#063 – World-record holding adaptive athlete, Josh Koehler, talks about his comeback journey from several major surgeries, including three shoulder and two foot surgeries and, most recently an aortic dissection resulting in several strokes, an emergency open heart surgery, and a coronary artery bypass surgery to obstacle course races.
Topics Covered:
- Pursuing your dreams despite the negativity around you
- Benefits of functional fitness, especially after an injury
- Support from family and taking the fitness journey together
- Having holistic fitness goals and plans
Today’s Guest
Josh Koehler
Josh is a world-record-holding adaptive athlete. He goes by “@2c_ocr” on social media, which stands for Second Chance Obstacle Course Racing. He started that page in 2018 to chronicle his comeback journey from several major surgeries, including 3 shoulder and 2 foot surgeries.
In November 2020, Josh had an aortic dissection resulting in several strokes, an emergency open heart surgery, and a coronary artery bypass surgery… bringing his surgery count past a dozen. He continues to run and race because he refuses to allow his injuries to rob him of the outdoor activities he loves. Josh also wants to set an example for others, including his own visually impaired son. His most recent endeavors include the soft launch of a new website and Instagram page: 2cRacing.com and @2c.racing, respectively. Josh hopes to feature many challenged athletes who deserve their stories to be told!
Follow Josh:
- Instagram – @2c_ocr
- Instagram – @2c.racing
- Website – Second Chance Racing
Resources:
- Inspire to Run on Instagram – @inspiretorunpodcast
- Free Guide – Kickstart your Fitness in 5 Steps
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Josh Koehler 0:00
Ended up taking me almost two hours with my son, my son was waiting on me the whole time, almost bored. And, you know, the, the the one race that was supposed to be one and done ended up turning into a lot of different things, you know, a desire to improve upon that embarrassing performance. And then it kind of spurred into a comeback journey, because as I continued to do them, you know, I saw that, you know, I kind of got a glimpse of what I had been missing my whole life or the last 10 to 15 years before that. And my mindset set started to shift a little bit, and which led to you know, starting the page and all of that, and it’s been a wild, wild journey ever since that for sure.
Intro/Outro 0:46
Welcome to Inspire to run podcast. Here you will find inspiration. Whether you’re looking to take control of your health and fitness or you’re a seasoned runner, looking for community and some extra motivation. You will hear inspiring stories from amazing runners, along with helpful tips from fitness experts. Now, here’s your host Richard Conner.
Richard Conner 1:10
Hi, everyone, welcome to inspire to run Podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about how to overcome adversity in your life to reach your fitness goals and your big life goals. And it’s truly an honor for me to be sitting down today with Josh Koehler. He is a world record holding adaptive athlete. He goes by to CEOs underscore OCR on social media, which stands for Second Chance obstacle course racing, he started that page to share his comeback journey from several major surgeries, including three shoulder and two foot surgeries, and most recently, an aortic dissection, resulting in several strokes and emergency open heart surgery and a coronary artery bypass surgery. So welcome to the show, Josh.
Josh Koehler 1:56
Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah, um, I’m the guy who’s famous for having a lot of surgeries.
Richard Conner 2:04
Well, you are an incredible athlete, an incredible human being. And it truly is an honor to have you here and share your story with our community. I mean, it’s so inspirational, and we’re gonna get into it in a moment. But you know, when I first saw your Instagram page, I’m like, wow, this guy is amazing. With all the work that you’re doing, despite the adversity in your life, and it’s not just one, it’s multiple adversities that you’ve had to face. And I’m sure a lot of the folks listening are going through their own things in their life, but you will certainly inspire them with your story. So, you know, let’s just kind of jump into it and just get to know you a little bit better. And a little bit about your background.
Josh Koehler 2:43
Sure, yeah. My name is Josh Koehler. Like you said, for the last several years, I’ve been doing obstacle course racing and kind of kind of going crazy with it. And it all really started as a comeback journey from different injuries, you know, I, I had gotten hurt in the military and had to have several shoulder surgeries, I tore my rotator cuff really bad. And I had multiple surgeries, I didn’t get to serve a full military career, like I had originally planned, you know, and that kind of set me on a different trajectory. You know, I didn’t have the mindset, then, that I think that I have now, you know, my mindset has definitely developed a lot in the beginning in the early 2000s, when when I started having these surgeries, you know, there was athletes and everything, you know, on the Braves, you know, a Braves fan, you know, there was pitchers that would tear a rotator cuff or have to have Tommy John surgery because of you know, tearing other ligaments or whatever. And you would see professional athletes have a recovery and a comeback journey and everything. But those were people who had, you know, teams around them, they had multimillion dollar contracts. So they have the whole team of physicians and doctors and they could go to the best doctors and specialists in the entire world, they are going to the best physical therapists in the entire world. So that was like the gold standard. You know, for me, just an average person, a low ranking individual in the military tears their shoulder really bad. The whole process ended up being a little bit of a debacle that, you know, is a story for a different time. But, you know, I had these surgeries, and I’m, you know, left, you know, trying to come back from from those things. And I was a driven person at that time. You know, I definitely wouldn’t say that I, you know, went from non driven to driven, but I was driven in different ways. You know, I had a motivation of making sure I could run a first class PFT again, you know, because those directly corresponded to promotions in the military, you know, your your PFT score and your rifle score and everything in the military played into where you fell in comparison to other people, which determined your promotions which determined your pay. So for me to have any gainful employment in a positive trajectory. I had to rehab myself in such a way that I could at least get a first class PFT, you know, so I would continually try to do the rehab and get back as soon as possible in that respect. But I didn’t have anybody in my life who had come back in a sports capacity. I didn’t have any family who had ever seen that really, you know, firsthand. So I didn’t have any family members who would give me assurances that, hey, you know, you can come back from this. I didn’t have any fellow Marines or I didn’t didn’t know any retired military individuals at the time who had gone through a devastating injury, and then had to come back and had wild success in being an athlete again, it was it was all negative stuff. It was, you know, doctors telling me, you’ll never do monkey bars again, because your shoulder so messed up, you know, you’re gonna have problems with it for the rest of your life, you’re going to be doing stretchy band exercises for the rest of your life, PTS is going to be, you know, a forever thing for you. By the time I got out after having multiple shoulder surgeries, it was kind of a continuation of the same thing. People who had friends who had gotten out of the military, it was a common joke that they would all tell the newly departed individual that basically Hey, you know, you know what shape you’re in right now, that’s pretty much the best shape you’re going to be in for the rest of your life. And a shocking amount of people would say, that seems to seem to have been like a repeated common thing. And so there was this just general consensus that your best days are over, your athletic days are pretty much over. It’s all downhill from here. And more importantly, and more disappointingly, all the doctors were probably the most negative in regards to saying, you know, your athletic days are over, you’ll never do monkey bars, again, so on and so forth. And I didn’t have anything to contrast that against, except those professionals, you know, the professionals could do it. But like I said, I didn’t have an entire team trying to bring me back for a playoff push. I didn’t have you know, world renowned doctors and physicians, I didn’t have, you know, new