My Journey

After quitting my job sitting behind a cubicle all day and travelling all over most of the United States for the last half a year, I've finally decided to do it. To go after what I've talked about, dreamed about, and most of all worked my butt of for since I was just a kid.

First it was basketball. For most of elementary and junior high this was all I did. It was my life. From 6th grade on I was going to grow 3 inches per year while not losing a step and developing all my skills to extraordinary levels until I was playing in the NBA. Sounds crazy, right? But as a kid, I had no doubt in my mind that it was going to happen.

As soon as I figured out I wasn't quite going to be anywhere near as tall as I'd hoped, I began to realize my chances were quite slim. In fact, since I wasn't even starting on the junior high squad, extremely slim. That's about the time I discovered golf. From there on I was on the course 4 days a week in the summer and every chance I got in between. I got pretty good. Fast. In a year I had shot a round under par. Keep practicing and I'd be there in no time, right? Well, that's when things started to taper off as I split time between running cross country in the fall, swimming in the winter (had to do something now that I wasn't playing basketball), and running track in the spring. Somehow I surprisingly made the cut each week to at least go to the golf tournaments and play on the varsity squad, though most days I would be shaking on the first tee box from the lung busting set of 300's I had just run as part of half mile training for track. Needless to say, it meant I didn't do particularly spectacular at either sport. And on top of that, my inexperience in tournament play often led to me letting my nerves and anger blow my scores through the roof and costing the team big points.

And so college hits and it's time to forget all those dreams and join the "real world" with one of those "real jobs". OK, this could still be exciting, right? I'm good at math, how about mechanical engineering. I bet those guys do all kinds of fun, hard stuff, that keeps them entertained while also getting paid handsomely for it. Well, some do. I didn't. Like most of the engineers in the world, I ended up in a typical 9-5 cubicle environment straight from the world of Dilbert or Office Space. It was quite the joke for awhile. Up until the point I realized that if I didn't make a change, this wasn't just temporary, it was LIFE.

And that's about the time I discovered triathlon. Lucky for me, I had kept myself in shape by running, swimming or lifting 3-4 days a week and started out extremely competitive. In my first race, I must have beat at least 90% of all women over 40. Though there was some obvious cheating going on. Particularly by the old, fat guys with their belly's hanging out of their jerseys that were passing me up hills on the bike. I am still researching how they figured out how to control gravity. I will keep you all updated when I find out more.

A couple months later, I was hooked. Somehow a $2k carbon bike seemed reasonable and in fact, a bargain, when not long ago I couldn't believe I was spending over $200 on just one item for one of three sports! It made all the difference. Riding became much more enjoyable and along with my new vow to never miss a day to train, I was all of a sudden placing in my age group in races. Which simply means that there was only one guy in the 20-24 age group who was fast, and most everyone else was slow and very new to the sport like me. Whatever the case, the new hobby was exactly the distraction I needed from the mindnumbing endlessness of working in a cubicle ALL DAY LONG.

The next year I spent without missing a single day where I was healthy to train and it showed. I had steadily and rapidly progressed to a consistent top 10 finisher in local races and a sub-5 hour half ironman. And it continued from there, as I learned more and more about training properly (something I now realize I never did in high school) through periodization and steadily building the workload, always doing more than before, but allowing the body time to adapt.

And then, as I was biking down the coast of California with a buddy of mine, I thought "Why don't I do this everyday?" And so my journey began to quit my job and travel, and all within the back of my mind, the question, "what would happen if you trained hard enough, smart enough and long enough? ...Could you go pro?". Is it possible for a normal, ordinary athlete to transform himself into one of those extraordinary superhumans we see on TV gliding through the water with a flurry of motion, rotating the ground beneath them as they slice through impossible winds and float up monstrous hills, and then proceed to fly to the finish line with only a few taps to the ground below to let it know that he is still pretending to obey gravity.

Well I think so.

And I intend to prove it.

I am going to go Pro.

And this is the story of my Journey.