How I Became a Hybrid Athlete — The Hybrid Athlete Blog | Powerflifting | Ultramarathon

I’m guessing if you are ‘here’ then you probably interested in one or more of the following subjects:

Who (or what) actually AM I?

What the hell is Hybrid Athlete?

Are you a real doctor?

Are you sure you’re a real doctor?

How do you mange as a 40 something year old (pretending to be an) athlete whilst owning a business?

What are you going to learn hanging out on this page, following my blog, and what do I hope you can get from ‘this’?

I would hope as the weeks, months and years pass I will add many layers to answers to these questions. But for now, for the sake of brevity, and your sanity, let me answer these questions as quickly as I can.

As with all good origin stories, I have in my life stumbled across my super-hero alias and that my blog reading friends is Dr Infinity.

It is too soon in my blogging journey to reveal where this came from I’ve go to keep the suspense, right? And in all honesty I say this is jest as I am far from a superhero. Just a silly human, doing silly things and hopefully helping a few people along the way.

Who actually AM I?

In the wider philosophical sense, I think it is safe to assume, many things to many people:

To the people I studied my degree and masters with, I strongly suspect that I am a drunkard, rugby playing, wrestling, slightly renegade, loud mouthed ‘idiot’.

To my family and school friends, stretching back in the years before and after my 10 or so years as a student, I am sure I have been many things.

My journey from insecure teen to boisterous student, to stressed out, self-doubting PhD student to stressed out, self-doubting, recently diagnosed with ADHD business owner, has created a unique character plot line but I think at the heart of all of this is one trueism. I can be a self-centered person, but I would hope I am not a selfish one. When I am needed, I am there.

To the women I have dated; well, that’s their story to tell.

I certainly am in no position to know how they would reflect upon who I am, I would only hope that time has been kind to their understanding of some of my less than admirable behaviour.

I would hazard a guess that in most cases the version of me they encountered was probably a fair reflection of the person I was at those micro-stages of my life. I just hope that I have become a better person than the arse I was certainly capable of being, especially throughout my twenties.

SIDE NOTE: I only mention the ADHD here because I think it explains a lot about who I am, why I am the way I am, what I struggle(d) with and now thrive at. This is a topic I will revisit another time as I unpack more the person behind the blog… but for now, I hope that it’s more creative elements contributes to the (hopefully) amusing lens that I now write and reflect upon my life to this point.

One common theme in my life is that I seem to thrive off ‘the next hard thing’ (innuendo for the win).

Not to dig too deep into my psyche, but in a somewhat perverse way, I like doing hard things, really hard things. Even if I hate the thing at the time there is something about doing what others can’t, or won’t, that gives me some kind of perverse pleasure.

I think this stems from some ‘sense’ I have always carried with me that people held the opinion of me that I couldn’t do ‘things’. As I have gotten older and possibly wiser, this reality, I fear, is I suspect largely self-created.

I’m not entirely sure where this came from, it certainly wasn’t because of the lack of love and support of my family. I certainly didn’t have people calling my ‘stupid’ or incapable... I was always told I had potential. Yet, I also had a sense of anger and frustration that I could not put my finger on, at least back then.

Maybe this is a narrative I created for myself to push me forward, that has been fuelled by those little comments and jokes that I have taken to heart about my appearance, my ability, my family, my intelligence, my physical capabilities; and turned those things into some imaginary bogey man that I must battle, over and over again. In every sense of the expression, it really is simply ‘me versus me’.

How can I ever win? I suspect I can’t.

I’m not sure at this point I even know what really winning looks like.

There is always the next thing, the next monster to fight the next limit to find, the next failure. And in all of that difficulty the occasional slaying of this imaginary beast.

To bask in the glory for a moment like the Knights of old standing over the slayed dragon, before the next challenge looms ominously over the horizon.

Maybe I create these monsters to motivate me because I can get bored easily. As I write this, my ‘other brain’ tells me that’s not entirely true.

I do get bored when the thing I am focused on loses it’s purpose, pleasure, or suffering (depending on the context) or I have overcome the challenge in front of me.

This attitude probably explains the appeal of ultra-marathons. There is always further to go, more pain to suffer, more stories to tell.

If ‘the obstacle is the way’ then make mine as big and scary as possible… with a side of suffering if it’s on offer.

Despite the stresses and strains of dealing with ‘myself; learning about who I am and what gives me joy, purpose, pain and how these things often seem indistinguishable. The question on my minds lips is '‘Why do I seem to seek the uncomfortable situations despite the frequently negative impacts on my well-being?’

To summarise the above into the one common thread that ties these together is my love of chasing the extreme.

Academics

Tattoos

Strength

Bodybuilding

Endurance

Ride ‘em till the wheels fall off.

