5 Years at OPS

5 YEARS AT OPS

Five years ago I sent an email that I almost didn’t send.

At the time I was about to complete my fifteenth year in retail grocery management. For most of those years I worked and moved wherever the company sent me. Eventually I was promoted to district supervisor where I was responsible for multiple locations throughout the inter-mountain region, hundreds of employees, millions of dollars a week in sales. I was good at it, I built a strong team and a solid career, and for a long time that felt like enough.

Then COVID happened.

The world shut down. My industry didn’t. They called us “essential workers” . We were still showing up every single day, keeping the shelves stocked, keeping the areas we served fed. We kept moving while everything else stopped. I watched people I had worked alongside for years get sick. I watched some of them die. I kept going to work. The expectations didn’t slow down. The pressure didn’t slow down. Nothing slowed down.

I found Dave Osborn on Instagram a little before the pandemic started, I was looking for powerlifters to follow as I was new to the sport. His user name caught my eye Daveatops. I thought he was calling himself a Triceratops and said , “oh cool! This dude is strong and he likes dinosaurs. I’m in!”

I started watching his Friday Q&As. I’d catch them in my car or on my lunch break and just think, I really enjoy the way this dude communicates, I like how he thinks about training. I’d show my wife something he said or she’d catch me laughing at something he said and ask what I’m laughing at “oh nothing, just something Dave said.” and remember telling her, “I feel like this guy and I would be really good friends if we ever met.”

The OPS ‘motto’ “Have You Tried Trying?” It really stuck with me. Have I?  Because if I was being honest with myself, the answer is no. Not in everything I’ve wanted to accomplish. Sometimes I was waiting for conditions to be perfect. Sometimes I was sitting on something and calling it patience when really I was just afraid.

I had been powerlifting for about a year before I reached out to Dave. My competition bests were 507lb squat, 286lb bench, 501lb deadlift. I had done four meets, bombed out at one of them. I had a coach but we both kind of knew we wanted to go in different directions. I kept telling myself I needed to get my numbers up before I reached out to a “real coach”. That someone like Dave would look at what I was bringing and decide I wasn’t worth his time.

I was scared. Not of rejection. Of being seen.

Being really frustrated with a lot of things in life and thinking about those words on Dave’s motto “Have you tried trying? I sent the email. After a conversation and an intake Dave took me on and we started working together in June of 2021.

My life was under more strain than I knew how to talk about at the time. I was in therapy, I was providing. I was performing. I was keeping it together on the outside well enough that only 1 or 2 people had an idea what was actually going on. 

Things were really dark. I hadn’t had an actual day off or real vacation in years. I was trying to hold everything but myself together for so long that the pressure became too much and I knew that if I kept working there, I would make a bad decision. I couldn’t be on the road four to five days a week, working 70-80 hours a week and be a good father and husband. I wanted to see my son grow up, I wanted to be home. 

I remember leaving work early a few days after the 4th of July in 2021 and breaking down in front of  my wife telling her “I can’t keep going there any more. Can we sell our house and move back home to Washington?” So we did. We made a decision that terrified both of us. We sold our home, I quit my job, I walked away from a fifteen year career and everything I built, and we moved back home to Washington State.

There were a lot of days I wasn’t sure I had made the right call. There were days I wasn’t sure about much at all. But we made a choice to go find something better instead of staying somewhere that was hollowing us out. And I’ve learned that trying, even when it’s scary, even when it doesn’t go the way you planned, will always get you further than just accepting what life puts in front of you.

After a few months of playing stay at home dad, I landed at a local gym that had a good powerlifting area. I started training there, got to know the people. The operations manager asked if I wanted a part time job so I took it because I didn’t have much else going on and it was something to do. At some point after some months of being around and cleaning toilets, someone would be struggling with a movement and ask for my help or opinion. Then one day I was watching someone squat, something I helped them with worked, and it all clicked for them. I wanted more of that feeling with less toilet cleaning.

About two years in, the team went to Vancouver Island for the Kodiak Clash. My first travel meet, and one of the best experiences I'd had in the sport up to that point. I squatted around 575, went after a 600 dead, dropped it right before lockout. It was devastating at the moment. But that trip was when I really started feeling like part of the team. Being around those people for a whole weekend, competing together, was different from just being a guy who trained alone and showed up to the gym occasionally and at meets.

The morning of weigh-ins for that meet Dave and I were walking to weigh-ins. Just the two of us moving hustling through Victoria. I’d been sitting on something for a while and I finally just said it. I told him I had been taking courses and I was working toward my personal training certification, and that I wanted to be a powerlifting coach. I asked if he had recommendations for resources, people to learn from, things to read.

I was nervous saying it. Dave’s opinion mattered to me. It has mattered to me since before I ever sent that first email. He could have made it awkward. He could have had doubts, he could have laughed and asked me why I think I'm qualified.

