In May of 2017, the inevitable finally happened. I witnessed my father take his last breath on a mattress we set up for him on his bedroom floor. He was 75. I had just come back from being in Seoul, Korea for eight months acting in plays with the Seoul Shakespeare Company (I was cast as Prince Florizel in The Winter’s Tale) and kickstarting my life as a competitive athlete.
Towards the end of the show’s run, my mom called me up and said, “I think you should come home. Your Dad is sick.” Now my mom is never the type to freak out about anything. The basement could be flooding and she’d be like, “Oh, it’ll be fine, where’s the pump? Let’s get to work.” I’d characterize her as being right on the border of stoic and delusional. So, when she told me I needed to come home, I instantly grasped the gravity of the situation. I hopped the first flight back after the final show, ending what I thought was going to be my new life as an actor in my mother country.
20 hours later, it was the longest ever cab ride from LaGuardia to the house in which I grew up in Bayside, Queens. And when I finally got home, I witnessed a condition you’d never wish upon anyone in your life. My father had complete muscle waste in his arms and legs with sores and scabs all over his shins and knees presumably from previous attempts at kinetics too advanced for someone in his state. His legs were as thin as my forearms. This was beyond sarcopenia. According to his doctor, his heart was pumping at 10% capacity and he couldn’t even roll over to one side fully without assistance.
Not only was I horrified at what I walked into but I was so mad at my mom for not bringing him to the hospital for immediate intensive care. I couldn’t believe she didn’t see that he was on the verge of death. In hindsight she probably did. But my first and only instinct was to get him to the emergency room as soon as possible.
So we did. And we kept him there for about a week and a half, which was about the amount of time that I needed for it to sink in that he was too far gone.
On top of the devastation to his body, dementia had rendered him insane. In the 40 years since he was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, his health was in a slow and steady decline but went into freefall in the final six months. Now here is a metabolic disease that is completely reversible through dietary and lifestyle changes. His diet was on point, but he never exercised.
When they say that optimal health is 80% nutrition and 20% exercise, they should also mention that without that 20%, you will with 100% certainty live a severely degraded quality of life and you will bring tremendous suffering upon yourself and the people affected by you.
And so I was mad at him. I blamed him for bringing this on to us — after all the shit he’s put us through, I could finally give him a piece of my mind…
Look at yourself. You’re a mess! I told you all the time that you needed to exercise. You made the choice not to put in the work to fix yourself. Who’s the big fuckup now, Dad?
When my friends found out that my dad was dying, they’d say to me, “I’m so sorry, it must be so hard.” Yeah. The hardest part was the fact that half of me wanted to shake some damn sense into him, and the other half still seethed from all the anger and contempt he projected onto us growing up. And at the end of the day, no matter what I did, I was completely powerless to help him. And he would never know how painful this really was for me.
Dad had a rendezvous with death and I was chosen to be the one to help him see it through. So I signed the papers to have him released so he could spend his last days in the home that he made possible for us.
His final moments came two days later. He was struggling to breathe and I called 911. He reached out his hands to me, as if for help because he knew he was going to die. He must have felt it happening. By the time the paramedics got to him and tried to give him oxygen through a mask, the commotion must have been too much for him because he went into cardiac arrest. But our eyes were locked the whole time. And the look on his face was of a frightened man, someone who wasn’t quite done with his life.
There’s something really quite extraordinary that happens when you witness someone die as I did. In that split second, you learn that person’s entire life’s lessons. I learned all his misgivings, unfulfilled desires and aspirations, failed inventions, and knowledge he never got to share with the world. He left a lot on the table. And at that very moment, I made a decision that would forever alter the trajectory of my life. I said to myself: not me, not like that. I’m not going out like that. I don’t care what it’s going to cost, how much I’m going to have to endure, whatever it takes-blood, sweat, and tears—I’m not going to end up like him. And the day after the funeral, I walked into my local box and signed up for my first unlimited CrossFit membership.
I went three times my first week. My second week, four. By the end of the month, I made it a 5x a week habit. A month and a half in, I started a stretch of 66 straight days of WODing. Now I wasn’t going balls to the wall every day, some days it was about going light and working on technique, the movements, learning the language, and engaging the community. I wanted to devour everything I could about this sport because I was convinced that the only way to not end up like my dad was to literally run as fast as I could or die trying; because nobody is ever going to have to wipe my ass for me.
And now here I am, two years into CrossFit, and not only am I stronger and faster than I’ve ever been in my life, but I’m also a better and more capable person than I ever was in every which way. And as someone who’s suffered from severe chronic depression, I haven’t experienced a single down day yet. And that’s the power of CrossFit, the sport of fitness. It helps you build mental fortitude and resilience so you can face any challenge head-on. What was once my obstacle, has become my way.
The problem with adulthood is that life gets in the way and we stop playing sports. Training becomes secondary. And this is where everything starts to fall apart. This is why the average life expectancy is what it is today. Because too many of us decide that there’s a point in our lives when we should stop competing. That it’s ok to retire and go on long walks instead of squatting heavy. We take ourselves out of the game. We lose the ambition to be ranked among our peers.
And then what happens? We stop trying to do difficult things. We build an aversion to things that are physically challenging. And then those lazy, parasitic microbes that love to just hang out and demand more sugar and carbs take residence in our gut and then we get fat and inflamed. And then sarcopenia sets in. Our hearts weaken and fail. And then we die.
It seems at this point that the last part is inevitable. But we at least know that we can slow down everything else before it. All the blood biomarker data that’s pouring in from athletes from around the world across all sports modalities show that CrossFit and HIIT confer the greatest anti-aging and preservation effect on human life.
And so the trick is now to slow it down just enough so that when the technological advances arrive to help us live to 200 and beyond, they come to us first. Because you and I both know those advances aren’t going to happen for everyone. That very unnatural selection where the human race is going to advance from will come from a very special breed of us — those who eat, sleep and breathe gold medals. The ones who go all-in on winning. The best of the best.
Do you have what it takes?
