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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing.
And this week, it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Kyle and Emily Rolfe.
Now, Emily is a radiographer and also a successful CrossFit Games athlete.
Kyle, originally from England, is now a law enforcement officer as well as Emily's coach.
So we discuss a host of topics from their journeys into the world of CrossFit, shift work, the NHS,
addiction, the blood clot that almost took Emily's arm, modern medicine,
the innate ability of the human body to heal itself, Kyle's organization Code3 Conveyance, and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback, and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of well over 900 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories
so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Kyle and Emily Rolfe. Enjoy.
Well, Kyle and Emily, I want to start by saying two things.
Firstly, I want to say thank you to Dr. Sean Rocket, who has not only been on the show himself,
but has brought some other amazing humans to me. And obviously this is another example of that.
And secondly, I want to welcome you both to the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
So where on planet Earth are we finding you this afternoon?
Where on planet Earth? It's we're in, I say sunny, it's sunny today, which is rare.
We're in Vancouver, Canada. But yeah, the sun is out. So.
Beautiful. Yeah, the sun's out here too, but I live in Florida, so that's not quite so unusual.
It's always sunny in Florida. It is gorgeous, especially today.
All right. Well, then I would love to kind of walk each of you through your early lives.
And obviously then we'll get to where they intersect and then we'll bounce back and forth.
But Emily, let's start with you. Tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic,
what your parents did, how many siblings.
So I was born in Kamloops, B.C. It's like maybe a four hour drive from Vancouver.
It's more up north in the mountains, kind of we call it like more Booneville, I guess, compared to Vancouver.
I have one older brother. He's two and a half years older. Grew up chasing him, obviously.
Did all the sports growing up, trying to keep up to my older brother. My parents were both very active.
My dad was a collegiate weightlifter and wrestler.
And then my mom was a track and field athlete and she actually made the Olympic team in the 80s for a jab and throw.
So both very athletic parents passed down to my brother and I, I would say.
When you were growing up, were you around them training? Were you watching them?
Because one thing I always point to is how amazing it is to watch the CrossFit kids,
the young kids that grow up watching their parents exercise and that becomes their norm. It becomes their baseline.
Yeah. So, yeah, I remember. I mean, my parents still train like they still are religious with their workouts.
So, yeah, I grew up with it all the way.
Obviously, I was brought to the weight room a lot.
I don't remember it being a like we weren't there hours.
I just remember going and seeing my mom and my dad do stuff and I remember being at the track with my mom and yeah, watching her throw balls.
I remember when I was little heavy, heavy weighted balls.
But as a kid, you don't really care. Like you're stoked because you get to go on the playground.
And I remember we got to bring like a treat. So I'd bring like my Smarties or something.
And that was like my most exciting part.
What about the lifting? Was he an Olympic lifter?
Because that's something when I got into CrossFit about 17 years ago now.
So somewhat early in the kind of, you know, metamorphosis of it.
And one of the areas I think that most of us were just awful at was Olympic lifting.
And then you'd have certain people that that's what they did in high school.
And they were just so much better as one guy, one of our coaches, Alex.
I mean, he could just put crazy weight over his head and it was simply that his dad was a CrossFit coach earlier on and then he just competed in weightlifting.
So how did that factor into your success later on?
Yeah, so my dad, he was actually a science high school teacher, too.
So he was the Olympic weightlifting coach at the high school and he had his own weightlifting club and they'd have a competition every year.
And my brother did it all the way through. So I grew up around it.
When did I learn to lift? I was young. I was probably like eight or something.
Like I was young, but I hated it.
Like all I wanted to do was gymnastics and then I had to do like a couple of weightlifting competitions a year and I hated like I hated doing it.
I just like did not was not interested at all.
I would say all the way up until I started doing CrossFit and then I was like, oh, maybe dad, can you can you refresh me, teach me?
So, I mean, it's super helpful having a dad that technique wise, like he knows he knows what he's got a great eyes, great coach.
I've never been a super strong athlete.
So the weightlifting part of CrossFit has never been a strength of mine.
And that's just, I think, the way I'm made up.
So, I don't know. It's not like, oh, just because my dad's a weightlifting coach, like I'm a great weightlifter.
Like, yeah, I learned the techniques young and that helped.
Like my first CrossFit class, I knew how to snatch and you had to clean and jerk.
Like a lot of people walk into a CrossFit class and they have no idea.
Right. And that takes years. So I definitely had that base, which was really helpful.
When you look back now, I mean, CrossFit has done so much and it served me incredibly well as a firefighter for my whole career.
But, you know, there has been an evolution.