He didn't.  

He was nothing but supportive. Pointed me toward resources, answered my questions, and treated the whole thing like the most natural conversation in the world.

He didn’t make a big deal of it and seemed excited for me. Which meant everything.

The post meet high after Kodiak lasted awhile. So when Dave said we were all signing up for Fight Or Quit in Las Vegas the May of the following year, I was in immediately.

We had a very long training cycle. This was a pro caliber meet. I wanted to put on a show.

Everything in training was pointing toward it. I was on track to hit a massive squat PR and total PR. I really wanted to break the Washington state squat record for the open 242 division. I hired a nutritionist to help me lose body fat and improve my body composition. I felt stronger than ever. I felt like this was the meet where everything was going to come together.

That's not what happened.

I didn't handle the water cut well. I came in dehydrated and couldn't get back to where I needed to be. I felt shaky under the bar from the first rep. After my opening squat I looked at Dave and told him we needed to adjust everything. I ended up squatting 595 when I felt like I had earned 633 in training. I went 3 for 3 on bench, which was the first time I've ever done that to that point. Then on deadlift I missed 600. And I'll be honest about what happened there. I quit on myself.

I still PR’d my Squat, Bench and Total, I came within 5kgs of placing 3rd in open in my weight class at a pro level meet. I should have been happy, I was devastated. I felt like a fraud as an athlete and as a coach. I felt like I tried my hardest but still came up short. I felt like all the reasons I left my “real job” for were pointless and once again I failed the people I cared for the most.

One afternoon a month or so after the meet, I was in the gym trying to get through accessories and I couldn’t make myself move. I just sat there staring at the weight, then got up and went to my car. And just started driving. I ended up in a parking lot at a mall. Then I broke down and I started crying...A lot.

I was lost, I didn't know who to reach out to, so I sent Dave a voice message. Told him I wasn’t in a good place. That I didn’t have a plan, I wasn’t going to do anything, but I just didn’t think I could keep going. I didn’t know how to stop feeling like a failure when all I could think about was that one moment where I fell short of what I knew I was capable of.

He sent one back.

I sat in that parking lot for about an hour and we just went back and forth. I don’t remember everything that was said. What I remember is that I stopped feeling alone. And once you stop feeling alone you can start to see things a little differently. That falling short of your own expectations doesn’t make you a failure. That there’s room to be proud of what you did right while still knowing you have more in you. That the people who are actually in your corner don’t disappear when things get hard.

Dave and I have had a lot of conversations over the years. That one was different. That one helped me begin to see my training and coaching in a new light. Not immediately. but enough to gather myself and not give up and to try. I think at that point I finally understood Dave was more than just my powerlifting coach and a friend. He’s my brother. 

Not long after that I signed up for the Train Your Ass Off seminar at EliteFTS in Ohio. Two days with Dave Tate, maybe thirteen or fourteen other lifters, and a world completely different from what I was used to. Decades of accumulated knowledge, people who trained nothing like I did. It was disorienting and exhausting and one of the most valuable things I’ve ever done in this sport.

Dave Tate watched me squat and told me my brace was garbage, my adductors were weak, and I was relying on my quads too much. He said I had never had the privilege of someone who didn’t care about my feelings telling me I needed work.

He was right. I came back from Ohio with a fresh perspective and new drive to improve. More tools in my toolbox for my clients and myself. A roadmap on how to improve my squat and other lifts. And I got to work.

Two years have passed and I am now an OPS coach, training powerlifters remotely and in person. We just got back from PLU Nationals where I coached two of my athletes to a national championship and competed myself. My day didn't go exactly to plan. I went 3 for 3 on squats with a 2.5kg PR, 2 for 3 on the other two. Totaled 712.5 kgs, 411 DOTS at 117.9 kilograms bodyweight. Placed second in Masters 40-44 and fifth Open. 

When it was over I didn't feel what I expected to feel. I felt grateful. Grateful for the opportunity to even be on that stage with so many great lifters. Grateful for the hard prep cycle, the injury, all the stuff that didn't go right, because all of it was part of getting there. I walked away with an appreciation for what it means to just get to try on that stage. 

Five years ago I sat with a draft email for three days because I wasn’t sure I was worth the reply.

I was a burned out district supervisor who had watched his friends die. I was ready to walk away from everything I had built. I was scared and I was lost and I sent an email to a man I had never met because something in me wasn’t ready to give up.

Dave Osborn didn’t fix any of that. What he did was show me, week after week, that there was a version of me worth building toward. He pushed me when I needed to be pushed, met me in a parking lot when I needed someone to be there, and never once made me feel like my ceiling was where I was standing.

I am someone I can be proud of. It took a long time to be able to say that out loud. It took a lot of failure, loss, a seminar in Ohio, a walk through Victoria, a really vulnerable conversation in an outlet mall parking lot and five years of just trying.

But I got here.

Try.