FUCK OFF AND DON'T TRUST THIS BLOG (Part 2)

Bio part 2

(This post is a direct continuation from Fuck Off and Don’t Trust this Blog Part 1)

College

After an illustrious band career which completely burnt me out from music, I ended up going to the University of Delaware. Mostly because I thought the green was nice. I was undecided and looking to explore a land outside of CT. I had no real ambitions except to try every opportunity that came my way and see what stuck. Two things changed my life for the better, I made the Ultimate Frisbee Team, and I decided that I wanted to become a teacher. 

For four years I chased plastic discs up and down the east coast in any tournament we entered. Dirt, scrapes to the hip, and many defensive plays later I learned a love of sport, practice, and competition. Also cheers. We were known for one particular cheer where every time we played an ivy league college we would yell, “clean their pooooooooollllls….fuck their wives!” It was the perfect team to be an idiotic fun loving college age student. Meanwhile, I was slowly falling in love with the idea of becoming a teacher. It was a romantic notion that soon got stomped on by reality.

“Why are you here?” Might have been the first words I heard at Newark High School. It wasn’t a philosophical question. Kids wanted to know why I was intruding on an honors English class where they basically watched movies. The teacher was…how shall I phrase this…an overpaid lenient asshole. The kids didn’t have to do shit. I was the new student teacher for the English department, looking to make a dent, and I was starting to get acquainted with the kids I would eventually teach. They were a solid mix of black, hispanic, and white kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds. A 150 different personalities that I had to try and make sense of and attempt to teach as a 21 year old. And they were fully disgruntled that they suddenly had to do work for a grade. My cooperating teacher was the equivalent of a deadbeat dad. He was supposed to help me learn how to teach, but the day I met him he essentially shook my hand and said he’d be in the library.

Needless to say, the first month of student teaching crushed my soul. My grand visions of me giving grand lectures to a group of grandly stunned students evaporated faster than the first period bell. I was ignored to some degree in every class. Phone use was rampant. Students cursed me out. I probably lost my temper to some degree every single day and the kids simply laughed. My first month of student teaching was the equivalent of a hot dumpster fire fed from the wreckage of my broken dreams.

I didn’t quit though. I may have had close to a mental breakdown and cried in my room a couple of times…but I didn’t quit. The smartest thing I did while I was at the school was observe some of the veteran teachers who had a reputation for running a great class. I’d watch in amazement the same students who trashed my borrowed classroom listen carefully to directions administered from a seasoned vet. It left me with the most important lesson a young teacher can learn. Most of the time it's not the kids. It’s you.

This left me with a fuck it kind of attitude. If old as dirt Mr. Kollis can run a tight ship then so the fuck can I. I really couldn’t. But it was the attitude adjustment that mattered. Soon enough the kids started recognizing the effort. Turns out, once you show kids that you give a shit, they stop doing everything they can to punish you for changing their easy movie-watching class into a place where they actually have to write. The more I worked the more they got to know me and all my strange quirks. I demanded they fist bump me when they entered the class. I forced them to get up and move during rotation work. They learned I loved purple ties. (It was a phase) When I entered that classroom in February, I was pretty sure 150 kids hated me for destroying their “lazy class,” when I handed back the classes to my good-for-nothing cooperating teacher in May, they kept asking me to teach.

I left student teaching with two takeaways. I love and excel at creating meaningful relationships with high school age students. And there was no fucking way I was going to spend the rest of my life as an English teacher.

(Close friends from the English Education Education program at UD, and one of my more badass professors Jill Flynn)

Crossfit

Student teaching toasted me. I began to realize that the life of an English teacher had no end. When you weren’t creating lesson plans you were grading tremendously shitty papers. You did all of your work outside of school and you implemented it in school. The only way the job seemed feasible was if you simply dragged a bed in the high school and slept there, occasionally allowing yourself to see glimpses of the sun. I wasn’t ready to accept that kind of life. Yet. 

Which left me at the quarter life crisis that many kids find themselves right outside of college. Lost in the ocean of life with no rudder and a mountain of debt. Except not really. The summer before my senior year I was assaulted by a number of commercials on youtube for Crossfit. Let’s just say these commercials had my number. The people in these videos looked the way I wanted to look - jacked, but not cartoon character big. They also just looked like they could do a bunch of cool shit. Lift heavy, run for days, do weird swingy stuff on a pull-up bar - I was intrigued. I decided to check out the closest Crossfit from my house which was about 5 minutes away. I walked in and met a man (well, at that point, a boy really) named Mike Sabato.

It was a decision that would change the rest of my life.

I still remember seeing a ludicrously jacked dude rubbing up on the side of the wall digging a lacrosse ball into his back. (Fun fact, when I met Mike I was around 150 pounds and he was around 180, I now weigh a mean lean 183 and Mike is a monstrous 220.) I had no idea what the hell he was doing with the lacrosse ball - oh how much I had to learn - but the moment he saw me he came up and shook my hand with a big goofy grin on his face. When we talked it wasn’t so much the words that I remember, but the feel of the conversation. This was a guy who got me. He understood the attitude of get-big-or-die-tryin, and it was clear he was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back if you asked for it. I eventually asked him if this whole Crossfit thing was truly worth it, and these are the words I remember, he said, “look man, I’m one hundred percent biased, but this has changed my life.” And so it changed mine.