personnel nutritionists, I didn’t have millions of dollars at my disposal to do hyperbaric training and get all of these, you know, platelet injections and everything. So I figured that I was just in a different class, and that if the doctors who were professionals that that’s what their opinion was, and I didn’t have any other frame of reference, I kind of got sucked into believing that I kind of stayed on that negative path for a while, a while turned into like 12 years. So by the time you go from the early 2000s to 2017 I finally got fed up with you know, the the lifestyle of basically watching TV playing Playstation, go into work and then rinse and repeat every day. You know, all I was doing was watching TV playing Playstation and that’s about it. I ate fairly healthy so I wasn’t too overweight or anything but you know, I was skinny fat and becoming less and less of an athlete every single day finally got tired of that I had a buddy loan p90x to my wife and I we started through p90x It probably took us about twice as long as it was supposed to because I started getting a little nagging injuries and everything’s I had been out of the physical game for so long. You know, the back started bothering me. I had to stop for a little bit and we resumed but we push through. We did p90x, we ended up doing p90x to somewhere along the lines of end of 2017 I guess I did my first 5k and was absolutely embarrassed by by my time you know, the first 5k Post military it had been a the first one in over a decade. I had taken off initially trying to run like an eight minute pace, which was slow compared to what I did in the military, but I couldn’t sustain that and after about half a mile I was walked jogging the whole rest of the 5k so we kind of went back to the drawing board ended up seeing a commercial for Spartan Race. Can I took that as you know a challenge. I figured I would do one Spartan Race. I ended up gifting the Spartan Race to my oldest son and myself as a way to kind of connect with my oldest son or attempt to so we did that the Spartan Race was scheduled for the beginning of 2018 and from there it you know, things kind of took off like wildfire. I did just as terrible at my first Spartan Race as I did and that that 5k A year before like we all Yeah, I came in with horrible nutrition experience for races like that i over ate the night before out of Out of fear that I would, you know, bonk during the race, and just be hungry and need food. I over ate that morning, and basically out of fear, like I had been out of the athletic game for 1213 years at that point, you know, from, from a competition standpoint, so, but I was still prideful in a way and I wanted to do really good and those things mesh together in a bad way, and gave me an internal fear that I was going to do terrible unless I really feel love. So I completely over fueled, but yeah, it ended up taking me almost two hours with my son, my son was waiting on me the whole time, almost bored. And, you know, the, the, the one race that was supposed to be one and done, ended up turning into a lot of different things, you know, a desire to improve upon that embarrassing performance, and then it kind of spurred into a comeback journey, because as I continued to do them, you know, I saw that, you know, I kind of got a glimpse of what I had been missing my whole life, or the last 10 to 15 years before that. And my mindset set started to shift a little bit, and which led to, you know, starting the page and all of that, and it’s been a wild, wild journey ever since that, for sure.
Richard Conner 11:20
That’s so incredible. And, you know, that’s kind of the way it started sometimes, right? When you do that first Spartan Race, or whatever the race is, and you’re like, wait a minute, I could certainly do that better. And I’m gonna find a way how to do it. So. So thank you for sharing that there’s so much that you shared, I want to touch on a few things that you talked about. Sure, you know, so first, you know, kind of, with the surgeries that you had, and the injuries that you had, and the negative messages around you. I mean, that’s a that’s a common thing. And, you know, it is unfortunate and, you know, being able to find the positivity in your life to to make a change, it’s not easy. So, this is one of the reasons why it’s so important to have this conversation to let people know that, you know, you can do something different, you don’t have to listen to those negative messages, you can overcome your adversities. And you can, you know, reach your goal. So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, what it was like, during that time, you know, you mentioned you didn’t really have access, maybe to the same kind of doctors and healthcare as maybe the professional sports players do, or, you know, positive messaging around you. What made you change your mindset at that moment in time to say, you know, what, I am going to make a change despite these injuries, despite where I am in life, I’m going to make a change.
Josh Koehler 12:34
You know, it was a from around 2005 to 2017, it was kind of just a continued slow fade. You’re absolutely correct that a lot of people don’t have positive messaging in their lives, they don’t have somebody who has kind of paved the way that has, not everybody has an example that they can point to, hey, they had a similar injury. And, you know, they shattered the doctors opinions, and they’re out doing all of this stuff, I want to be like that. I didn’t really have anything like that other than, like professional athletes, and because of the money and the resources that they had, that I didn’t have, I thought it was just, you know, impossible. And I didn’t have anybody around, tell me any differently. It wasn’t that, you know, I have a negative family. It wasn’t that all my friends were completely uninspiring people. It’s just that I didn’t have anybody that was on that specific journey, or had been through that journey around me. I didn’t have the kind of mentors back to me that I try now to be to other people. So it was really a long, slow fade. And it wasn’t until 2017 where I got fed up, I essentially saw a picture of myself from a work party. And it was an outdoor work party. And I was in the background of somebody else’s picture. But I got posted on the company intranet and everything and I saw myself I was like we didn’t Is that me, I was standing with horrible posture. Definitely nothing that would ever resemble somebody who had been in the Marine Corps, you know, horrible posture or you know, hips sagging and leaning to the side. I had a, you know, small gut sticking out. My arms were skinny, no muscular definition in my arms whatsoever. I wasn’t necessarily fat, so to speak, but I was definitely skinny fat. I had lost a majority of my muscle that I had. I didn’t look like an athlete whatsoever. And I just didn’t like that. I was like, This can’t be this can’t be the first step towards what I’m going to look like what I’m going to be like what I’m going to feel like for the rest of my life. I need to do something because this is embarrassing to me. I was like I have higher standards than that. I don’t want to be the person with terrible posture, I don’t want to be the person who’s hunched back at 50 years old. I don’t want to be the person who can’t hardly move and just sits in a chair all day. And I started reflecting a little bit. And basically like, that’s what I’m setting myself up for. That’s what I have been doing for, like 12 years, just playing Playstation. And that stuff can be fun. I’m not condoning or condemning video games, I’m not condemning watching TV, I still enjoy video games, I still watch TV with a family, but it’s not a big part of my lifestyle anymore. And I had to choose something different. I had to have a spark, and I guess embarrassment, and letting myself down a little bit. I had always wanted to be the person who served, you know, full 2030 years in the military, I wanted originally wanted to be a drill instructor, I wanted to retire as a Marine in the military, that all didn’t happen. I guess I got embarrassed by how much of a departure, there’s certainly something to be said by God taking you in other directions than what you originally intended for your life. And that’s fine that the the military aspirations didn’t necessarily pan out. I’m cool with that even even to this day. But the parts that relied on my effort, were all disappointing because I had given up I had let myself go, I had caused a greater separation, because of my my lack of purpose and lack of, you know, inspiration and motivation and all that stuff. You know, I needed to get moving and get back to the things that I previously enjoyed. Because I was basically lying to myself and pretending that I didn’t enjoy those things. And I was filling my life with with video games and, and playing season upon season in Madden Football, because