AH-HA, I have learned how to update and create posts on this website, so what does that mean? I will be able to put out more content and you all do not have to wait two to three years at a time for a new update. With that being said, let’s dive into what life has been like since my last update!
The last update you know of was right after my 17th surgery in 2022 and as I am writing this, it is 2025. A lot has happened in those two and a half to three years, but the first thing to go over is my football season. Unfortunately, I was not able to participate for the rest of the season since my surgery was smack in the middle of season, but once I was cleared, it was go time. I was back to the grind and I was an absolute unit conditioning and in the weight room.
Top of Santiago Peak w/ Iain
Since I was not able to practice, I was mountain biking a ton and that was one of the reasons that I was in really good shape. That December, I summited Modjeska Peak and Santiago Peak all in one ride, it was a 33.87 mile ride with 5,740 feet of elevation gain. This was one of my biggest rides and it took a lot of hard work to be able to do so. To train for that ride, I was riding four to five times a week on top of the football weight training and conditioning. From January to June it was literally, go to school, weight train, mountain bike, maybe play some video games, eat and repeat. The only event that went on was my trip to Florence, Italy to watch my cousin get married.
Our Hotel View of Florence
The trip was a week long mission in between my busy training schedule. Upon arriving back to the US, it was one week of light lifting to prepare my system for max week. Max week is a week to see the maximum amount of weight that you can get while doing certain lifts. The week was a bit of a rough transition since my body sort of got used to the time change but not fully. I pushed through it and it was onto my max lift which went great. My max bench was 325 lbs, back squat was 455 lbs and clean was 265 lbs which equals a total of 1,045 lbs putting me in the 1,000 lb club for the football program. There were over 120 athletes on the team and only around 25 athletes made that club and one of those athletes was me.
Making that club gave me a huge confidence boost going into the summer. It was a hot summer but the work never stopped, it was four to five times a week in the weight room and conditioning on the field and six times a week working on the agility ladder and football technique with maybe one to two rides on the mountain bike a week. I was very happy with how I was doing and I was ready for the next football season.
August came rolling around and it was time for all of that hard work to pay off. The first practice ended and it was time for the Chapman mile. This is our conditioning test for the year and it consists of going back and forth, from endzone to endzone, 17 times. That years test went great for me, I finished in the top seven of both defensive and offensive lineman. The next couple of days, we had practices and meetings all day which went well. Then came day five, my practice reps went from 12 to 16 reps down to zero. I was puzzled as to why, so I asked the position coach and he wanted to talk after practice.
It was a great career
I spent all of practice doing my thing in indies and trying to figure out what I did wrong. Practice ended and we started talking and that is when he told me that he is starting to weed out the individuals who are not going to play. I was taken back by this information, processed it and asked him “what specifically is the reason why,” and it took about two minutes for him to respond and he told me “it’s not that you aren’t good, it’s just that there are better people than you.” That hit hard and I was left with a really tough decision to make and I chose to finish school, move on and work on getting real-life experience.
That night was bitter sweet, but it was time to move on. The next week was a bit weird for me, the past 10 years of my life grinding in school and football were closing down. Since playing football was over, I still was not quite ready to step away from the game. That fall, I started coaching high school football for the Laguna Beach High School Breakers, the head coach of that team was my freshman high school football coach.
It was kind of bizarre, I never had aspirations of being a football coach but it turns out, I liked it and I think I am pretty good at it. I assisted the varsity offensive line and coached the freshman and sophomore, offensive line for the 2023 season. The season went well, undefeated on the frosh level and 9-2 on the varsity level. While I was completing school and coaching, I was also training for some mountain bike racing. I wanted to start racing because I have always had a competitive fire raging inside of me.
Race Prep
The first season that I raced did not go to plan, well lets be real here, I did not even race. The first race was slated to be February 4, 2024 and it had been raining all week long. It stopped raining the day before so I thought we were in the clear but that was not the case. It was race day and I woke up with the surprise of light rain and was mentally preparing for some horrible conditions. My friend and I decided to drive up to the races together, and that drive was full of hearing rain splatter against the windshield. An hour and a half later, we exited the freeway, only 10 minutes away from the race, when we get the e-mail that the race was cancelled. It was a shame, we woke up early and spent a long drive together only to turn around and head back. That was a bummer but hey, it happens and I will be back in the next one, or so I thought. The next two races were just as the first, it was rainy, cold and I did not have it in me to race. That season was wasted so it was on to next season and finishing school.
Graduating w/ Aaron
As school was closing up, I was getting seriously stressed out. I needed to finish 5 classes when I had scheduled 4 classes and on top of that, I dropped out of one of the classes, Spanish. Following that spring, I took the two remaining courses over the summer. It was my internship and the Spanish class. The struggle in Spanish continued so I was reluctant that class was online. My degree required an internship and my internship was at CORE Athletic Training in Newport Beach, CA. They offer kids camps in the summer and on holiday weeks/ weekends during the school year, and they offer recess and after school programs during the school year. I was an intern over the summer which was really fun, they teach the kids competition by having the interns and coaches play in certain games. That meant I was able to hit kids with dodgeballs (that is the game they play most with different variations).
Laguna Beach 2024 Coaching Staff
My internship wrapped up in a few months and they offered me a part time position. I took it and it was really fun. It was the start of the school year and our recess and after school programs went into full swing. As I was coaching at CORE, the season was heating up at Laguna Beach and we set out to become league champions for the fourth time in a row. It was a very good year for us, we went undefeated again on the frosh level and varsity went 10-1 with another league championship. If that does not sound busy enough I was creating content on the side and I was mountain biking. Training for the upcoming race season was going well and my numbers on social media were going up, life was good, too good.
Earlier that fall, in October, something weird was going on. I did not really know what was going on, I thought I had a big pimple and to spare you I’ll just say it was in a certain place. It affected how I was able to move around but eventually that week it died down. Well, it was not completely died down, I still had a lump where the ‘pimple’ was. I went to a couple dermatologists and they both said the same thing: “pilonidal cyst.” A pilonidal cyst is a growth that forms, mainly on hairier athletes, due to a hair follicle that breaks off and re enters your body right above the butt crack but below the tail bone. They told me it needed to be removed by a surgeon because the nerve endings are by where the cyst is.
This is when I meet my next surgeon, Dr. Yosef Nasseri out of Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, CA. We had a consultation and then planned a date to get it removed. That meant mountain bike training was on hold and I was not able to work as much. The date was set to December 17, 2024 and my 18th surgery was underway.