02The story
I was the chubby, picked-on kid who needed someone to show up and never quite had one.
Sellwood, Portland. The studio.
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Los Angeles
I grow up overweight, in my brother's hand-me-downs and bootleg Shaq shoes from Kmart. In PE the other kids wheeze to imitate me. My grandmother dies in front of me when I'm six, maybe seven. Nobody showed her. That became the question I've been working on ever since: why do people who know what to do still not do it?
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San Diego
At UC San Diego I work the campus gym as a freshman. I know how to be funny. I don't know how to do a pull-up. I'm pre-med until I watch the med students come in grey-haired and stressed. That's not health. I leave with a biology degree and no real plan.
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Portland
I move north with my friend Josh to join the Portland Fire Department. A hiring freeze ends that. Later I get let go from a job, and the only thing I can think to do is go to the gym. There's a hiring sign. I start at Planet Fitness, purple treadmills and all, and learn the difference between entertaining people and training them. In 2013 I open Stick-To-It Fitness.
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The hips
Arthritis so bad I need breathing exercises just to walk. Every client notices the limp, then strangers do. Three surgeons tell me I'll never squat again. One surgery done, a second coming. I rebuild my hips with the same training I give my clients, and I use the whole thing to teach them about the body.
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The streak
I squat every day for close to a year. One working set: one more rep each day up to twenty, then back to one with more weight on the bar. Early morning, phone camera recording, Pantera playing. I get to almost 500 pounds. The lesson that stuck: you really don't need to do that much, as long as you never miss.
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The record
May 4, 2023. I set the Guinness World Record for the most weight lifted by dumbbell curls in one minute: 1,233.54 kilograms. The kettlebell-swing record I chased for three years before that never became official. I broke it on video, alone, more than once. Two official attempts failed in front of friends and clients. Then my surgery date came. I keep both stories.
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Now
I coach about fifty hours a week. I've read about a thousand nonfiction books and taken notes on all of them. I'm a bro-scientist at best, and a personal trainer who reads too much nonfiction. These days I build my own tools with Claude Code and Codex. I'd rather be the matrix than run from it.