I loved athletics, and controlling digital players on a TV screen was at the time, I thought the the closest I was going to get, I didn’t think I was going to be the athlete anymore. I was just a spectator. And you know, and that changed in 2017 and 2018. And led to the creation of the page and where I really wanted to chronicle my comeback journey and my injury recovery journey and show other people that despite what the doctors say, and despite all the negative negativity, and despite even sometimes family members, almost assisting you in the hey, you know, happens everybody as part of getting older, you know, I knew that wasn’t me. And I have found over the last few years that just how much that wasn’t me how much I was lying to myself how much I was pretending. And it kind of turned into the complete opposite of, you know, an absolute addiction, I went crazy, we’ll end up talking about a little bit. But I went crazy with the races and trying to set world records and trying to continuously beat previous race totals and get better with speed. The heart surgery that I ended up having to have was a wrinkle that kind of put a big dent in the speed aspect of things. But, you know, my mindset was better this time around, and I returned to sports faster the second time around than I did before. So it’s it’s been a wild ride. And I’ve been able to meet tons of people through my page and through sharing my journey and just being involved in the sport. And it’s, it’s been life changing, to say the least,
Richard Conner 18:35
for sure. I mean, life changing is a great way to describe, you know, describe that. And, you know, I love a lot of the things that you said and you know, go back to what you’re talking about how you didn’t feel when you saw yourself, the photo of yourself. That was not how you want it to be that was that was your goal to be better than that, not what someone else wanted for you. And I think that’s really important, because I think there’s kind of a lot of messaging around about, you know, what people should or should not do or what they should fall into follow from external influences. But in your case, you’re like, No, this is what I want for myself. So I really applaud you for, you know, realizing that and taking action. So just really, really wonderful story. And I want to get, you know, a little bit into the how, you know, how did you kind of overcome those injuries and the surgeries that you went through? And then you know, talk a little bit about the future surgeries that you had went through with your heart so so let’s little talk a little bit about like the movement in the house, like how did you overcome some of the shoulder surgery injuries as well as I think you said you had surgeries on your feet as well.
Josh Koehler 19:43
Yeah, so I had the the shoulder surgeries in the military and I tried to maintain a level of fitness after the military. And I ended up you know, going to the gym and trying to lift ungodly heavy weight all the time. You know to be a boy bodybuilder or whatever probably wasn’t going to be in shape Marine, I would at least try to lift as heavy as possible and be a big dude. That lasted for a little bit. And I ended up having hernia surgery as a result of some overexuberance in that area. And then I kind of gave up on the heavy weight lifting and eventually had some some foot surgeries tore a couple of ligaments in my foot. And the crazy thing is, it was kind of the same thing with the the foot surgeries as well. I was told by several people that I would, I would never be much of a runner ever again, the physical therapists were okay, you know, they would try to give you a little bit higher of a ceiling of potential so to speak, you know, went through the physical therapy and everything. But my foot surgeries were pretty major, I ended up having to have four titanium screws in my foot for about six months, and my foot ballooned to almost twice the size of my other foot just from the the swelling and reaction of having those those large titanium screws in my foot, which were necessary to hold all the bones together, I had essentially twisted my foot apart and and torn, roughly four major ligaments in the mid foot. Wow. And I wasn’t a foot expert, the people who were foot experts, you when they offered opinions of what things would be like athletically, after this mishap. They didn’t have a lot of positivity in there. Their ceiling of potential, again, wasn’t very, very high wasn’t exactly inspiring, or flattering or anything. And they were the experts, you know, and it was still I didn’t have people in my life to that had been through foot surgeries. And now they’re running marathons and triathlons and everything. So I assumed that the experts were correct. And that I was always going to have swelling problems with my foot and that it was always going to hurt and that, you know, long or short no matter how much training I did, it would always hurt afterwards. And it kind of still does. But the thing is, I realized that, you know, once I started that journey with the p90x and and a big part of that was my wife also joined that fitness journey with me. She is a wonderful person, my wife is incredible has been by my side through all of this crazy stuff. And we sat down that path of doing the p90x and p90x two and p90x Three. She didn’t do the first Spartan Race with with me, but we ended up doing a small trip shortly after doing our first Spartan Race, and I did one with her. And we started doing the you know, sometimes I would run competitive competitively by myself and other times I would run in the open wave or the fun wave, so to speak, and do the obstacle course races with my wife. And that was that was and still is an amazing part of our life. We are all into fitness. Now. My wife, our kids, we haven’t really looked back, my kids are swimmers, kids are runners, my, my son and daughter, my youngest son and my my daughter, they both podium regularly. In the obstacle course races, my oldest son before he moved out of the house, he was getting podiums in Spartan. So it was kind of a lifestyle change for the whole family. And we just started getting moving and starting doing all the races, the only way to really get better at something is to be bad at it at first and keep doing it again. You know, I see all these things now. And I know all these things now that I didn’t know then, in regards to failure being part of the process. And, you know, there’s the Instagram reels, you know, they say the first step of it, being good at something is, you know, sucking at it, you know, and that’s so true. You know, I was, I was terrible at everything that I did at first, I was terrible at p90x, I would get unbelievably sore at every single workout until I didn’t. And I was horrendously slow at all of the obstacle course races and bad on obstacles until I wasn’t. I started doing the pull ups again, I had to really put a lot of focus on doing shoulder rehab, and not just the shoulder rehab that I had done 10 years prior, but I was looking at things on the internet. ATHLEAN X Jeff Cavalier of ATHLEAN X has a lot of good videos on YouTube about rehabbing almost every single part of the body. And there’s the prehab guys and there’s all kinds of good people on social media, sharing little tidbits of information. So I would pick up on things and try to incorporate new ways of rehabbing certain injuries, new exercises, a new approach that didn’t necessarily in involve trying to strain my guts out when I was lifting weights, so that it was better on my joints and allowed me to kind of strengthen the muscles without continuously doing additional damage to soft tissue. Not you know, not everybody can be a powerlifter. You know, kudos to the people who can, and kudos to the people whose joints hold up. But apparently, that was never in my destiny. God did not create me to be an Olympic power lifter. And you know, I needed something different. So I had to get moving, I had to find out where my niche was. And when I finally started doing functional fitness, and started doing yoga, I got exposed to Yoga with the p90x Yoga, things like yoga and pilates have their place, you know, I’m not a yoga and pilates guy, but I will do the stretching and the foam rolling and the yoga and the Pilates. Now, you know, with no shame, you know, all of that has been a big part to getting my flexibility back getting some balance back working on functional fitness, instead of just the same power lifts you know, squats and bench press and lat pull downs, you know, doing something that’s different. And in working on cross abdominal work and everything, go into ninja gyms and practicing obstacles and, and working on all of your weaknesses instead of trying to make all of your lifts that are decent, better. I started trying to work on the things that I was worst at. So the trail running, I sucked at trail running at the time