(Me to the left. Mike to the Right)

I learned to squat, I learned to deadlift, and I learned all the countless cool and strange moves that Crossfit incorporated into its programming. But most importantly I learned I had a competitive thirst. Don’t get me wrong, I was competitive as hell on my college Ultimate team, but there’s something to be said for having a whiteboard with your name and the results of the workout next to it. In Ultimate frisbee you can hide behind the supposed mistakes of your teammates, but Crossfit provides raw data. It’s accountability straight to the veins. Cheaters and rep shavers are few and far between, but when they are discovered everyone agrees they’re lesser human beings. 

What started as a curiosity became an obsession. Soon enough I was doing three workouts a day. On my 21st birthday instead of buying me a bucket of booze my parents bought me a barbell and some plates. Instead of partying like any normal 21 year old should have been doing, I was going to bed early on Friday to workout early on Saturday. Most importantly, I was forming deep bonds with like minded individuals obsessed with getting better.

These individuals were a bunch of massive dudes in the back of the gym who always seemed to be lifting heavy and doing extra work. The band geek that still lived in my skin had immediately categorized these guys as “mean jocks,” and I did my best to avoid them. I was beyond surprised when they invited me to workout on Saturday after the classes were finished. This workout session was commonly known as the “bro-sesh” and it was the time where the best Crossfitters congregated in the gym to train their faces off. I was beyond honored for the invite to join in on the face-melting. These training sessions were akin to iron marathons. Heavy lifts were followed by heavy metcons, (if you’re not drinking the Crossfit koolaid that’s short for metabolic conditioning) followed by longer breathing workouts (aerobic conditioning), usually followed by some kind of crash and burn partner work (anaerobic training - the kind that makes you think your heart is pumping acid). These training sessions were brutally long, ludicrously hard, and driven by everyone's pure desire to win. It was akin to repeatedly smashing your face into a wall, looking up in a bloody haze, smiling at your buddies, and then doing it again. These Saturdays contain some of the fondest memories of my early twenties and many of those guys are some of the closest friends I have to this day.

If you’re wondering whether we still train that way, the answer is fuck no. As thirty year olds with the power of hindsight we now know that style of training is completely unsustainable if you have anything else going on in your life….like lets say a job.  The beauty is we learned how to train more effectively as a unit. We were a fitness brain trust. That Saturday crew had an uncountable number of conversations about how to get better. Sleep optimization, perfecting technique, different programming, playing with different combinations of proteins, carbs and fats, what was the best way to shame someone to eat more, whether to masturbate or not masturbate, all topics were on the table when it came to winning. This beautiful world of camaraderie and accountability formed the foundation for my love of performance. 

This world saved me from a true quarter life crisis. While training my face off I got certified in Crossfit and eventually became an L-2 coach. Coaching is just teaching with sweatpants, so when I started coaching classes at Crossfit Norwalk it was like sticking my foot into an old comfortable boot. I got it immediately. Except it was better. This boot had perks. It turns out that adults paying $200 a month to listen to your advice are waaaaay less likely to interrupt you mid explanation. Go figure.

I fell in love with coaching just as much as I fell in love with training. I had many conversations with Mike about getting better at the craft, and I spent anywhere from 25 to 30 hours a week running classes, correcting movement patterns, speaking on a dime about nutrition, sleep, recovery practices, and anything and everything that related to fitness. Competing was the way I learned, but coaching was the way I practiced communicating the ideals that were becoming my identity.

Fast forward a couple of years, I’m 25, training my ass off for the love of it, and building great relationships with clients. In general, I’m content. However, there are two things my mind keeps wandering to. The first is that I miss kids. I had built a Crossfit Kids and Crossfit Teens program at the gym, and those classes had a decent following, but most of my day was adults. For some reason I missed those foul mouthed assholes I taught in Newark, DE. As satisfying as it was for me to help an adult improve their fitness, being a role model (hopefully a positive one) for 150 kids was one of the sweetest experiences of my life. I was craving that taste again.

The second thing my mind kept wandering to was, of course, money. Blah. Much as I loved coaching, I could see the forest for the trees. Mike was getting set to buy the gym from its previous owner, and as much as I liked the idea of being his head trainer, a Crossfit gym isn't exactly a wildly profitable business, and it certainly didn’t have a chunk of retirement waiting at the end of a rainbow.

With these two thoughts in mind, I plunged into $50,000 dollars worth of debt, made a blood oath to the government to pay it back, and entered a masters program to become a P.E. teacher. After blitzing through 30 credits and student teaching in under a year, I became an NYS certified P.E. teacher, desperate for a job, and damn excited to teach. 

(Continued in Part Three)