Chapter 2: A New Path

Duke – the first CrossFit client in Canada

Finding CrossFit helped me clear my head. And with eyes wide open, while attending my first Level 1 Cert in Santa Cruz, the Red Sox come back from three games down to win their first World Series since Babe Ruth was traded. I felt change was in the air.

With a very light heart, I gave up on the new green building design firm I was starting and resigned from the B.C. Green Building Board of Directors.

I was able to look back at my engineering career with clarity. And I knew whatever my next career steps were, I was going to make sure to create a family-oriented business.

One day I hopped in a cab and the cabbie said to me, “You don’t really know someone until you have financial dealings with that person. And then you have to ask yourself, ‘How well do I really want to get to know this person?’”

That quote stuck with me and led to life lesson number four: Trust your Spidey Senses.

Be it engineering or taking on a new coach, I do believe we have a sixth sense that can gauge a person’s character.

By September of 2004, I started doing Greg’s workouts on my own, first in community centres and then I moved to the park because I kept getting kicked out of gyms. At the same time, I ventured to Seattle, hoping to learn from Dave Werner, the guy who owned the first CrossFit affiliate in the world.

It was an unpretentious place. I couldn’t tell if a business even lived there. I showed up on my first day and couldn’t find someone to pay.

There was no personal training. No group classes. Eventually, I started paying him $50 a week to mess around with the movements in his gym. And I’d spend the evenings and nights on T-Bear’s couch, who I knew from my days at Johnson Controls.

Seattle was also where I met Glassman. We instantly hit it off. I could tell he was brilliant and I just wanted to spend time with him.

Pretty soon, I was paying visits to Glassman in Santa Cruz, where we’d hang out in his garage until all hours of the night, talking about how the world works. It was a mind blowing experience in that Garage. I learned more from Greg about life and how the universe works than I did in 5 years of university.

When I felt competent enough, I convinced my roommate, Dave Newcombe, (aka Duke) to train with me. He was a tall, slow-twitched, lumbering fucker with a willingness to get fit and take punishment like few I had ever met. As far as I know, Duke was the first paying CrossFit client in Canada.

Glassman had explained to me that before I opened an affiliate, I had to learn how to coach people in a one-on-one environment. Coaching people one-on-one does two things: It allows you to spend the necessary time with clients working on the most technical movements and making sure they move well and safely, and it allows you to connect with them on a personal level, generating trust and loyalty while learning their psychology and mental make up. Personal training and relationships are still the backbone of MadLab School of Fitness and is also business mode rule number four: Personal Training before Group Classes.

Although I’m not coaching on the floor anymore, I know that the 15-20 hours of intimate time I spent with each of my clients during their fundamentals phase of training allowed me to develop a real, human connection with them. I knew every single client’s husband, wife and kids’ names, where they worked, and the problems in their lives. And above all, I genuinely liked them. Developing a friendship with my clients made the job fulfilling and is the reason why our churn rates are low.

I took Duke to the park and put him through gnarly workouts. There was a true feeling of being part of something bigger than ourselves; we felt like we had stumbled upon a hidden treasure.

We knew this thing was only going to grow.


As for myself, newfound fitness was helping me figure out what was really important in life. I felt like I was an 18-year-old on steroids—utterly invincible.

I learned that people’s characters really shone through when you put them in uncomfortable physical workouts. I saw people of all shapes and sizes and realized that the majority of my current great-looking good-time-Charlie friends were kind of soft and week and unable to handle the training. Meanwhile, some troll-like character I’d stumble across in the world would turn out to be tough as nails. And usually an awesome human.

I continued to spend time with Glassman and made regular trips to Santa Cruz to learn more. Every night I spent with him broadened my understanding of the world. When I wasn’t in Santa Cruz, I’d call him up — he was number 3 on my speed dial (cab #1, Sushi #2) — at least once a week.

I got my Level 1 CrossFit certification in October, 2004 — a course run entirely by Greg. I spent the weekend with other CrossFit pioneers, like Eva T., Nicolle Caroll and Rob Wolf. After the weekend, we (Krynen and our other partner Kirky Bird) met with Lauren and Greg at the Cruz Café and lauren handed me a sheet of paper that said “crossfit.ca” and we signed an affiliate agreement that had a 20 mile radius of protection.

I still didn’t have a venue and couldn’t do a pull-up.

But I had a vision.

I looked back to the stressful engineering days. Building my first consulting company, I put myself on EI, took a loan for $30,000, I hadn’t made a sale in 18 months and I was down to my last $750. I was on the precipice looking over. And then someone—a female, Persian architect, God bless her soul—took a chance on me. I got my first deal and then the money started rolling in, we booked $2 million in gross revenue over the next nine months. And then the real problems began.

It was no way to live. I was embroiled in political correctness, greed and insincerity.

I wanted to create something better: a place where the people love what they do, love each other, are motivated as self-sufficient entrepreneurs, aren’t at risk of getting fired because of politics, and have a great lifestyle where they make enough money to buy homes and raise families, but can also take the time to vacation whenever they want. These are all the things I didn’t have in my first career, and I now believed they were necessary for living a good life.

Today, the worst parts of corporate America are the exact opposite of MadLab School of Fitness.

Friday Lesson Plan

Warm Up: Coach Choice

4×6/6 Side Plank Twists

Strength/Skill:

A) 12 Minutes Heavy Deadlift Single

B) Warm Power Clean

Conditioning:

6 Rounds:

12 Power Cleans 155/115
12 Wallballs 20/12
Rest 1 min

Saturday Lesson Plan

Warm Up: Coach Choice

Include Stiff Legged Windmills

Conditioning:

30 Minute OTM:

4 Pull Ups
8 Push Ups
12 Squats

14 minute elimination:
550m Plate Carry