These are things I have pushed or am currently pushing, as far as I my body and mind will go. Some of these things went very far indeed. Some I have just started the journey.

I did, as most people, have a nice backpack of trauma to carry through my teens and twenties. I lost two of my role models; key examples of how to be a good human and as I write this I can feel my eyes well up, not a good look on a train from Cardiff to London on a slightly grey Summers eve.
Uncle Bert.
Auntie Jo.

These are names I will write about again as they deserve their own chapters in this whole story of my life. But for now, in the jigsaw that is me, these are some of the most important people pieces that have been parts of the ‘edges’ of the puzzle from which all the other bits of me start to make some sense.

I will talk about ‘my brain’, my journey, my life as I perceive it in more depth in due course, but for now it is the physical component that we are here for and that is where we will stay for the remainder of this blog. About getting to ‘this’ point in my existence.

One of my earliest memories, at around the age of 4, was being at nursery school. I was given a picture of the Incredible Hulk to colour in (badly, art was never my strong suit) because I was upset… at what I am not entirely sure.

I am never quite sure if this memory is something which was a key trigger to the person I now am, or in hindsight it makes ‘sense’ through my post-rationalising eyes.

It is always easier to look back and find patterns that tell us who we are, but the truth is as a species that thrives and survives on stories, I can’t tell you for certain whether the map of my life I am about to spell out stemmed from this moment, or if now looking back this is just an attempt to make sense of my obsession with physical culture… being the biggest, the fastest, the strongest.

It turns out as I got older, I was never quite any of those things.

Having this monstrous figure before me, always loving superhero films and growing up during the ‘peak’ of Hollywood muscle-mania, the first person on my street to have Sky with all the trappings of the WWE (WWF as it was then until the Panda’s complaints about trademark infringement).

It was difficult for a child of the 80’s and early 90’s film era to not want to fight aliens in the jungle or single handedly take on entire armies. Most people saw entertainment, I saw my future commitment to becoming a physical freak.

It turned out I was good at the one sport people really cared about in my town. Football.

I played against kids 2-3 years older than me. I was always a quick, tough, physical player.

I enjoyed all sports at school and was a decent all-round athlete, but the truth is I was never quite good enough (insert the usual talk of trials with professional football teams).

Rugby was something I ‘think’ I could have gone somewhere with, but for various reasons it wasn’t a sport I played with any gusto until I hit my late teens/early twenties and by then I was already seriously flirting with another sport, submission-wrestling.

My good friend Dave Ives was obsessed with martial arts. We used to watch, and try and learn from the old BJJ instructionals of the Gracie’s, watching on VHS the old UFC’s and travelling around the country competing (losing) but training wherever we could and frequently kicking the crap out of each other with a rag-tag bunch of friends.

This is Dave… whacking me in the stomach, naturally.

I cared enough to train and compete, but in all honestly, I was dragged along for the journey by Dave at least in my teens and early twenties. At 23 I went to university, and there I played Rugby League at an ‘ok’ level during my undergrad and had lots of fun with it. The beers and friendship that surrounded the sport at that level were a key part of my social education.

On our university induction I vividly remember one quote ‘Don’t let university get in the way of your education’.

I did not.

It was at university I first crossed paths with another David, David Stache who is the driving force behind Nuvictus… I will talk about him again I am sure, but for now back to our scheduled viewing.

I still occasionally trained wrestling in the summers, or at home. However, it was only in my late twenties that I started to train more frequently, got damn big and damn strong and became more dedicated to the sport.

Training at gyms all over the country, coaching at a couple, and starting one-to-one coaching in Cardiff (where I had started my PhD) with a truly elite grappler Ashley Williams.

I was also travelling back most weekends to Dave’s club ‘Chester Submission Wrestling’.

Side note: I also played a year of rugby union in Cardiff but for ‘academic’ and my increasingly aging body reasons, I left the egg chasing part of my existence at around 29.

The funny thing was at my wrestling performance ‘peak’ I never actually competed seriously. After a couple of years dedicated training, a nightclub incident resulted in a broken hand.

The complications that followed, alongside a few other compounding reasons that have become vague in the mists of time, meant that was pretty much the end of my wrestling career… although I still got plenty of ‘practice’ working the doors at such delightful venues as ‘Vodka Revs’ and ‘Walkabout’ in Cardiff where I worked as a bouncer to help fund my PhD.

I had worked as a doorman on and off since my early twenties and those experiences taught me a lot about myself and human behaviour. It also gave me A LOT of stories to tell, but that’s not what we are here for right now.

This is where the next chapter of my physical journey and the interwoven start of the business chapters of my life really kicks off.

Already a solid 105kg, on walking into a local sports supplement store, ‘CSN’ I was confronted with Marc, a 6ft 4, 120kg+ bear of a man, whom I am friends with, and still work with, to this day… from those small store days to a huge online business.

