Team Beachbody Guest

TO MY COACHING STUDENTS: Before I launch into my bio and transformation story, I want to make sure that my Coaching Students know that I CANNOT EMAIL YOU UNTIL YOU EMAIL ME! So, shoot me an email, introduce yourself, and let’s get you on the road to reaching your fitness goals!


I present My Personal Bio to you in three parts: “My History”, “My Inspiration”, and “My Decision”.


My History

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TO MY COACHING STUDENTS: Before I launch into my bio and transformation story, I want to make sure that my Coaching Students know that I CANNOT EMAIL YOU UNTIL YOU EMAIL ME! So, shoot me an email, introduce yourself, and let’s get you on the road to reaching your fitness goals!


I present My Personal Bio to you in three parts: “My History”, “My Inspiration”, and “My Decision”.


My History

I was a three sport (football, basketball, baseball) varsity athlete in high school. However, I suffered a rash of shoulder and neck injuries during my junior year that made me ineffective on the field and forced me to sit out my senior football and basketball seasons. Determined to make a come back and have a great senior baseball season, I did a ton of physical therapy and, for the first time, hit the weights pretty hard. My hard work paid off, and my senior baseball season I was a team captain and the only player in the league to be unanimously selected to the all-star team (every coach voted for me). As far as I know, I still hold my high school’s record for stolen bases in a season (24 steals in 24 games). When I graduated from high school, I was a muscular 5’ 9” and 190 lbs.


I could have played college ball, but I decided to focus on academics instead and, after I graduated from H.S. in ’98, I wound up at a Great Books school, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. While going to St. John’s was the best decision that I have ever made (I would encourage all aspiring young scholars to check it out), I was too busy exercising my brain to spend much time exercising my body and my physical prowess slowly wasted away.

However, attention to my physical health was hardly absent in the nine years after I graduated high school. In fact, my nutritional health was quite good, much better than it was in high school. I learned a great deal about nutrition, and I credit my 11% body fat reading before P90X to my nutritional health over those nine years. My nutritional health combined with the occasional hike/ski in the Santa Fe mountains (sometimes less occasional than others) kept me feeling physically alive… but, all the while, I was feeling increasingly weak. When I began P90X, I was still 5’ 9” and my weight had been fluctuating between a relatively weak 150-155 lbs for years.


My Inspiration

February 4th, 2007, was a day that I will remember forever. I got an unusually early morning call from my mother. It was immediately evident that something was very, very wrong.

With much difficulty, my mother informed me that my father had died of a heart attack that morning. My father was 55 years old, and, although he was by no means the healthiest man on the planet, no one had expected that something like this would happen so soon. 65… maybe. 55… no.

My mother, sister, and I, as well as our friends and family, take some comfort in knowing that my father had a great last night. He and my mother had hosted a party the night before at which most of the guests were friends my parents had known since they were teenagers. His last words were to my mother, “I love you, dear.”

To put it mildly, my father’s death was hard to take… still is… I’m crying as I am writing this. Like no other time in my life, the importance of physical health was thrust before my eyes.



My Decision

About two months after my father’s passing, I found myself searching for information online and designing a workout program for myself. However, it was coming along rather slowly as I can be a perfectionist with such things. If I was going to truly devote myself to as intense a regimen as I was envisioning, it had to be good.

It was while I was visiting my sister for a few days at St. Michael’s College in Burlington, VT, that I caught my first glimpse of P90X. Myself, my sister, and a couple of her friends were sitting around the tv hanging out when, for a brief moment, a P90X infomercial came on. The girl who was lackadaisically flipping through the channels was distracted for a moment and left the P90X infomercial on long enough to peak my interest.

I got on the P90X website the next day and I was quite intrigued right away. I remember thinking, “Wow! This looks like the exact type of program that I want to design for myself... but better!” That night, after the girls had gone to bed, I was having difficulty falling asleep on the broken futon I was given, and my thoughts turned to P90X. The broken futon happened to be in the tv room (my sister had a very nice dorm), so I decided to see if I could find the infomercial… I did!

I took this as a sign (I was also awfully impressed with the P90X program), and it was not long before I had ended my research into developing a program for myself, and was ordering P90X and researching and buying the equipment that I needed.

Now, I must admit, after I found P90X I thought I was ready to go. However, I had severely underestimated how long it was going to take me to get all of the equipment, supplements, etc., that I wanted before I began the program. While MDB does carry most everything you need, after nine years of not working out, I didn’t even have things like shorts, sneakers, and socks.

My starting the P90X program was delayed even further by my decision, in light of my father’s passing, to move home, from Santa Fe, NM (where I had been teaching) to Concord, MA, to live with my mother for the summer. We have a beautiful home in Concord (birthplace of the American Revolution, Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott), but there wasn’t exactly a good place for me to workout. So, I had to make a place for myself in the garage, which, in addition to setting up a tv, pull-up bar, etc., also required a fair amount of cleaning. However, about a month after I returned home to Concord, I was ready to “Bring It!” with P90X…

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