First , I am a husband to an amazing wife, Terri. With out Terri, I could not do half the stuff in my life. I am a dad to four wonderful children, Kinsie (12), Berkley(10), Charlie(4), and Cooper (2). All four of my kids are great in their own ways and each is so different. I have been lifting weights for 21 yrs. I started in power lifting and body building as a teenager. I placed 1st in every local power lifting meet as a teenage except one. I placed 2nd and one meet I bombed out. I competed in gear and in my last competition I weighed 178#. I hit a 564# squat, 365# bench, and 465# Dead lift. This same year, I entered in a body building competition and cut down from 178# to 152#. I placed 3rd in the teenage division. At this point, college took over my life. Even though I trained hard and worked as a personal trainer at Stacks Gym, I no longer competed as academics became more of a priority. I attended Kennesaw State University and earned a Bachelors of Science in professional chemistry and mathematics. After College, I worked as a chemist for 1 year before returning to Georgia Institute of Technology to earn a PhD in Physical Chemistry. During Graduate School, I trained at the campus recreation center with my lab buddy, James Goeders. James is the one that convinced me to start this blog. This time of training was a great stress release, but this was probably the time in my life training constantly started to slip. We conducted a standard powerlifting/body building split training each body part at most once a week.
At the end of graduate school, I married my amazing wife and instantly became a step dad, which was a big change but worth every bit of the change. Upon graduation, I took a post doctoral fellow position at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM in the Photonic Micro System Lab. It turned out my new step-daughters could not move from GA, and I found myself living in NM with my family in GA. It took 4.5 yrs for me find work back in GA. Luckily I was promoted after my first year at Sandia to Senior Member of the Technical Staff, giving me the resources to travel home often. My first year in NM, I would train a few days a week at the Kirkland Air Force base gym, since I had access to it for free, but habit from graduate school continued to slip.
After about a year and half in NM, My wife and I were expecting our first son. At this point I was probably in the worst shape of my life, which started toward the end of undergraduate, through graduate school and into my first real job combined with all the travel. I had packed on a few extra pounds of fat, but most would not have called me fat. I was just out of shape compared to my prime days of training.
When my son was born, I took a month off of work to come back to GA. During this time, one of my best buds from childhood, Justin Crocker (actually had a son two day before we did) invited me to come train with him while I was home for the month. This was my first introduction to Crossfit at Crossifit Holly Springs. This was a huge deviation from powerlifting/body building splits, but was just the kick in the ass to show me how out of shape I had gotten. I told myself I would not let my son see me as an out of shape man and I set a goal that by my son's first birthday, I will be in the best shape of my life. I probably was not in the best shape by his first birthday, but I called it a success because I was definitely in better shape. When I returned to New Mexico I joined a Crossfit gym, at first it was Crossfit to the Bone, but was sold and changed to Bear Canyon Crossfit . This broadened my fitness knowledge at least 10 fold, but I was not 100% on the band wagon. I immediately saw that it was very hard to increase your absolute strength doing Crossfit alone, but I continued to do it because of the overall fitness improvements, the community, and I didn't have to program for myself.
After 4.5 yrs working at Sandia, with my family in GA, I finally was able to get a job at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in the Quantum System Laboratory. A perfect match for my scientific back ground and a perfect fit for my family. We bought a house when I finally returned home and I joined Crossfit EX ,and now that I was not traveling, I was able to really improve at Crossfit. I started to compete in local team competitions. My first competition, we competed in an elite division, we did not win. I have now competed in a few team competitions and placed 3rd in two of them. I realized about a year after being home, that I could build my garage into a gym. It would save drive time, along with give me the freedom to train on my schedule, not on the schedule of classes set by the Crossfit box. The kids could play while I lifted, which seemed like another bonus. This was one of the best training decisions I have made to date. I hired an online coach from Mash Elite Performance to write my programing. Now I am training for my first weight lifting competition. I will be a masters weightlifter, and hope to qualify for my fist national level competition.
If you are interested in more about my professional career you can find my Linkedin profile here, although I have not updated since I started at GTRI.
