I grew up like any other kid, playing sports from a very young age. I started with the basics like baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, golf and skiing. I started swimming for our local summer swim club at age 7, and I was hooked. All the kids in the neighbourhood had the same summer schedule: we’d ride our bikes to swim practice for 2 hours, then we had tennis straight after. I continued playing baseball and soccer as I grew older, but eventually joined the year-round swim club in the area, the Oakland Live Y’ers. Being a part of this club was a big deal, it taught me discipline, commitment and hard work - things I have carried with me to this day. I continued on swimming, moving up the ranks, knowing it would be my focus in high school. In freshman year I decided to join the cross country team despite having never really run and not really knowing what the sport was. I had fun that year, but was more excited to swim in the winter. The following year it hit me how much fun I’d actually had on the cross country team; I tried out for the varsity team and made it from the start.
After high school, I no longer wanted to swim - I was burned out after so many years - and I ran my first marathon that fall. It wasn’t an aim, and I wasn’t sure what it took anyway, but I ran a 2:57 and qualified for Boston. Over the next 2 years I dropped my time down to 2:29 and thought I had a shot to run the Olympic Trials standard. In college, I was fortunate enough to train with Hansons-Brooks team, and while I never quite got the standard, I met my wife while running with the team. Talk about lucky! Des and I spent many years training for marathons together, and I watched her eventually make the 2012 Olympic team.
The summer after those Olympics, I was ready for a change in sports and figured it was time to put my swimming and running background together and try triathlon. The goal was to make Kona. I’m not going to lie, I thought it was going to be easy and I’d be at the top level right away. Little did I know how hard biking would be and how humbling the whole experience would be.