and 2017 through just a few years ago, really. I had a mountain range near my house. And I could drive to it in about 15 minutes and there was a four mile trail, I ran that four mile trail with almost 1000 feet of elevation gain across four miles 10 or 11 times with absolutely zero change whatsoever in how I felt or in my time. Sometimes my times in the last few would be worse until they weren’t the 11th or 12th. One. I looked at my watch and I still felt terrible. But I looked at my watch one day and it was several minutes faster. Like it was a it was a big jump almost five minutes than my previous run. And I thought it was an anomaly at first but a couple days later I was I was trying to do this a couple times a week. I went back shaved another minute or two off and that progression kind of continued things kind of started to click with me from a cardiovascular standpoint. So I started getting at least decent at trail running, decent functional overall fitness, my balance improved. And I went from a person in the spring of 2018 who did a Spartan sprint in almost two hours to where I was doing by the end of 2019. I was doing Spartan sprints competitively at just over 30 minutes. Wow. It was a huge thing you know, and it was similar experience for our kids for my wife, my wife lost an enormous amount of weight. I’m so proud of her. She is fit and inspires a lot of women because she’s done a lot of obstacle course races she has competed at OCR World Championships, she has multiple trifectas each year and Spartan and you know, we’re like kind of people, we always insist on doing our burpees and everything and, you know, I’m super proud of her and we’ve all just come a long way. And it’s been a journey together, you know, through the the page. Second Chance OCR, I’ve gotten to show a lot of this stuff show the foot surgeries and shoulder surgeries, and, you know, we just enjoy encouraging other people. And when I see somebody who has gone through an injury, especially if they’re getting down on themselves, you know, I, I always want to step in and try to encourage them and offer to help offer to be their offer to send them videos, I’ve you know, I’ve sent people some of the training videos that have helped me that I found on YouTube, just whatever they need, you know, because I want to be for other people what I didn’t have, so that other people don’t spend 10 plus years or maybe even the rest of their life believing the same lie that I did that everything is over and you just need to pack it in and watch TV. That’s really where where we’re at, you know, you you have to take it one day at a time. You know, some of these are cliche, but they’re they’re true. You know, a lot of these are cliche because they’re true. You do have to take it one day at a time. You kind of have to ignore the number on the scale. If you’re in a weight loss journey or a body fat cutting journey. You can’t focus on that exclusively. You know, it’s okay to be realistic and to track your progress. Is and to know where you’re at and know where you started and check back in a week or two later and, and be able to see different different progress, that’s fine. I’m not advocating against that. But it’s all important, making small changes to your diet, and then making more small changes to your diet. Until now you’re eating mostly, mostly real food instead of junk and processed stuff. Getting the exercise making it a part of your lifestyle, making it a part of your relationship, making it a part of being a healthy family. All of that is important. Because if you don’t have buy in, in your family, it’s tough. And I know there’s a lot of people out there who want to go down this journey or, or maybe they’re already trying to start this journey. And they not only don’t have buy in, you know, with their, their family, maybe they even have absolute pushback or rejection from their family, like, I’m not going to eat those vegetables, I’m going to stick with the chips. I’ve, I’ve eaten this every day in my life. And I like it, and I don’t care, you know, you can do your athletic thing you can, you can be the health nerd, you can do the organic thing. And, you know, I unfortunately see a lot of people who, you know, they don’t have the buy in from their family and friends. And sometimes, you know, like I said, outright rejection of their, their concepts, but I would encourage you, if you’re listening and you’re in that situation, stick with it, because it is your life. It is your health journey. If you have a passion for being better, it’s okay to be cringe worthy to other people be be an outcast, be that person who steps up and does the right thing for your health, because nobody is going to do it for you. Rehab, your injuries, there’s tons of stuff that’s out there, you can contact me directly. If you can’t find the stuff or you’re you’re having trouble with it. I sometimes help people with nutrition. And I’m just passionate about all of it. I want people to live healthy lives, get good sleep, drink water, get sunlight, eat real food, and exercise. It’s not that complicated. We live in a horribly, unfit and unhealthy world. But if you do though, those basic things, you will stand out amongst other people 99 times out of 100 you will be you know, extremely successful in your health endeavors. You know, there will be setbacks, I had the setback with the heart surgery, which we’ll we’re gonna get into in a minute. But I have recovered very quickly from that, because I had adopted a different mindset and a different status quo with how I live my life, all the way from movement, and motion to diet and everything. And the whole package, you know, kind of comes together for some pretty powerful results, if you look at it, so stick with it, as is my message to, to all the people who are struggling with trying to go down this journey.
Richard Conner 33:08
Wow, I really appreciate you sharing that because, you know, that’s what we’re trying to do here on inspired around podcasts is really inspire others to take control of their health and fitness, and make a change in their life, you know, based on what they want, what they’re looking for, what their goals are. And, you know, something I wanted to touch on before you know, your goals was, you know, I want to be better person who I see in a photo right now I want to be better than that I have higher standards for myself. And, you know, for me personally, my goals, you know, if I roll back the clock for five years ago, was to overcome my fears. I you know, I kind of grew up in a, in a way that I was afraid of everything, I was afraid of heights, I was afraid of failure, I was probably afraid of success. And you know, that’s something that, you know, getting back into running and getting into obstacle course racing has helped me personally. But that was my goal. And I’m sure those who are listening have their own goals, not necessarily something that someone tells them how they should be, but something that they themselves want to get to. And for sure, all of us want to be healthy, kind of in our own way, whatever that looks like. And I think the advice that you shared is, is really, really helpful. And going back to the movement piece really, really helpful for you to share, you know, your turning around the functional fitness, you know, not only lifting heavier weights or things you think you might have to do to recover, but some of those other methods of making yourself stronger, more flexible, and more functional, right. And I also love what you said around Pilates and yoga, because those are topics that I brought on the show and I’m like, Well how is this going to resonate with the community and with listeners, right? How are they going to look at Pilates and yoga? I’m like, No, I’m going to do this anyway, because I’ve seen how it’s helped other runners right in their running journey. So I’m really happy that you mentioned that kind of reinforce, you know, some of the topics that we’ve had on the show as well. Hey everyone, now’s a good time for us to take a break. Eric, Josh has shared helpful information through his journey around surrounding yourself with positivity and people who support you, believing in yourself and not falling into what others believe is possible for you. And the importance of functional fitness, especially if you’re recovering from an injury. Now, don’t worry, Josh has so much more to share as next week we’ll dive into his aortic dissection part of the story, the hurdles he had to overcome, and the impact is OCR and Spartan racing, so make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss our next episode. In the meantime, if this episode inspired you to make a change in your life. Visit us at inspiretorun.co/kickstart or visit us on Instagram @inspiretorunpodcast and DM us the word Kickstart to get started on your journey. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next week.
