joshuawayne.com

Please Note: The deeper into this I get the longer it seems to get.  I’m having a fun time writing it but it’s by no means “essential reading” to get something from my blog.  I’m including it so anybody who may have an interest in understanding how I got interested in the work I did (and the formative experiences that brought me here) can do so.

If you’d like to read Part 1 of this series, please click here.

And Then I Had a Freak Accident…

Two weeks to the day before my 16th birthday, on July 4th, 1985, I had a freak accident.  The short explanation is that I was being very cocky and stupid on a trampoline- generally speaking, not a very smart thing to do.  Without getting into the complex physics of how this actually happened, I got a 5-inch crack in my skull and was knocked unconscious.

I’m told I was out for maybe 30 seconds or so.  When I came to, I couldn’t move, everything was a white blur, all I could hear was a deafening ringing sound, I couldn’t move, and I had a headache that was beyond extreme.  I remember literally thinking these words, “Josh, you f#$ked up somehow, just be patient and it will all be okay.”

Gradually I was helped up and my senses started to come back to me.  I had to spend the next several days in the hospital under observation because of the severe concussion I had suffered, unable to hold food down, and still with a mammoth headache.  As you can imagine, the rest of my summer was spent taking it very easy.

Changes Were Afoot…

It didn’t take too long to physically recover from the accident, but over the next several months many things started to shift in my life in significant ways.  First, I became very depressed.  I felt that life had no meaning, and the more I tried to resolve this dilemma, the more I felt despair.  I had several close friends, but somehow I couldn’t really talk to anybody about what was going on inside and I felt very isolated and alone.
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Please note: I was recently encouraged to share a complete bio on my blog so that interested readers would know more about me and how I came to do the work I do today.  The more I get into it, the longer it gets.  It’s by no means essential reading to get what I talk about on this blog, but who knows: maybe somebody will find it interesting.  Truth be told, I’m having an enjoyable time writing it.

I’m not trying to recount every boring detail, but instead trying to focus on the few major life events that led me to do the work I do today.  It will take me a few installments to get all the relevant material written out, but here is Part 1.  I hope you find it at least slightly amusing : ) . Here goes…

I grew up in Highland Park, IL, a suburb about 30 minutes or so north of Chicago.  For the most part I was a normal American kid who played sports and was a decent student.  Like most kids of my generation (I was born in 1971) I spent a lot of time in front of the television and grew up on a pretty standard American diet.  Mom did a lot of home cooking, but there was also loads of fast food, hot dogs, chips, and Twinkies.

Thank God I remained as active as I did, because I was already a bit on the chubby side.  I had a number of overweight family members, and I think if I had grown up in the internet/video game era (yes, we had Atari, but by today’s standards I’m not even sure that counts) it probably would have become much more of an issue.

But remaining active like I did, it fortunately never went too much further than that- though I did have a very visceral period of emotional eating which I think in many ways helped me really understand this problem, and which I’ll recount in detail later.

Probably the single most important thing that happened in this early phase of my life that positively impacted my sense of health and fitness (and that would eventually cause me to be so interested in this topic) was that as a freshman in high school I joined the swim team.  

I don’t know what it’s like in other states, but in Illinois where I came from (or at least in my high school) swimmers always trained double practices.  What this meant was that every school day (plus Saturday’s if there was no swim meet) I was either in the pool or weight room at 6AM (and not a millisecond later or else we would experience our coach’s wrath in practice that day!).

Now I don’t mean to relish the point, but I will anyhow to milk it for what it’s worth.  If you do the math, this means I had to be up every day at 5:15AM and out the door 15 minutes later.  Sure, that’s early for high school you may be thinking, but it’s really no big deal- lots of people get up early (it’s got to be time to make the doughnuts somewhere).

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