I’m Brennan Ryan, and I’m a liar and a fraud.
Today, I have a great business, with great clients, who I teach to have a healthy lifestyle.
I teach them how to eat well, how to exercise, what not to eat, or snort, or drink, or smoke.
I am a hypocrite. You see, a personal trainer should always practice what they preach ,right?
Let me take you back over a decade ago.
It’s cold. Steam rises off my coffee. I’m in my “office”, well, more the garage with the walls lined to look like an office. I light a cigarette and take a sip of coffee, it’s getting cold fast, i’d better get started on my morning routine.
Dorinda is inside getting ready for work, and the kids ready for the day, I can hear them banging around a bit.
I get everything I need for the first job of the day ready.
* Garlic grinder – check
* Glass Bowl – check
* Water – check
* Cigarettes – check
* Wooden Skewer – check
* Bong – Check
* Marijuana stash – Check
I grind the dope up with some tobacco, making sure I don’t spill any, this stuff costs me hundreds every week, I have to be careful. After all, I have a young family to care for. The selfish irony of that thought process staggers me today.
I fill the bong with water, pack the first cone of the day, just a small one, enough to get my head straight to start the day. Again, it is amazing the bullshit you tell yourself to rationalise selfish behaviour.
I hold the bong in my left hand, raise it to my mouth, flick the BIC, and close my eyes as I start to draw breath and hold the flame to the green / brown mix in the cone.
Nothing sounds quite like a bong, no smoke smells or tastes quite the same.
This is the best part of the day. My breakfast bong. The first time the sweet smoke hits my lungs, I hold it in deep for what seems like a long time, savouring the heat inside my chest. Even as I exhale I can feel the THC hit my bloodstream, course through my body, hit my head behind the eyes. It takes away all the pain, solves all my stress and problems.
A noise distracts me from my blissful moment, as I turn towards the opening door i’m already a little pissed off, it could only be Dorinda (the kids are too small to bother me out here), and she knows better than to bother me until i’ve had my morning coffee, cigarette, and a couple of bongs. I don’t deserve to be nagged like this.
It’s not Dorinda.
It’s Dad.
In. My. Shed.
Watching quietly as I finish the bong. Yeah, I was that fucking arrogant and selfish, I finished it. Waste not want not, right?
“Hey Dad. What are you doing here?” – I was stoned, not stupid. I knew, intervention time. Who do they think they are?
This is my drug hazed memory of what Dad said. It’s probably pretty accurate, it hit me hard.
“Well son, Dorinda has called me and asked for help. Your Mum, your Step mother and I are here to help. Your Step Mother is taking the kids out for the day, she’ll be back at 4 pm. In the meantime, Dorinda, your Mum and I are going to talk to you about helping you to stop smoking this shit, and you are going to make a decision.”
“By 4 pm, you will have decided to stop smoking dope forever, which we will help you do, or you will have decided that you won’t stop.”
“If you decide not to stop, then we are going to help Dorinda move out, with the kids, and we are going to help her start again.”
“I want you to understand that we will not give up on you, we will help you, we will not disown you, however we are not going to let your family live with a drug addict one single day more”
With that, he pretty much just left me to think on that. I had another bong. I can’t remember exactly, but I think I actually felt relieved. Drug addiction is like carrying a weight, when someone offered to take the load I could see a way of getting out from under it.
The rest of the day is a bit of a blur to be honest. There were tears, yelling, crying, denial, confrontation, anger, acceptance, regret, forgiveness, and by four o’clock I had decided that my family was more important than drugs, and I began the journey of changing my life.
The next 3 years I began to actually be a husband and father, spending time with my kids and wife, and become a happier person.
Around this time, my son asked if he could try Karate. I was thrilled, because i’d always been one of those “I’d love to try karate one day” people, and ball sports weren’t his thing. I sat at the back of the dojo watching my son train for a month or two, I realised he was enjoying it very much, so I decided I may as well join in hoping it may encourage him to stick with it.