Intro/Outro 35:58
That’s it for this episode of inspired to run podcast. We hope you are inspired to take control of your health and fitness and take it to the next level. Be sure to click the subscribe button to join our community. And also please rate and review. Thanks for listening
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Ended up taking me almost two hours with my son, my son was waiting on me the whole time, almost bored. And, you know, the, the the one race that was supposed to be one and done ended up turning into a lot of different things, you know, a desire to improve upon that embarrassing performance. And then it kind of spurred into a comeback journey, because as I continued to do them, you know, I saw that, you know, I kind of got a glimpse of what I had been missing my whole life or the last 10 to 15 years before that. And my mindset set started to shift a little bit, and which led to you know, starting the page and all of that, and it’s been a wild, wild journey ever since that for sure.
Intro/Outro 0:46
Welcome to Inspire to run podcast. Here you will find inspiration. Whether you’re looking to take control of your health and fitness or you’re a seasoned runner, looking for community and some extra motivation. You will hear inspiring stories from amazing runners, along with helpful tips from fitness experts. Now, here’s your host Richard Conner.
Richard Conner 1:10
Hi, everyone, welcome to inspire to run Podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about how to overcome adversity in your life to reach your fitness goals and your big life goals. And it’s truly an honor for me to be sitting down today with Josh Koehler. He is a world record holding adaptive athlete. He goes by to CEOs underscore OCR on social media, which stands for Second Chance obstacle course racing, he started that page to share his comeback journey from several major surgeries, including three shoulder and two foot surgeries, and most recently, an aortic dissection, resulting in several strokes and emergency open heart surgery and a coronary artery bypass surgery. So welcome to the show, Josh.
Josh Koehler 1:56
Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah, um, I’m the guy who’s famous for having a lot of surgeries.
Richard Conner 2:04
Well, you are an incredible athlete, an incredible human being. And it truly is an honor to have you here and share your story with our community. I mean, it’s so inspirational, and we’re gonna get into it in a moment. But you know, when I first saw your Instagram page, I’m like, wow, this guy is amazing. With all the work that you’re doing, despite the adversity in your life, and it’s not just one, it’s multiple adversities that you’ve had to face. And I’m sure a lot of the folks listening are going through their own things in their life, but you will certainly inspire them with your story. So, you know, let’s just kind of jump into it and just get to know you a little bit better. And a little bit about your background.
Josh Koehler 2:43
Sure, yeah. My name is Josh Koehler. Like you said, for the last several years, I’ve been doing obstacle course racing and kind of kind of going crazy with it. And it all really started as a comeback journey from different injuries, you know, I, I had gotten hurt in the military and had to have several shoulder surgeries, I tore my rotator cuff really bad. And I had multiple surgeries, I didn’t get to serve a full military career, like I had originally planned, you know, and that kind of set me on a different trajectory. You know, I didn’t have the mindset, then, that I think that I have now, you know, my mindset has definitely developed a lot in the beginning in the early 2000s, when when I started having these surgeries, you know, there was athletes and everything, you know, on the Braves, you know, a Braves fan, you know, there was pitchers that would tear a rotator cuff or have to have Tommy John surgery because of you know, tearing other ligaments or whatever. And you would see professional athletes have a recovery and a comeback journey and everything. But those were people who had, you know, teams around them, they had multimillion dollar contracts. So they have the whole team of physicians and doctors and they could go to the best doctors and specialists in the entire world, they are going to the best physical therapists in the entire world. So that was like the gold standard. You know, for me, just an average person, a low ranking individual in the military tears their shoulder really bad. The whole process ended up being a little bit of a debacle that, you know, is a story for a different time. But, you know, I had these surgeries, and I’m, you know, left, you know, trying to come back from from those things. And I was a driven person at that time. You know, I definitely wouldn’t say that I, you know, went from non driven to driven, but I was driven in different ways. You know, I had a motivation of making sure I could run a first class PFT again, you know, because those directly corresponded to promotions in the military, you know, your your PFT score and your rifle score and everything in the military played into where you fell in comparison to other people, which determined your promotions which determined your pay. So for me to have any gainful employment in a positive trajectory. I had to rehab myself in such a way that I could at least get a first class PFT, you know, so I would continually try to do the rehab and get back as soon as possible in that respect. But I didn’t have anybody in my life who had come back in a sports capacity. I didn’t have any family who had ever seen that really, you know, firsthand. So I didn’t have any family members who would give me assurances that, hey, you know, you can come back from this. I didn’t have any fellow Marines or I didn’t didn’t know any retired military individuals at the time who had gone through a devastating injury, and then had to come back and had wild success in being an athlete again, it was it was all negative stuff. It was, you know, doctors telling me, you’ll never do monkey bars again, because your shoulder so messed up, you know, you’re gonna have problems with it for the rest of your life, you’re going to be doing stretchy band exercises for the rest of your life, PTS is going to be, you know, a forever thing for you. By the time I got out after having multiple shoulder surgeries, it was kind of a continuation of the same thing. People who had friends who had gotten out of the military, it was a common joke that they would all tell the newly departed individual that basically Hey, you know, you know what shape you’re in right now, that’s pretty much the best shape you’re going to be in for the rest of your life. And a shocking amount of people would say, that seems to seem to have been like a repeated common thing. And so there was this just general consensus that your best days are over, your athletic days are pretty much over. It’s all downhill from here. And more importantly, and more disappointingly, all the doctors were probably the most negative in regards to saying, you know, your athletic days are over, you’ll never do monkey bars, again, so on and so forth. And I didn’t have anything to contrast that against, except those professionals, you know, the professionals could do it. But like I said, I didn’t have an entire team trying to bring me back for a playoff push. I didn’t have you know, world renowned doctors and physicians, I didn’t have, you know, new personnel nutritionists, I didn’t have millions of dollars at my disposal to do hyperbaric training and get all of these, you know, platelet injections and everything. So I figured that I was just in a different class, and that if the doctors who were professionals that that’s what their opinion was, and I didn’t have any other frame of reference, I kind of got sucked into believing that I kind of stayed on that negative path for a while, a while turned into like 12 years. So by the time you go from the early 2000s to 2017 I finally got fed up with you know, the the lifestyle of basically watching TV playing Playstation, go into work and then rinse and repeat every day. You know, all I was doing was watching TV playing Playstation and that’s about it. I ate fairly healthy so I wasn’t too overweight or anything but you know, I was skinny fat and becoming less and less of an athlete every single day finally got tired of that I had a buddy loan p90x to my wife and I we started through p90x It probably took us about twice as long as it was supposed to because I started getting a little nagging injuries and everything’s I had been out of the physical game for so long. You know, the back started bothering me. I had to stop for a little bit and we resumed but we push through. We did p90x, we ended up doing p90x to somewhere along the lines of end of 2017 I guess I did my first 5k and was absolutely embarrassed by by my time you know, the first 5k Post military it had been a the first one in over a decade. I had taken off initially trying to run like an eight minute pace, which was slow compared to what I did in the military, but I couldn’t sustain that and after about half a mile I was walked jogging the whole rest of the 5k so we kind of went back to the drawing board ended up seeing a commercial for Spartan Race. Can I took that as you know a challenge. I figured I would do one Spartan Race. I ended up gifting the Spartan Race to my oldest son and myself as a way to kind of connect with my oldest son or attempt to so we did that the Spartan Race was scheduled for the