In the day, you know, I was doing it from the main site being laughed at by people in the gym wondering what this crazy Englishman was doing,
almost vomiting in the gym every every couple of days.
But then, you know, then I became a coach.
And then when I look back, I realized all the mistakes.
We just didn't know what we were teaching very well.
We saw the videos, we learned the cues, but we didn't really understand it.
When you look back now, let's take the kind of high school age.
You know, what are what are the some of the things that you're seeing in the coaching now in twenty twenty four that maybe wasn't happening fifteen years ago?
Yeah, I think just CrossFit as a sport has evolved so much.
And when like when I was in high school, was there even CrossFit? I don't know.
Or I sure sure didn't know about it at that time.
And then I think when I started doing CrossFit and I remember like watching a bit with my dad and he was like,
this is ridiculous because, you know, people are snatching with like rounded backs and like, you know, the beginning of CrossFit.
And that's why people made fun of it, because it was like the technique was a joke and people were getting injured.
And so it wasn't a good look, I wouldn't say, for weightlifting at the beginning.
Now, I think it's yeah, it's night and day difference.
And, you know, sometimes I say to my dad, like, man, if you had a weightlifting club now,
like back when it was kind of like the weird thing to do, you know, you kind of had to be a bit different to join weightlifting.
And like now, like that club would flourish, like he'd have a waitlist for training days for sure.
So it's kind of like, oh, for him, you know, ten years too late.
But me, like I'm in my prime. It's great.
I think it's the same for wrestling when UFC came along and started evolving.
You know, again, the wrestlers were kind of the weirdos, the scary weirdos, let's be honest.
But and now, you know, the transition from that to MMA is very, very clear.
Yeah, like they had to they had to plead with people to fill up competitions, you know, when I was a kid, I remember.
And now now there's waitlists like you have to sign up when it opens or else you can't compete for weightlifting, which is it's crazy.
Absolutely. All right. Well, you mentioned gymnastics.
So walk me through the kind of gymnastic, competitive journey that you had.
Yeah. So I like I say, that's all I wanted to do.
My parents kept me in other sports up until I was about 10 or 12, just cross country running, volleyball, basketball, swimming, soccer.
And I was kind of good at everything. So it was like easy to do everything.
But all I wanted to do is gymnastics. And then finally, I think they just didn't want me to specialize so early as a kid and then just burn out.
But yeah, finally, I started going five, six days a week, five hours a day.
And I competed nationally for six years, I think.
And then, yeah, transitioned right from gymnastics to pole vault.
They were just pulling gymnasts and they're like, oh, you know how to like flip through the air.
You'll be good at this. So I did that for a year and then CrossFit right after that.
One more question before we go to Kyle.
I've had so many conversations now, a lot, you know, many of the gurus in CrossFit when it comes to the athletes and the coaches as well, but also all kinds of disciplines through an English eye.
And I'm sure Kyle probably shares the same thing.
When we go through high school back home, you're exposed to a lot of sports, but there's not really that kind of elitism because it just isn't the money in English sports apart from football.
That's it. You're not making money playing cricket really or anything else.
So you end up people leave school and then they keep playing pub leagues and all these kind of things.
What I saw in the US was so many Uncle Rico stories.
Oh man, I was going to be the next quarterback of whatever wasn't for my ACL, my shoulder, whatever it was.
And then as you start speaking to a lot of these coaches and being a parent yourself, you start to realize that in some instances there is that specialization.
And it almost seems like performance is at the detriment of wellness in some of our young athletes.
What's your perspective of that?
Yeah, I agree.
And I think that's what my parents didn't want to do, especially with my mom being so high level.
They know to be really good at something, you have to kind of zero in on that.
You can't be doing everything.
I think now with the CrossFit world, I would say that's the one negative thing about kids starting CrossFit so early is like all of us that are 30,
whatever year old now, we all kind of did like competitive sports till we were till we found CrossFit, till we were in our 20s.
And then we focused on CrossFit, where some of these kids are focusing on CrossFit and they're 13 years old.
And it's like, well, I was doing gymnastics till I was 21st, you know, kind of thing.
So I don't know, I think only time will tell, really.
Like, it's too young of a sport to see where these 12 year olds are going to be in 10, 20 years.
But yeah, I don't know. Maybe they'll be way better than we are.
Maybe.
Well, I've always said that when you've got that very, very small percentage like yourself that actually are so driven that they end up doing this competitively and forging a career out of it.
But I think what's what was lost, at least in a lot of the coaching that I saw was and this wasn't the coaches so much.
It was the athletes. It was get fit and then find out what that fitness is going to do for you.
