About Me

I’m a 33-year old fitness fanatic with a regular boring day job and an unhealthy obsession with sports.

Ever since I can remember I’ve been crazy about sports. As with most Englishmen, it started out with football which was absolutely my first love. That love was quite literally mauled out of me at secondary school where we were forced to play rugby. Despite a couple of years of fierce resistance, I ended up getting quite into it and it is still today my favourite spectator sport.

I then inexplicably developed an obssession with basketball, a sport which had almost no visbility or participation in England in the 90′s. It happened after a trip to the USA in 1990 where I fell in love with UNLV and Larry Johnson during their unstoppable drive towards the NCAA title.  I was hooked immediately and even persuaded my father to ship back a basketball hoop so I could practice in the back garden.

After graduating from university I miraculously managed to parlay my passion for basketball into a job at FIBA, the International Basketball Federation. I had a great few years there, but no matter what anyone says, when you turn your hobby into a job, it becomes, well a job. To use a clumsy sexual metaphor, it’s impossible to maintain a platonic love for a sport in which the relationship has been consumated. When you are behind the scenes you see too much and you no longer have the innocence of the fan.

In any case, the upshot was that I turned my obsessive nature to the world of fitness. It started out with running (why, for the love of God does it always start with running?) and I even joined a gym so I could use the treadmill. I remember watching the rather intimidating guys spending all their time in the free weights section, an area which I barely dared approach let alone actually use. But eventually I felt its tractor beam like pull and I turned into a meathead.

Bodybuilding was my new love and although I never entertained the thought of stripping down and oiling up, I did want the type of physique that could grace a Marvel comic. As I learned more and more about training, I realised that bodybuilding style training was actually pretty boring and I gravitated towards more athletic pursuits. In 2007 I stumbled across CrossFit and I found it to be a great programme for what I wanted to achieve. The combination of short, intense and varied workouts was really enticing and the videos of the athletes posting almost superhuman performances wonderfully motivating.

In 2008 I completed my Level 1 certification and I’m now a part time trainer at Crossfit Léman, which is without a doubt the finest training facility in the Geneva area.