ok – at around the same time the Livestrong wristbands were about to become a thing, we were in Plano visiting Morgan’s family. Morgan, her dad, and I went over to Arbor Hills Nature Preserve, and on a whim I tried to cross the monkey bars at the playground there. To my dismay, I could hardly get past the first couple of rungs. I think, at 26 years old, this was my first real brush with mortality and decline. I did not like it.

A few months into the Livestrong project, Jason Webster came on board at Amplifier on the tech side of things. Jason was also a Muay Thai fighter and trainer, having lived and trained in Thailand. And brushing against him would also be a brush with mortality. I shared my predicament with Jason, and his solution was kettlebells and Pavel Tsatsouline. I remember the first time he brought a 1.5 pood kettlebell up to Guerrero – Jud and I dressed out for our first lesson. I swung the bell ten times (Russian swings). put it down. went to the bathroom. vomited. Weakness leaving the body. The novice begins his journey prostrate.

Four years later, my friend Kurt Yusi (an Army officer at the time) and Morgan’s cousin Paul (an Air Force officer at the time) both independently commended “oh, if you do kettlebells, you should check out CrossFit”. So I did. It looked well out of my reach, so I signed up for a class at CrossFit Central in May 2008. Joe Wood and I covered a lot of ground together there. It was great.

Macon started at CrossFit Central in 2010 or so, and between the two of us, we started accumulating a good amount of equipment. In 2013, or so, we realized we had enough equipment between us to set up our own gym, so we did so in a corner of Amplifier. We both got our CrossFit certifications, Macon made an LLC so that we could get insurance, and we started offering CrossFit classes for anyone who wanted to join at the warehouse or in its orbit. Our most recent class was two hours ago.

I can handle a jungle gym now.