You know, go to the beach with your kids, you know, take up a sport, whatever it is.
But use CrossFit to get really good at something.
Don't just do CrossFit. Otherwise, as Kenny Powers says, for the rest of you, you're just, you know, getting really good at working out and you're not doing anything with your fitness specifically.
And that's the thing, like going back before it was CrossFit, like it was interval training.
It was plyometrics. Like what that was training for, I don't want to say real sports, but that was training for your actual sport.
Like you'd go to a weight workout, like in track, we'd jump, we'd pole vault, and then we'd go to the weight room and do like CrossFit kind of style stuff.
So it's like, yeah, it's crazy the way it's actually a thing now.
Absolutely.
Well, Kyle, let's go back to your origin story then. So tell me where you were born, a little bit of your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Born in the UK. So I was born in London or just south of London, a place called Sig Cup.
But I was mainly raised in Lincoln, which is about 150 miles northeast of London, on the East Midlands of England.
My father was a police officer, kind of followed in his footsteps.
My mom was a police officer before I was born, but then she went into nursing.
After she had kids, she went and recertified and became a nurse.
And I have one older brother who's also two and a half years old, and he's just turned 40, the old git.
I just turned 50, easy.
Yeah, it's all right.
You don't look it though.
No, wow, you look great.
Yeah. And then I suppose, yeah, usual upbringing in England, you talk about playing all sports.
Yeah, played football, sorry, soccer, as the Americans call it, or North Americans call it.
I played copious amounts of soccer, rugby, cricket, tennis, badminton, anything, anything sports I did, I represented my school in pretty much all of them.
I think the only one I didn't do was tennis.
I didn't really represent my school in, ironically, even though I played tennis quite a lot, because we had a couple of really good racket sport players in our school.
So they just beat me to it, I think, and they represented the school.
Everything else, yeah, I did.
What is your perspective of the availability for us to play sports?
Someone made a really interesting observation about a year ago now, and I think it was an American guest.
But they were saying that we have beautiful facilities here in America, but everything costs.
So you want to rent a softball field or maybe a basketball court or something, you're going to have to pay, get a whole team together and then get them to chip in 20 bucks, and then you can rent the thing.
When I grew up, we had leisure centers and it was almost nothing.
There was a pool, then when you said badminton, I can't even visualize really, apart from an actual school, anywhere where you can go inside and play volleyball, badminton, all those kind of things.
So what have you seen as far as the contrast, if any, between the access to sports you had as a young boy in the UK and what you see in the States or Canada?
I think the sports in North America compared to England is completely different anyway.
I mean, you talk about football or soccer is the biggest sport in probably, I'd say, Europe, to be quite honest.
In North America, you've got hockey, basketball, baseball, American football.
Soccer is around, but it's not as big.
And then we've got rugby as well.
I suppose if you could compare it to anything like North America is like the white collar of sports, whereas in England and a lot of European countries are the blue collar of sport.
So for us, all we need is a field.
Now, as a kid, I would, well, you probably remember this, you'd throw down your jumper and that was your golf post kind of thing.
That was it.
You don't need anything else, a patch of grass in a park or in a field nearby.
You know, old farmer Smith would be really annoyed that his carrot crops got trod over.
But you're like, I'm going to go and play football.
It's as simple as that.
Whereas in hockey, you've got to pay for ice time, you've got to pay for all the padding and stuff.
I mean, I speak to parents of kids at work and stuff, and they're spending thousands of dollars, like a month, for ice rink, hire time,
because you've got to have to pay for the Zamboni, the upkeep of the ice, the refrigeration and all that kind of stuff.
It's crazy money.
Whereas in for us, it was like I said, just throw down a jumper and get a spherical object and go kick it around or an egg shaped object and go kick it around.
That was it.
It was simple as that.
Yeah. I always say that with American football, it should be named egg chucking.
It's basically what it is.
It's still to me, I watched my first ever Super Bowl the whole way through this year.
Only because Taylor Swift was there.
Yeah, that's why I watched it, because of Taylor Swift.
Yeah.
But I was just like, it's crazy how they call it football and they spend, I think the average plays around seven seconds or something.
So talk about explosive.
I got to like five hours in, I was like, is this game ever going to bloody end?
So very, very different from me.
I've always said just take out all the specialization, just get two teams and you have to do everything quarterback, you know, tackle block, receive just the same two groups of people.
You can't switch out for offense or defense, take away all the bloody commercials.
It would be a really fun game, but they've destroyed it by breaking it up.
Yeah, it's called rugby.
We played there for years.
Exactly. I like the forward throw though.
