when physical therapy doesn’t help, it can be that kick in the right direction. CBD isn’t some crazy fix-all. It doesn’t make you feel euphoric, but it can help get you to a better place.”
CBD has really taken off among professional athletes across all kinds of disciplines, and for Just Live, Travis is partnered with some big names who all found that CBD assisted them in their careers and beyond.
“One of the greatest skateboarders of all time, Paul Rodriguez,” Travis says. “Klay Thompson [the ace Golden State Warriors shooting guard]. As far as sports, these guys are at the top of their game.”
Another founding partner is Alex Morgan, the World Cup–winning striker for the U.S. Women’s National team who has credited CBD with helping her both on and off the field.
“My girls love Alex,” Travis says. “Like anyone, when the U.S. starts winning, everyone starts paying attention. Alex is kind of like the face of that. It’s cool to see her, especially going through pregnancy and everything and coming back. She was going to come back just a couple months after the Olympics. Now she’s got an extra year, which is great. You’ve got to do stuff not only as an athlete, but there’s certain things that you’ve got to do to speed up and help yourself, but to do it naturally.”
While the brand is centered on some high-profile athletes, they think it can help people far beyond the worlds of mainstream and alternative sports.
“I wanted to be a part of Just Live because it’s for more than just athletes, it’s for everyone living,” he adds. “We can help. We can help people get on the right track, to overcome pain, to get better sleep, to function better as humans.” Part of that is to continue to dispel misinformation and really get to the truth of CBD as a health aid. “To have a solution that doesn’t impair you mentally, doesn’t change your personality, and doesn’t hurt your body that’s natural is something that the world needs to know about.
While they’re hoping for broad exposure, Travis and his Just Live partners are definitely focused on people whose highly active lives can eventually lead to pain, discomfort, and sleepless nights. And he’s all too aware of CBD skeptics when it comes to that.
“To all the people that reach out and say, ‘It’s a sell-out, why are you pushing this, it’s a bunch of snake oil’—okay. If you’re not in pain, if you sleep all through the night and you’re not in pain, you can do everything you want to do, unless you’re an athlete? Fine. I’m happy for you. That’s not the life I live. That’s not the life a lot of these other guys live. You’re not our target demographic. For all of those who think ‘Who needs that?’—you might not! You might not want to be or need to be 5 percent or 10 percent better. But for those of us who do, this is a natural solution.”
Travis then goes into some deeper, more painful issues he’s experienced with his family.
“My uncle committed suicide, because he was in too much pain,” he says of his father’s brother, Richard, who took his own life in 2015. “He was a bodybuilder. He just didn’t do a lot of things correctly all the way through. But as soon as he retired on a Friday, he was gone before Monday.… My dad was about at the same point. He calls me up and says, ‘If you find me like Richard, it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s not because I don’t love life and everything.’ He goes, ‘I have one more surgery. This is my third surgery in six months. I can’t sleep. I’m living on painkillers. I’m yelling at people I shouldn’t be yelling at. I’m not me. I can’t live this way.’”
His father was on the edge, and Travis couldn’t face the thought of losing him. He suggested his father try CBD to help manage his pain.
“We got him set up with CBD, which I thought he would never try,” he says. Did it help? “Typical dad! ‘I started sleeping a couple more hours. I got back into physical therapy. I’m better now, but it probably would have healed anyway.’” Yep, that sounds like a typical dad! Travis believes CBD gave that little extra push that helped his father heal.
Pastrana has a personal connection to CBD and genuinely credits it with a tremendous amount of help in his career and in his life. It’s something he clearly believes in, and he’s put a lot of his own money on the line to create a company that can help others too. And because he’s such a nice guy, he wants to hook our readers up: if you need support with sleep, pain, stress, recovery or immune health, he wants you to give CBD a try, so he’s offering 30% off your Just Live order with the code RACERX at checkout.
We respect the hustle.