It was in that first conversation that the next love of my life came along. From a general interest with getting ‘jacked’, the bodybuilding culture in Cardiff took over me completely.

I went on to compete in several bodybuilding shows. For the record I was not very good, but in keeping with pushing myself to the extreme, I can say I tried my best with the tools available to me at the time.

At my heaviest I had pushed myself up to a chunky 120kg. To be crystal clear, I was not healthy at this weight. Strong, yes. Healthy, not so much.

I stopped bodybuilding for 2 reasons. Firstly, I simply wasn’t willing to push the limits of my health any harder as I approached my mid-30’s, to be an average competitor at best.

Secondly, mentally both the dieting process and the stress of business at the time meant that the ‘juice wasn’t worth the squeeze’ anymore… pun absolutely intended.

There were several ‘incidents’ in my final year of competing that made me realise that as much as bodybuilding had helped in some areas of my life and launched my first business, it was now taking away from me more than it was giving.

Business, personal life & my mental health, all suffered and in the midst of this I had been trying, struggling but eventually succeeding in completing my PhD, which was an experience that needs a whole series of chapters on stress and trauma all to itself.

So yes, I am a doctor… but not a real doctor, as people love telling me.

Although I had built a business around bodybuilding… education, content, coaching… as a competitor my days were over... so what next?

I had no interest in endurance sports at that time. But I did have an interest in moving my businesses into the wider area of sports performance nutrition & physiology. The hunt for my first clinic began.

Business is so intertwined with my journey to become a hybrid athlete, that I could not do it the disservice of not mentioning it, being a major character in the play we call life. Perhaps not the leading role, but at least a solid supporting actor.

Post-bodybuilding.

Finding, building, and growing my business meant A LOT of time on the road, a lot of time not being able to train in the ways that I would like. To be honest for the first time since I could remember fitness was more about clinging on for dear life to some form of shape, rather than having a competitive purpose.

I will skip a few chapters here for the sake of keeping this blog at a reasonable length. But ultimately the next phase in my fitness journey went something like this.

Business took over, travel took over & energy levels plummeted and all I could manage was a few half-arsed workouts a week and the occasional run to do ‘something’ to keep me sane and ‘fit’.

Two years(ish) later having flirted with the idea of signing up for an iron man distance triathlon under the encouragement of some friends and starting to take this semi-seriously alongside trying to get back in shape. The move ‘full-time’ to a new clinic in Leeds and the building of the place living, working and commuting between 3 cities, truly put any performance goals on the back burner. Actually, not just the back burner, it was somewhere in the other room gathering dust behind a sofa.

I hit a low point physically and mentally, and how I got through this period without fully ‘breaking’ still astonishes me.

I wasn’t ‘out of shape’ by conventional standards. But for me, I wasn’t happy with where I was in both appearance and fitness. I wasn’t fit or strong by my own standards and this did not sit well with my ingrained fitness ‘identity’ and values.

Once the Clinic was built in Leeds in around the December of 2019, and with exposure to this idea of the Hybrid Athlete through people like Alex Viada, I decided that I would make the next 12 months of my life about getting back in condition.

Not just in terms of an aesthetic I was happy with and that I could sustain, it also had to be functional; I needed to be strong, fit and mobile.

Over the next few months, I switched into a machine with the most consistent nutrition, training and performance testing & monitoring I had ever had. I felt great, I performed great. My weight was the same but my physique had transformed considerably.

Then in the March of 2020 we all know happened. That’s when the silly really kicked in.

For a lot of people they struggled, I certainly had business anxiety, but I also had my own clinic with everything I needed to become an athlete and no distractions... apart from the relentless Zoom quizzes of course.

From March until the end of the year I ramped things up. I had started to run much further, lift heavier again and out of sheer curiosity had started to play with some longer distance endurance training on the Wattbike and running.

Pools were closed and Leeds is TERRIBLE for swimming facilities anyway, so over time my training bias simply became ‘lift-bike-run’.

For whatever reason the biking never really stuck with me. But coming out of lock-down into 2021, I had on somewhat of a whim, but with a decent level of fitness, decided to sign-up to my first ultra-marathon. The Endure 24.

12 weeks later.

In this loop race, going as far as you can in 24 hours on the same 5-mile trail course, three things happened.

I ran, walked and hobbled 135km.

I ended up with a stress fracture.

I got the ultra-marathon bug.

Being a bigger athlete, I knew that I didn’t want to lose the strength I had built over years of lifting and liked the idea of being ‘competitively strong’. To me this meant being able to maintain some strength standards, that could see me rock up at a power lifting competition and at least hold my own with decent level lifters.

