I believe the definition of definition is persistence. It’s not just don’t quit. It’s to keep going until you become who you were going to be.

Over the last five years at Ravi and Jacque’s wonderful gym in downtown Seattle, I learned quite a bit about persistence and got a lot closer to who I am working to become.

It was fall of 2020 when I first walked into their gym. The world was still in the thick of Covid and social distancing. We were all threats to one another until proven otherwise. Jacque was prepping flyers or some such thing when I walked in. She seemed confused about why I was walking in. I was confused about her confusion at the prospect of a new customer. It turns out even though their doors were wide open, they were technically closed. They had only recently gotten clearance to reopen given the wide open space of their gym. She gave me a business card and asked me to come back Monday.

When I came back, I met Ravi. He was to put me through a gauntlet to weigh my worthiness for entry into the gym. As background, Persistence was primarily a CrossFit gym back then, and CrossFit is effectively competitive exercise. Ravi and Jacque had learned that the many keyboard warriors (most of their clients worked in tech) needed to be assessed to be put on a path most likely to make their fitness journey stick. Those who qualified could join group classes immediately. Those who didn’t began with one-on-one coaching, where they learned the basics and got their form up to a standard before joining group classes.

Ravi explained all this to me, and of course, as an athlete, I knew my place was among the worthy in the group class. I was no scrub that needed one-on-one training.

Ravi put me through the battery and I breezed through it. He had me do push ups. No problem. Squats. No issue. He tested my form on Olympic lifts. Yep, I still remember that from high school. We kept going and he asked about my background while he pushed me. I told him about how I played football, basketball and ran track in high school. He said it showed in my movements, but he immediately noticed opportunities for improvement. For example, I spent too much time on the balls of my feet, making myself unstable when I lifted.

The breeze continued until it didn’t. The legless rope climb.

Ravi had me sit on the floor near a thick rope and he instructed me to climb the rope using only my hands and not my legs. My ego had met its match. I pulled and pulled and my ass barely got off the floor. I pulled and pulled and the skin near the nails on my thumbs began to bleed. I didn’t want to stop. Ravi said enough for today. I had made it into the class.

And so it was that I learned my first lesson at the gym.

Persistence requires humility.

I had gone through life white-knuckling it. I was scared to admit that I had limits because I felt that belief would be self-limiting. Persistence Athletics taught me that understanding your limits and being humble about them is the way to expand the capability and capacity we have. I didn’t understand that in my bones until I came to Persistence.

By 2020 I had spent my adult life trying to outrun myself. I was a talented student who had to start out in community college (Georgia Perimeter College) because I had wasted so much of my high school years that I needed to take remedial math. I was an imposter in the corporate world, where the majority of my work experience had been working in Dollar Tree as a cashier. I was a good brother and a son who had experienced distance from his family because of unprocessed trauma.

Yet the story I told myself was if I tried hard enough I could do it. Hard enough couldn’t get me up that rope. I had to first acknowledge my limits and why they existed.

Persistence is more than intensity.

When I joined those group classes, I was bored by the weightlifting but I loved the intensity of the metcons, even though I couldn’t finish any of them for the first few months I was at the gym. Before Persistence, I had never been a big lover of weightlifting, even when I played football. It didn’t feel like the real workout of running and getting your heart rate up. In a way, I think I loved the intensity of the metcons because they reminded me most of the feeling of traditional cardio. Traditional cardio for me was about being harder than the workout itself. The more the workout pushed me, the more I tried to push back.

Those first few months, the metcons would push the hell out of me and I would push back and they would win. I thought I just needed to try harder. Ravi educated me that I needed to scale the workout down to what was appropriate for my fitness level, and then I could finish and actually make faster progress towards my fitness goals. I was shocked. How could he suggest that I do a scaled (in my mind an easier) version of the workout? Didn’t he know that I didn’t back down from a challenge? That intensity was my friend.

Ravi was trying to teach me that too much misplaced intensity can actually be detrimental to sticking to the long-term plan that persistence requires. He’d seen it when athletes got injured or stopped coming because they needed more recovery days. Persistence is as much about being prepared for the workout (diet and sleep) and scoping it to your current level as it is about seeing it through over time.

Persistence needs to survive stillness.

I love to be in motion and active because it distracts me from having to process things in my life. Trauma is for other people, not for me. Or so I thought.

Ravi messaged the community that the gym needed to close due to the latest Covid closures until spring 2021. He advocated that Persistence needed to survive this interruption and asked members if they could pay their dues even though they wouldn’t be using the gym. I had seen enough value that I decided to keep paying, and was secretly happy that the gym wouldn’t be kicking my ass anymore for a few months and I could retreat to my comfort zone of push ups and zone 1 runs outside.

During this time, like many of us, I spent a lot of it alone. I started to drink more alone, which was uncharacteristic of me. With the alcohol and my unprocessed trauma, my thoughts began to get dark. I had never thought of self-harm before, and the thoughts started to creep in. I think I was trying to beat myself up for not being worthy enough of fixing my family, for hiding behind independence as a mask for my fear that other people might let me down. I was trying to beat myself for not being good enough. I got quite close.

Then God sent a friend from out of the blue to come visit me, and it made all the difference. David Johnson and I watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and talked philosophy and life. It felt like I was 10 again, watching TV with my brother.