beginning of 2018 and from there it you know, things kind of took off like wildfire. I did just as terrible at my first Spartan Race as I did and that that 5k A year before like we all Yeah, I came in with horrible nutrition experience for races like that i over ate the night before out of Out of fear that I would, you know, bonk during the race, and just be hungry and need food. I over ate that morning, and basically out of fear, like I had been out of the athletic game for 1213 years at that point, you know, from, from a competition standpoint, so, but I was still prideful in a way and I wanted to do really good and those things mesh together in a bad way, and gave me an internal fear that I was going to do terrible unless I really feel love. So I completely over fueled, but yeah, it ended up taking me almost two hours with my son, my son was waiting on me the whole time, almost bored. And, you know, the, the, the one race that was supposed to be one and done, ended up turning into a lot of different things, you know, a desire to improve upon that embarrassing performance, and then it kind of spurred into a comeback journey, because as I continued to do them, you know, I saw that, you know, I kind of got a glimpse of what I had been missing my whole life, or the last 10 to 15 years before that. And my mindset set started to shift a little bit, and which led to, you know, starting the page and all of that, and it’s been a wild, wild journey ever since that, for sure.
Richard Conner 11:20
That’s so incredible. And, you know, that’s kind of the way it started sometimes, right? When you do that first Spartan Race, or whatever the race is, and you’re like, wait a minute, I could certainly do that better. And I’m gonna find a way how to do it. So. So thank you for sharing that there’s so much that you shared, I want to touch on a few things that you talked about. Sure, you know, so first, you know, kind of, with the surgeries that you had, and the injuries that you had, and the negative messages around you. I mean, that’s a that’s a common thing. And, you know, it is unfortunate and, you know, being able to find the positivity in your life to to make a change, it’s not easy. So, this is one of the reasons why it’s so important to have this conversation to let people know that, you know, you can do something different, you don’t have to listen to those negative messages, you can overcome your adversities. And you can, you know, reach your goal. So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, what it was like, during that time, you know, you mentioned you didn’t really have access, maybe to the same kind of doctors and healthcare as maybe the professional sports players do, or, you know, positive messaging around you. What made you change your mindset at that moment in time to say, you know, what, I am going to make a change despite these injuries, despite where I am in life, I’m going to make a change.
Josh Koehler 12:34
You know, it was a from around 2005 to 2017, it was kind of just a continued slow fade. You’re absolutely correct that a lot of people don’t have positive messaging in their lives, they don’t have somebody who has kind of paved the way that has, not everybody has an example that they can point to, hey, they had a similar injury. And, you know, they shattered the doctors opinions, and they’re out doing all of this stuff, I want to be like that. I didn’t really have anything like that other than, like professional athletes, and because of the money and the resources that they had, that I didn’t have, I thought it was just, you know, impossible. And I didn’t have anybody around, tell me any differently. It wasn’t that, you know, I have a negative family. It wasn’t that all my friends were completely uninspiring people. It’s just that I didn’t have anybody that was on that specific journey, or had been through that journey around me. I didn’t have the kind of mentors back to me that I try now to be to other people. So it was really a long, slow fade. And it wasn’t until 2017 where I got fed up, I essentially saw a picture of myself from a work party. And it was an outdoor work party. And I was in the background of somebody else’s picture. But I got posted on the company intranet and everything and I saw myself I was like we didn’t Is that me, I was standing with horrible posture. Definitely nothing that would ever resemble somebody who had been in the Marine Corps, you know, horrible posture or you know, hips sagging and leaning to the side. I had a, you know, small gut sticking out. My arms were skinny, no muscular definition in my arms whatsoever. I wasn’t necessarily fat, so to speak, but I was definitely skinny fat. I had lost a majority of my muscle that I had. I didn’t look like an athlete whatsoever. And I just didn’t like that. I was like, This can’t be this can’t be the first step towards what I’m going to look like what I’m going to be like what I’m going to feel like for the rest of my life. I need to do something because this is embarrassing to me. I was like I have higher standards than that. I don’t want to be the person with terrible posture, I don’t want to be the person who’s hunched back at 50 years old. I don’t want to be the person who can’t hardly move and just sits in a chair all day. And I started reflecting a little bit. And basically like, that’s what I’m setting myself up for. That’s what I have been doing for, like 12 years, just playing Playstation. And that stuff can be fun. I’m not condoning or condemning video games, I’m not condemning watching TV, I still enjoy video games, I still watch TV with a family, but it’s not a big part of my lifestyle anymore. And I had to choose something different. I had to have a spark, and I guess embarrassment, and letting myself down a little bit. I had always wanted to be the person who served, you know, full 2030 years in the military, I wanted originally wanted to be a drill instructor, I wanted to retire as a Marine in the military, that all didn’t happen. I guess I got embarrassed by how much of a departure, there’s certainly something to be said by God taking you in other directions than what you originally intended for your life. And that’s fine that the the military aspirations didn’t necessarily pan out. I’m cool with that even even to this day. But the parts that relied on my effort, were all disappointing because I had given up I had let myself go, I had caused a greater separation, because of my my lack of purpose and lack of, you know, inspiration and motivation and all that stuff. You know, I needed to get moving and get back to the things that I previously enjoyed. Because I was basically lying to myself and pretending that I didn’t enjoy those things. And I was filling my life with with video games and, and playing season upon season in Madden Football, because I loved athletics, and controlling digital players on a TV screen was at the time, I thought the the closest I was going to get, I didn’t think I was going to be the athlete anymore. I was just a spectator. And you know, and that changed in 2017 and 2018. And led to the creation of the page and where I really wanted to chronicle my comeback journey and my injury recovery journey and show other people that despite what the doctors say, and despite all the negative negativity, and despite even sometimes family members, almost assisting you in the hey, you know, happens everybody as part of getting older, you know, I knew that wasn’t me. And I have found over the last few years that just how much that wasn’t me how much I was lying to myself how much I was pretending. And it kind of turned into the complete opposite of, you know, an absolute addiction, I went crazy, we’ll end up talking about a little bit. But I went crazy with the races and trying to set world records and trying to continuously beat previous race totals and get better with speed. The heart surgery that I ended up having to have was a wrinkle that kind of put a big dent in the speed aspect of things. But, you know, my mindset was better this time around, and I returned to sports faster the second time around than I did before. So it’s it’s been a wild ride. And I’ve been able to meet tons of people through my page and through sharing my journey and just being involved in the sport. And it’s, it’s been life changing, to say the least,
Richard Conner 18:35
for sure. I mean, life changing is a great way to describe, you know, describe that. And, you know, I love a lot of the things that you said and you know, go back to what you’re talking about how you didn’t feel when you saw yourself, the photo of yourself. That was not how you want it to be that was that was your goal to be better than that, not what someone else wanted for you. And I think that’s really important, because I think there’s kind of a lot of messaging around about, you know, what people should or should not do or what they should fall into follow from external influences. But in your case, you’re like, No, this is what I want for myself. So I really applaud you for, you know, realizing that and taking action. So just really, really wonderful story. And I want to get, you know, a little bit into the how, you know, how did you kind of overcome those injuries and the surgeries that you went through? And then you know, talk a little bit about the future surgeries that you had went through with your heart so so let’s little talk a little bit about like the movement in the house, like how did you overcome some of the shoulder surgery injuries as well as I think you said you had surgeries on your feet as well.