I never imagined it would be something I would stick with, let alone become a black belt. I did though, eight years later. It wasn’t plain sailing, in the first year of my training I suffered a terrible injury, life changing injury in fact. During a routine training exercise, my right leg hyperextended, and I shattered the tibea plateau (first 100 mm of the top of the shin bone) into about 60 bits! I was lucky to keep the leg and came away carrying around ten screws and a plate in my leg forever.
The recovery from that injury was long and hard. I broke my right leg, so I could not drive, I couldn’t even have a shower without help. I was again glad I was married to such an amazing woman who cared for me so well in that time. This recovery period did bring about another change I hadn’t expected, through inactivity and eating the same as I did pre-injury (badly), I gained a lot of weight. I got up to 135 KG (plus probably, I stopped weighing myself). Did I care? Not really, I knew once I got back into karate i’d drop a few kilos, so I wasn’t really that fussed when the Doctor told me I had to now lose 25 kilos. The Doctor soon put paid to my nonchalance by explaining in simple terms that I could “lose weight through diet and exercise now, or do nothing and lose weight when your knee totally wears out and I have to take your leg off”. The bigger the “why”, the easier the “how”, right? In an instant, I had a pretty big “why”.
The next phase of my life then became all about getting fit, losing weight, and becoming the person I am today. Life became – get up early, train, work, train again, sleep – repeat. At this time I was running a business that I owned all up for 12 years. It was a “Promotional Merchandise Brokerage”, i.e. printed tees, pens, embroidery etc. When asked what I used to do, I often describe it as “Selling shit I didn’t believe in, to people I didn’t care about”. Of course, that doesn’t mean I hated all my clients, it just means that I wasn’t focussed on clients results, I was always chasing the next sale, to stay ahead of the next bill. This means I never really thrived, just survived.
I had the business pumping in the first few years, got ripped off, lost a heap of money, sued someone and won, wasted more money on that, struggled for a while, got it busy again, then started to slowly but surely lose momentum until the day came that I realised I was dreading going to work…… and I owned the fucking place!
Something had to change. I sat down and wrote a “magic wand list”. If I could wave a magic wand, what would I be doing? Who would I be? What would I have? Who would I help? What I was doing, was not on that list. I realised when I wrote that list, that what I really loved, what woke me up in the morning, what inspired me, what drove me to work hard without effort, was helping other people achieve goals…… a watershed moment for me, who knew? I’d spent years being selfish, but through karate had found that helping a 10 year old get a bit of black tape stuck on his belt was what really gave me a kick.
I started to think about what I could do to take that to another level. How could I help people? Who would they be? What did a former drug fucked, selfish, fat bastard possibly have to offer? Well, lets see. I knew how to fuck up a business. I knew how to nearly end a marriage. I knew how to use drugs. I knew how to get fat. I knew how to mind fuck myself into depression and aggression……. but because I knew all that, I also knew how to fix all that shit up….. hmmmm, another watershed moment…. the value I had was that I was a fuck up who knew how to stop being a fuck up. If I could fix all that shit for myself, then I could help someone else do it too.
Once the decision was made, the rest fell into place. I studied to become a personal trainer, found myself in a great gym, helping great people achieve great results. My PT business has thrived, when you love what you do, you love the people you help, it always will. Not one to be satisfied with the status quo, i’m always looking for how to level up, so my next mission is to help as many people gain a healthy life my showing other PT’s to do what I have done.
Was it easy? No, but i’m glad it happened. I’m forever grateful to my wife, who was brave enough to ask for help. I’m forever grateful to my parents, who were loving enough to come together and stand up to me. I’m forever grateful for my kids, who unknowingly were the thing I was most afraid of losing and became my reason for staying sober.
I haven’t always led a healthy lifestyle, but what I have done has led me here, and that is the important thing. Without my particular journey, then helping other people might not be as important to me as it is. Without my journey, I may have less empathy with people who struggle with their relationship with food. Without my journey I would be someone else.
I’m Brennan Ryan, and I was a liar and a fraud.
Sally Carr says
Wow thank you so much for sharing your story Bren! I can resonate with that one and those feelings. What an inspiration you are I knew there was a reason I chose your gym!