You didn't
get old.

I played baseball my entire life, competitively, until I turned down smaller schools to try to walk on at Central Florida. That's where it ended. Leukemia at eighteen, three years of treatment, and then the chemo came back for my knees in my mid-twenties. I was referred to a surgeon at the University of Miami doing an experimental procedure. It worked. I could walk. He told me not to count on running again.

I rebuilt anyway. I was a client at a gym in downtown LA at twenty-five, and within two years I was stronger than I'd ever been before I got sick. I was also icing my knees for two days after every heavy session and deciding that was just the price.

"I would quietly pretend that was progress."

Then I burned out my hips compensating for knees I'd never dealt with, hiking to Everest Base Camp trying to prove something.

Five years ago a mentor in a course on myofascial chains watched me walk for about a minute and read it off my gait. The asymmetry, the compensation, all of it. Then she told me to start with my feet. Not my knees. My feet. I'd been a trainer for fifteen years and nobody had ever done that for me.

What I do now is narrow on purpose. I work with people over forty who used to be athletic and stopped, not with beginners, not with bodybuilders, and not with people who want to be shouted at.

I've been coaching close to twenty years. I started by accident, at six-thirty on a Monday morning in Los Angeles. I was the client. My trainer walked off the floor and I took the session. Several hundred people since: a professional baseball player, a college golfer, an actress, a lot of executives, and the security guards in the same building. I coach in English and Spanish.

Almost nobody over forty has actually been assessed. They've been sold programs and given exercises, but nobody has watched them move and told them what's going on. That gap is the entire reason this exists.

"When someone tells me their knee is shot, I tell them mine was supposed to be too."

It's probably just overworked. We rebuild it slowly. You'd be surprised. At forty I put a uniform back on and played a season here in a men's league.

"I was in better shape than the twenty-somethings on that team. I couldn't get through the dynamic warm-up."

I can sprint now. I've stolen second base. Fifteen years earlier I hit a ground ball in a pickup game, broke out of the box to run to first, and fell flat on my face in front of everyone I went to college with.

I live in Hermosillo, Mexico with my wife and our five-year-old, and I'm building a studio here. I turn forty-two this September, which is roughly when I stopped being able to pretend this was theoretical.