Josh Koehler 19:43
Yeah, so I had the the shoulder surgeries in the military and I tried to maintain a level of fitness after the military. And I ended up you know, going to the gym and trying to lift ungodly heavy weight all the time. You know to be a boy bodybuilder or whatever probably wasn’t going to be in shape Marine, I would at least try to lift as heavy as possible and be a big dude. That lasted for a little bit. And I ended up having hernia surgery as a result of some overexuberance in that area. And then I kind of gave up on the heavy weight lifting and eventually had some some foot surgeries tore a couple of ligaments in my foot. And the crazy thing is, it was kind of the same thing with the the foot surgeries as well. I was told by several people that I would, I would never be much of a runner ever again, the physical therapists were okay, you know, they would try to give you a little bit higher of a ceiling of potential so to speak, you know, went through the physical therapy and everything. But my foot surgeries were pretty major, I ended up having to have four titanium screws in my foot for about six months, and my foot ballooned to almost twice the size of my other foot just from the the swelling and reaction of having those those large titanium screws in my foot, which were necessary to hold all the bones together, I had essentially twisted my foot apart and and torn, roughly four major ligaments in the mid foot. Wow. And I wasn’t a foot expert, the people who were foot experts, you when they offered opinions of what things would be like athletically, after this mishap. They didn’t have a lot of positivity in there. Their ceiling of potential, again, wasn’t very, very high wasn’t exactly inspiring, or flattering or anything. And they were the experts, you know, and it was still I didn’t have people in my life to that had been through foot surgeries. And now they’re running marathons and triathlons and everything. So I assumed that the experts were correct. And that I was always going to have swelling problems with my foot and that it was always going to hurt and that, you know, long or short no matter how much training I did, it would always hurt afterwards. And it kind of still does. But the thing is, I realized that, you know, once I started that journey with the p90x and and a big part of that was my wife also joined that fitness journey with me. She is a wonderful person, my wife is incredible has been by my side through all of this crazy stuff. And we sat down that path of doing the p90x and p90x two and p90x Three. She didn’t do the first Spartan Race with with me, but we ended up doing a small trip shortly after doing our first Spartan Race, and I did one with her. And we started doing the you know, sometimes I would run competitive competitively by myself and other times I would run in the open wave or the fun wave, so to speak, and do the obstacle course races with my wife. And that was that was and still is an amazing part of our life. We are all into fitness. Now. My wife, our kids, we haven’t really looked back, my kids are swimmers, kids are runners, my, my son and daughter, my youngest son and my my daughter, they both podium regularly. In the obstacle course races, my oldest son before he moved out of the house, he was getting podiums in Spartan. So it was kind of a lifestyle change for the whole family. And we just started getting moving and starting doing all the races, the only way to really get better at something is to be bad at it at first and keep doing it again. You know, I see all these things now. And I know all these things now that I didn’t know then, in regards to failure being part of the process. And, you know, there’s the Instagram reels, you know, they say the first step of it, being good at something is, you know, sucking at it, you know, and that’s so true. You know, I was, I was terrible at everything that I did at first, I was terrible at p90x, I would get unbelievably sore at every single workout until I didn’t. And I was horrendously slow at all of the obstacle course races and bad on obstacles until I wasn’t. I started doing the pull ups again, I had to really put a lot of focus on doing shoulder rehab, and not just the shoulder rehab that I had done 10 years prior, but I was looking at things on the internet. ATHLEAN X Jeff Cavalier of ATHLEAN X has a lot of good videos on YouTube about rehabbing almost every single part of the body. And there’s the prehab guys and there’s all kinds of good people on social media, sharing little tidbits of information. So I would pick up on things and try to incorporate new ways of rehabbing certain injuries, new exercises, a new approach that didn’t necessarily in involve trying to strain my guts out when I was lifting weights, so that it was better on my joints and allowed me to kind of strengthen the muscles without continuously doing additional damage to soft tissue. Not you know, not everybody can be a powerlifter. You know, kudos to the people who can, and kudos to the people whose joints hold up. But apparently, that was never in my destiny. God did not create me to be an Olympic power lifter. And you know, I needed something different. So I had to get moving, I had to find out where my niche was. And when I finally started doing functional fitness, and started doing yoga, I got exposed to Yoga with the p90x Yoga, things like yoga and pilates have their place, you know, I’m not a yoga and pilates guy, but I will do the stretching and the foam rolling and the yoga and the Pilates. Now, you know, with no shame, you know, all of that has been a big part to getting my flexibility back getting some balance back working on functional fitness, instead of just the same power lifts you know, squats and bench press and lat pull downs, you know, doing something that’s different. And in working on cross abdominal work and everything, go into ninja gyms and practicing obstacles and, and working on all of your weaknesses instead of trying to make all of your lifts that are decent, better. I started trying to work on the things that I was worst at. So the trail running, I sucked at trail running at the time and 2017 through just a few years ago, really. I had a mountain range near my house. And I could drive to it in about 15 minutes and there was a four mile trail, I ran that four mile trail with almost 1000 feet of elevation gain across four miles 10 or 11 times with absolutely zero change whatsoever in how I felt or in my time. Sometimes my times in the last few would be worse until they weren’t the 11th or 12th. One. I looked at my watch and I still felt terrible. But I looked at my watch one day and it was several minutes faster. Like it was a it was a big jump almost five minutes than my previous run. And I thought it was an anomaly at first but a couple days later I was I was trying to do this a couple times a week. I went back shaved another minute or two off and that progression kind of continued things kind of started to click with me from a cardiovascular standpoint. So I started getting at least decent at trail running, decent functional overall fitness, my balance improved. And I went from a person in the spring of 2018 who did a Spartan sprint in almost two hours to where I was doing by the end of 2019. I was doing Spartan sprints competitively at just over 30 minutes. Wow. It was a huge thing you know, and it was similar experience for our kids for my wife, my wife lost an enormous amount of weight. I’m so proud of her. She is fit and inspires a lot of women because she’s done a lot of obstacle course races she has competed at OCR World Championships, she has multiple trifectas each year and Spartan and you