In the stillness after that day, I learned that mental health isn’t about having one kind of thought or another. It’s about finding comfort in stillness and knowing that your thoughts are not you, and as Jay-Z says, “things don’t happen to you, they happen for you.”

When the gym reopened in 2021, I was dedicated to being disciplined. No more fake intensity. And things really started to pick up. I could see my confidence growing. I began finishing the metcons now that I had accepted my limitations and trusted the process for expanding them. I could see my bench press numbers start going up as I took the weightlifting portion of the class more seriously. I even got a new job at a different corporation making more money with more responsibilities. Things were looking great. That fall my VO2 max climbed to 55, the highest it’s ever been. I was prioritizing sleep, drinking a bit less and taking the classes seriously. I even began to put on muscle and my shoulders filled out. People started to notice the difference in my body. I was always an athlete, but people could tell that something was different about me.

Persistence doesn’t protect you.

2022 was going to be my year. I started the year solving a really hard problem at work that most people thought couldn’t be solved and senior leadership was pushing to shut down. My confidence in the gym swelled and I began spreading the gospel of CrossFit to my friends: “it’s not all that crazy kipping pull-up stuff, they actually help you get stronger, look at me bro.” I was building my own confidence in the gym. I had been a bit shy to start, not really speaking much to others, but I began to engage people with weird philosophical inquiries and awkward jokes. Weirdly, it seemed to resonate with people. I was dating and my family life was showing positive signs of life. My brother, who had been in prison, reached out that summer wanting to reconnect after about a year and a half of silence. He wanted advice about how he could turn his life around and reconnect with the family. I was excited to give it to him. I was excited to be there for him. My time to have it all was finally here.

Then he died.

The night he died was the hardest all-nighter I have ever done in my life. I got the call from an officer telling me that he had died late night on the West Coast, then I stayed awake until my dad woke up on the East Coast to tell him. All the bottled-up feelings came pouring out as I cried to my dad on the phone telling him the news. He told me then that I’d done enough. But I wasn’t ready to believe it then.

I went to the gym late that morning. I needed to move. I couldn’t sit with this pain. I saw Srihari first and he could tell that I’d been going through it, but I couldn’t tell him that my brother had died. I didn’t want to believe it myself. The next day I flew home with my sister and grieved with my parents. We were just kids again. We watched the Rush Hour trilogy and ate egusi soup.

Persistence means you run toward the pain, not from it (s/o Hov).

My brother’s passing surfaced old traumas that threatened to push our family further apart. In 2023, I was determined to do something about it, and I rushed headfirst into problem solving both at work and in my family life to avoid dealing with the trauma of my brother’s passing. I was running from the pain.

2023 challenged me. I had been a star at work, and people began questioning if I should even be working there, maybe I needed some performance improvement. In my personal life I was flying between Atlanta, San Francisco and Seattle to make sure my parents and sister felt loved during this time of loss. I wanted to run away from my own pains and problems by solving others. All the travel and prioritizing work meant I wasn’t as consistent at Persistence Athletics. I got injured when I went back to my old habits of too much intensity, forgetting that consistency beats intensity in the long haul. I felt my world getting darker. And even as the beautiful Seattle summer arrived, I felt a perpetual dark cloud over me. Then I found myself sobbing uncontrollably on my birthday to A Man Called Otto. I was ready to run towards the pain.

In 2024, Ravi and I set a goal: I’d do 100 consecutive back squats once a week, working our way up from about 65 lbs to bodyweight squats. All the lessons I had learned at Persistence came together in that goal. I wanted to rush, but Ravi was stern about me staying on the assigned weight for the week and not progressing too fast just because it felt light. On the weeks I missed because I had to travel, I just redid the prior week’s weight to reacclimatize my body instead of rushing back into the workout after a break. As I tended to my body in this way, I also tended to my soul. The pain in my legs told me to stop, that I couldn’t do it anymore, but because I knew my limits and had a plan to expand them, I ignored them and pushed through. As I did these workouts, others got interested. “What’s Manny doing?” And that created community around me. Ravi made videos of these workouts on social media, which helped me to tap into my more humorous side. Rep by rep, the darkness began to recede. I was comfortable sitting in the pain of those squats, and I became comfortable sitting in the pain of my own trauma.

And then one dark Seattle morning in November, as I was walking back from the gym, I realized that even though the sky was overcast, it felt like the world was lit up because I had found my light once again. I was beaming.

At the gym we joke that there have been multiple versions of Manny, with software and hardware upgrades along the way. Manny 1.0, who walked into the gym in 2020, was on the surface an athlete but more deeply trying to prove himself to the world so that he could prove his worth to himself. Manny 2.0 in 2021 got the software upgrade of understanding consistency over intensity and finally did the legless rope climb. Then Manny 3.0 in 2022 and 2023 learned to sit in the stillness and the pain. Now Manny 4.0, from 2024 forward, has rediscovered his light and understood deep in his bones the meaning of persistence. It’s to keep going until you become who you’re going to be. I don’t yet know what Manny 5.0 looks like, but I’m going to keep going until I find out.

I am still an unfinished project, and I am grateful to Persistence Athletics for pouring into my cup.

Goodbye, Persistence Athletics. You will always be the heart of my Seattle story. Thank you, Ravi. You were the best coach I ever had. Thank you, Jacque, for pushing me over the years.

- Emmanuel