I also knew this would limit my endurance performance at my current level of muscle mass, even though there was still much room for improvement. The one thing that really appealed to me was the distance… I might not be able to run much faster, but how far could I go?

SEED. PLANTED.

Now just over half way through 2023 I have since competed in powerlifting and a 50 mile run within one week of each other (winning my power lifting class), failed a 100 mile ultra-marathon, and completed god-knows how many runs of over marathon distance, mostly on trails, mostly in ridiculous conditions.

As I write this I am two days away from attempting to cover the 184miles of the Thames River Path in under 3 days, self-supported.

The specifics of these events are stories withing themselves and I will write about all my ultra experiences, lessons learnt and all of the ridiculousness in good time.

This leads me nicely into talking about what a hybrid athlete is.

Well firstly, it is not a sport. There is no ‘games’, there are no ‘rules’.

To me this makes the definition an entirely personal one but across the various people who consider themselves Hybrid Athletes one thing seems to hold true.

In its simplest and broadest sense, it is people who dedicate themselves to training for both strength and endurance.

That opens a whole world of potential argument, and it is certainly not for me to talk about this in an authoritative way. I did not coin the term and ultimately to me it doesn’t matter.

Some people may think it simply means justifying not being exceptional at any one thing!

I always joke that I might not be a good endurance athlete, but I can guarantee I can bench more than the field. When I compete in power lifting, I am certain I am the only person in the room who has run over 100km.

Fragile male ego kept intact.

The truth is there are some incredibly talented lifters who train in a Hybrid Style (I am not one of them). And some people who are well above average in terms of strength that have very high levels of endurance performance.

For me, to keep myself ‘honest’. I have come up with a more standards based, operational definition of the ‘sport’ with my desire for the extreme built in. More of my Hybrid manifesto than anything else…

1. To compete [and find my limits] in both [maximum] strength and [ultra] endurance sports events.

2. To meet strength standards that would be considered strong across athlete populations in at least one of the main power lifting disciplines (1.5 x body weight bench press, 2 x body weight squat, 2.5 x body weight dead lift are VERY solid numbers).

3. To be in the top 30% in ‘standardised’ endurance events in a chose discipline (in my case running).

4. TRIGGER WARNING: To use my body in a functional manner, in my case this means climbing to a grade of V6!!

It is VERY difficult to gauge performance standards in ultra-marathons.

It is very much a who turns up on the day, how ‘big’ the event is, the terrain and weather conditions. Timing and placing comparisons across ultra events is virtually impossible for this reason once you are in to the middle of the pack.

However, being the clever sausages we are, we can look at 5km, 10km, ½ and full marathon times. These can give a reasonable approximation of endurance performance against the ‘population’.

If I am going to consider myself a) an athlete and b) one that actually trains for endurance events. Then I think it is reasonable standard to hold myself to, to be a ‘bit’ faster than the average person rocking up to a park run, who couldn’t really care less about time and just wants to stretch their legs on a Saturday or Sunday morning (and by the way this is a completely admirable & reasonable way to live your life… zero judgement here).

My bias is clearly towards strength because that is the background from which I came and what I was ‘ok’ at… and that is perfectly fine because this is my definition after all. If you don’t like it… create your own!

Ultimately, these numbers do not matter to anyone but me. But I do feel that these are reasonable goals to aim for and are solid targets for anyone who wants an ultimate hybrid goal.

My other goals sit in the much vaguer bucket list of distance rather than speed; completing 100 mile and 200 mile plus events. In those situations, finishing alone is the result, I could not care less about time or placings!

To sum up my thoughts on this in a more broad sense. Being a hybrid athlete is about having strength and endurance goals that are important to you. Reaching them. And then moving on to the next challenge.

For me it the extremes that drives me, wrapped within the physical constraints of what my 42-year-old body will still allow me to do and my desire to have a personal aesthetic goal.

Last but not least, let’s have a little chat about. climbing.

The great thing is that there are standards and progressions to aim for in climbing. Mine is to climb at an advanced grade (V6) within the next 2 years. Having only started seriously in December of 2022 I am currently climbing consistently at an intermediate level of around V3 & V4… on good days.

To me climbing is about as functional as you can get in terms of movement, and it feels like the missing piece for me in calling myself a hybrid athlete.

For some it might be combat sports, functional fitness/CrossFit, or strongman.

This functional component is about having a vehicle to express all the components of fitness, co-ordination, balance and complex movement competency with endurance and strength.

Some may argue this is the definition of CrossFit and they might have a point. But for me, the competition is still limited to duration’s and intensities of effort that fall within a pretty narrow window when you consider the broad spectrum of human capability.

Personally, I want this spectrum to be as large and extreme as possible, to be able to fully explore the limits of my potential.

And this journey to finding our limits and pushing past them is what this blog is all about.

My Origin Story

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