Ian Warner is always looking forward.

He is always looking forward to what his next task is in class, what his next assignment is for those classes and what he has to do next to make sure he will graduate from Iowa State. Warner also is concentrating on his track-and-field career competing as a sprinter for the Cyclones.

Warner also keeps his schedule busy by doing something most other students, or student-athletes for that matter, don’t do. He manages and writes for a website he and his older brother, Justyn, created called “Cover Ground” and subsequently started a clothing company called “Parilexx.”

The idea for Cover Ground was formed in 2009 when Justyn was a senior competing in track and field at Texas Christian University and while Ian was an ISU freshman. Justyn had the idea of creating a blog about his training schedule and posting it on the Internet, and Ian came back with an idea taking Justyn’s blog one step further.

“I suggested to him that we try and use it to take what we are learning in our journeys and try to help other people to make their journeys easier,” Ian said. “So I was the one who transformed it into a blog about helping others, but he was the one who got the domain name, started it and did the first posts. But he eventually asked me to write for it.”

Traffic for Cover Ground was initially slow. At one point, Ian and Justyn didn’t know if they should even continue operating the website because they thought, “No one really cares about it and no one’s really reading it.”

They decided to continue their efforts, though. The first summer after they started the site, Ian went home to Markham, Ontario, and posted on Cover Ground’s website “literally every single day for three months.”

“Every day we posted and it really started to generate a lot of traffic and people really started to like it,” Ian said. “Facebook and Twitter really helped a lot with it, so we really used those to start getting it out there, and it just kept going and now it can’t stop.”

Cover Ground currently has 562 likes on Facebook and 2,654 followers on Twitter. The boom in social media, Ian said, is what was able to allow the brothers to start Parilexx.

“The clothing is really something we always dreamed out as kids and we were really just waiting for the right time to it,” Ian said. “We really didn’t know what we were doing with Cover Ground and just did it along the way. That’s the exact same thing we are doing with Parilexx. The amount I’ve learned since we started [Parilexx last] June has been tremendous.”

The name Parilexx was spawned by combining the middle names of Justyn (Paris) and Ian (Alexander) to create the unique brand name. While Cover Ground’s mission is to provide assistance and instruction for people to become a better athlete and a better person in the process, Parilexx was to provide clothing for its target audience to dress comfortably but to look “cool” as well.

While Parilexx merchandise cannot be found in stores right now, Ian and Justyn operate a website for it and word of mouth has helped the product spread.

Sophomore sprinter Dana Christensen is one of Parilexx’s biggest promoters and said she has been asked a lot about the clothing because of how often she wears it.

“I went home and a few people from my hometown have been asking about it,” Christensen said. “My sisters and a couple family members have been into it, too, and have gotten a couple shirts not too long ago to help support it and put [Ian’s] name out there.”

ISU sprints coach Nate Wiens said it is gratifying for him to work with a person like Ian who is always in pursuit of bettering himself as a runner and person.

“Ian is just a student of the sport,” Wiens said. “He’s always learning, so it’s one of those things where he’s proactively seeking that. He doesn’t go home and watch movies or TV — he goes home and figures out how to do things better. It’s just another step in who he is.”

Christensen said Ian is always the person to be there to help others anytime they need him.

“Whenever you are having a problem or having a rough week, he’s the go-to guy,” Christensen said. “He always has some type of motivation for you to keep pursuing to be that athlete you want to be.”

That is exactly what Ian’s goal for Cover Ground and Parilexx is.

“I’m just like everybody else here,” Ian said. “But I want certain things in life and I’m not going to stop until I get those things. Everything you want in life takes sacrifice, but no matter what, if you have a goal, do not stop until you get it. Let no one get in your way.”

Wiens said he is not surprised with Ian’s efforts in creating Cover Ground and Parilexx because that is how he approaches everything he does.

“That’s just Ian,” Wiens said.