I used to play like touch football, American football, had a friend in school that was into it and it was fun.
It really was.
But that was how we played.
You play both sides, you never stopped, you were tired.
But this, oh, I only do kicking.
Just let me know if you need it kicked.
Like, no, get on the field.
You got to run and that guy's going to try and kill you.
Off you go.
Actually, the closest game we ever played, I don't know if you remember, I was in scouts and Cubs and all that kind of stuff as well as a kid.
But for me, it was death ball.
And that's basically, I suppose the closest game I think of is Aussie rules football.
And that game is just insane.
But that was basically what it was.
It was like, all right, anything goes, this ball goes over there and you've got to go and touch it to that side of the field.
Go.
And it was just a full on, it was brilliant.
I love that game.
That's how it all started, wasn't it?
Mob football, that's the origin of soccer, rugby, all the things.
So, yeah.
Well, then I was listening to you and forgive me, I forgot the name of the podcast, but it was a very humorous Irish guy that was the host that you were on.
Coffee pods and wads, yeah.
Pedro.
Yeah, it was very funny.
But in the conversation with him, I heard you say about your mum rising up through the nursing ranks and ended up being quite high in the NHS.
While we're on this subject, because obviously we're going to get to medicine with Emily's story as well.
This is just my personal opinion.
When I look around the world, there are philosophies that I think are so beautiful that work so well in certain countries.
Finland's education, Portugal's drug decriminalization, Norway's prison system and the UK's healthcare system.
At its core, we all chip in and we take care of people when they need the help.
And if you do it properly, that would also, in theory, drive you to have as healthy a population as possible, to use as little tax money as possible.
From now across the Atlantic, I've seen that beautiful system, cut and cut and cut and privatized and all that kind of stuff.
So it's kind of in tatters now.
But that's James Gearing's perspective.
I think it's a beautiful system.
And I think it's amazing from being a paramedic, taking someone to hospital and not being asked for their social security number.
That's the first thing.
But actually being asked what's wrong with you, how can we help, which is the UK system.
What is your perception or have you had conversations with your mum about the NHS?
And then what have been your experiences with the Canadian system?
I've been very privileged.
I actually worked for the National Health Service in the UK as well from 2004 to 2010.
I was in a much different role than I was now.
Oh, I am now.
I provided first, second and third line of support and computer systems.
So I supported 107 different practices in Lincolnshire, including GPs and all that kind of stuff.
And then I have also worked for the health service.
Well, I worked in the security side of health service in Canada.
So I've been very, very privileged and exposed to all this kind of stuff here as well.
So the difference, as you said, and I well, with Emily's injury, we got a little bit of exposure to it in America.
What the best thing about the UK is, as you said, you walk in and you you're taken care of.
It doesn't matter who you are, where you are, what you are like.
It doesn't matter.
You're going to be taken care of, and that's what our national insurance, it was a national insurance number back then.
You were covered.
And then when we were part of the EU, we had another thing that worked everywhere in Europe as well.
I can't remember the name of it, but that allowed us to go to hospitals there if needs be, if you got injured on holiday or whatever, which is great.
And the nice thing about UK as well, I think, is that they have a hybrid.
They have private health care where you can pay and jump queue.
And if you know, hypothetically, you're a high end sportsman, you need an ACL repair or whatever you can pay.
You can go and see that specialist or go and go and see Sean and get your shoulder or elbow fixed or whatever he's going to do.
In Canada, you can't seem to do that as easily.
You can get private health care, but it's not as easy.
And it's different province wide.
So National Health Service, back when I worked for it, was the biggest company in the world.
Like hands down, it employed the most people out of every company in the world.
And then it was back when my mum started, it was like you went there for a career and you did, you know, you'd start at the bottom.
As a staff nurse or an RN nurse and then work your way up.
She went all the way up to sister, matron and then into all the managerial side of things.
So that was when she started, that was her plan.
It was her career and she's still there.
She's actually working for New Zealand Health Care now.
Oh, really?
Yes. So she's been in nursing now for 30 odd years, goodness knows at least.
And as you said, it's changing so much.
I think I'm careful when I say this, unfortunately with how immigration has happened and everything, it has a huge impact.
I mean, I think the population of England is over 70 million now.
Well, Canada is, goodness knows how many times bigger than England.
England can fit into BC 10 times, I think it works out to be.
So that just tells you how big Canada is because BC has got 12 provinces and BC is one of them.
So when you've got a population of 35 million in a whole country compared to England, it's got 70 odd million, twice the population in, you know, a 12th, 20th of the size, whatever it is.
And you have all these people that are coming in using the system.