know, we’re like kind of people, we always insist on doing our burpees and everything and, you know, I’m super proud of her and we’ve all just come a long way. And it’s been a journey together, you know, through the the page. Second Chance OCR, I’ve gotten to show a lot of this stuff show the foot surgeries and shoulder surgeries, and, you know, we just enjoy encouraging other people. And when I see somebody who has gone through an injury, especially if they’re getting down on themselves, you know, I, I always want to step in and try to encourage them and offer to help offer to be their offer to send them videos, I’ve you know, I’ve sent people some of the training videos that have helped me that I found on YouTube, just whatever they need, you know, because I want to be for other people what I didn’t have, so that other people don’t spend 10 plus years or maybe even the rest of their life believing the same lie that I did that everything is over and you just need to pack it in and watch TV. That’s really where where we’re at, you know, you you have to take it one day at a time. You know, some of these are cliche, but they’re they’re true. You know, a lot of these are cliche because they’re true. You do have to take it one day at a time. You kind of have to ignore the number on the scale. If you’re in a weight loss journey or a body fat cutting journey. You can’t focus on that exclusively. You know, it’s okay to be realistic and to track your progress. Is and to know where you’re at and know where you started and check back in a week or two later and, and be able to see different different progress, that’s fine. I’m not advocating against that. But it’s all important, making small changes to your diet, and then making more small changes to your diet. Until now you’re eating mostly, mostly real food instead of junk and processed stuff. Getting the exercise making it a part of your lifestyle, making it a part of your relationship, making it a part of being a healthy family. All of that is important. Because if you don’t have buy in, in your family, it’s tough. And I know there’s a lot of people out there who want to go down this journey or, or maybe they’re already trying to start this journey. And they not only don’t have buy in, you know, with their, their family, maybe they even have absolute pushback or rejection from their family, like, I’m not going to eat those vegetables, I’m going to stick with the chips. I’ve, I’ve eaten this every day in my life. And I like it, and I don’t care, you know, you can do your athletic thing you can, you can be the health nerd, you can do the organic thing. And, you know, I unfortunately see a lot of people who, you know, they don’t have the buy in from their family and friends. And sometimes, you know, like I said, outright rejection of their, their concepts, but I would encourage you, if you’re listening and you’re in that situation, stick with it, because it is your life. It is your health journey. If you have a passion for being better, it’s okay to be cringe worthy to other people be be an outcast, be that person who steps up and does the right thing for your health, because nobody is going to do it for you. Rehab, your injuries, there’s tons of stuff that’s out there, you can contact me directly. If you can’t find the stuff or you’re you’re having trouble with it. I sometimes help people with nutrition. And I’m just passionate about all of it. I want people to live healthy lives, get good sleep, drink water, get sunlight, eat real food, and exercise. It’s not that complicated. We live in a horribly, unfit and unhealthy world. But if you do though, those basic things, you will stand out amongst other people 99 times out of 100 you will be you know, extremely successful in your health endeavors. You know, there will be setbacks, I had the setback with the heart surgery, which we’ll we’re gonna get into in a minute. But I have recovered very quickly from that, because I had adopted a different mindset and a different status quo with how I live my life, all the way from movement, and motion to diet and everything. And the whole package, you know, kind of comes together for some pretty powerful results, if you look at it, so stick with it, as is my message to, to all the people who are struggling with trying to go down this journey.
Richard Conner 33:08
Wow, I really appreciate you sharing that because, you know, that’s what we’re trying to do here on inspired around podcasts is really inspire others to take control of their health and fitness, and make a change in their life, you know, based on what they want, what they’re looking for, what their goals are. And, you know, something I wanted to touch on before you know, your goals was, you know, I want to be better person who I see in a photo right now I want to be better than that I have higher standards for myself. And, you know, for me personally, my goals, you know, if I roll back the clock for five years ago, was to overcome my fears. I you know, I kind of grew up in a, in a way that I was afraid of everything, I was afraid of heights, I was afraid of failure, I was probably afraid of success. And you know, that’s something that, you know, getting back into running and getting into obstacle course racing has helped me personally. But that was my goal. And I’m sure those who are listening have their own goals, not necessarily something that someone tells them how they should be, but something that they themselves want to get to. And for sure, all of us want to be healthy, kind of in our own way, whatever that looks like. And I think the advice that you shared is, is really, really helpful. And going back to the movement piece really, really helpful for you to share, you know, your turning around the functional fitness, you know, not only lifting heavier weights or things you think you might have to do to recover, but some of those other methods of making yourself stronger, more flexible, and more functional, right. And I also love what you said around Pilates and yoga, because those are topics that I brought on the show and I’m like, Well how is this going to resonate with the community and with listeners, right? How are they going to look at Pilates and yoga? I’m like, No, I’m going to do this anyway, because I’ve seen how it’s helped other runners right in their running journey. So I’m really happy that you mentioned that kind of reinforce, you know, some of the topics that we’ve had on the show as well. Hey everyone, now’s a good time for us to take a break. Eric, Josh has shared helpful information through his journey around surrounding yourself with positivity and people who support you, believing in yourself and not falling into what others believe is possible for you. And the importance of functional fitness, especially if you’re recovering from an injury. Now, don’t worry, Josh has so much more to share as next week we’ll dive into his aortic dissection part of the story, the hurdles he had to overcome, and the impact is OCR and Spartan racing, so make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss our next episode. In the meantime, if this episode inspired you to make a change in your life. Visit us at inspiretorun.co/kickstart or visit us on Instagram @inspiretorunpodcast and DM us the word Kickstart to get started on your journey. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next week.
Intro/Outro 35:58
That’s it for this episode of inspired to run podcast. We hope you are inspired to take control of your health and fitness and take it to the next level. Be sure to click the subscribe button to join our community. And also please rate and review. Thanks for listening
Transcribed by https://otter.ai