Well, it's going to take a beating.
There's only a certain amount we can do.
There's only a certain amount of people that are going to school and to become doctors.
There's only a certain amount of people schooling, come to nurses, paramedics and whatnot.
It's going to have a huge, huge impact.
And yet you're going to have everybody say, oh, it's terrible.
It's all this.
There's grass in every field.
There's also shit in every field.
Sorry, excuse my phrase.
There's crap in every field.
Now you can say whatever you want on here, by the way.
Yeah, it's you know, the grass is greener on the other side of the hedge, but there's also those potholes you've got to avoid.
Right.
So yeah, I mean, when I went home, you know, every time I go home, it's so heartbreaking because people seem to be fatter and sicker every single time I go back.
And I'm going back again next month.
And it shows that obviously that there's been a shift in that system.
And it's the same with immigration.
Like this country is built, you know, the U.S. is built on immigration.
It doesn't mean that you open all the borders wide and just let everyone run in.
But I think if people have been here and proven themselves that maybe didn't come here legally initially, then we fight to get them registered and pay in tax and that way contributing to the country.
But, you know, you've got that going on.
You've got the 999 abuse and then you've got the ill health of the nation.
If you have healthier people, you use less resources.
It's that simple.
But I don't see that happening in the UK.
People just seem to be sliding the same way as the U.S.
There's there's bad apples everywhere.
There's good apples and bad apples everywhere.
There are people that are going to come in.
I used to work with a lot of Polish guys that came over, but they were hardest workers I've ever come across.
Like they would work every hour that God sends them.
They really would. I love working with those guys.
I enjoyed it.
They were good fun and they worked really hard.
And oddly enough, their economy is getting stronger now.
So they're sending them back and they go in there and they're buying up businesses in the UK and stuff like they own.
Lawrence Fishburne.
Not Lawrence Fishburne. What am I saying?
The actor. They own the actor.
They can't do that.
Lawrence David is what I'm trying to say.
Lawrence David, the trucking company.
They own the trucking company.
It's one of the biggest trucking companies in the UK and it's owned by the Polish now because they've just done a better job about it.
Right.
And it's probably the same in the US.
You've got a lot of people come over whether they come over the border or if they're coming in as refugees or what not.
There are people that want to come in and work and then there are people that want to come in and go, no, I want to abuse the system and just live off, you know, what the government give me and stuff.
And that's the problem.
It's where that abuse happens.
And there's always going to be that problem.
There's always been that issue like going back to when the British Empire went around, people moved countries or whatever and, you know, we sent out our non-Law abiding citizens to Australia.
Now they, you know, send them to an obviously horrible island.
Is it horrible?
You're going to hate it.
It's all sand and sun and palm trees.
Yeah, sounds terrible.
Yeah, except every animal wants to kill you.
That's the only thing for me.
Well, coming from London, it's the same thing there too.
Yeah, exactly.
Except animals are humans.
But anyway, that's a whole different ball.
I did notice you said home though.
I don't refer to England as home anymore.
It's not my home.
Canada is my home now.
So, see, it's weird.
I never saw it.
Because I'm.
Yeah, it's where the heart is.
It's where the heart is.
It's weird for me.
Are you in the US?
Yeah, yeah, I live in Florida and I've been here for 22 years now, I think.
So almost half of my life.
But it's not that it's, you know, I mean, I've got a flag, you can see the other shoulder behind me.
You know, it's who I am.
It's how I was raised.
I was born and bred.
But I served with an American flag on my shoulder for a long time, you know.
So it's just to me, this whole planet is my home.
But so when I talk about going home, it's, you know, that's where I was born and bred.
But it's not that I and my family think that I turn my back on the UK and so I can't bloody win either way.
So but to me, you know, like everywhere, I genuinely feel like this whole planet is our home.
So I don't really acknowledge borders too much.
I mean, we have to legally.
But, you know, I see I see that the human nurse of everyone around us.
So like you said, there's rotten apples, but they're few and far between, I think.
So all right.
Well, then, Emily, since we're talking about medicine, let's walk through your journey into radiography.
What made you choose that profession?
Oh, it was it was my back fall.
My plan C, to be honest.
I wanted to do physio.
I was kind of I still wanted to compete in gymnastics.
And I don't know if you know much about gymnastics, but the US is where you want to do collegiate gymnastics.
Canada is not we don't do that here.
So I was kind of at a crossroads.
It's like, try to get a scholarship to the US or just continue competing club and just see how far I can go here.
And I had a couple teammates and friends that went to the US and kind of weren't really getting an education.
You kind of just go for your sport.
And like, that's that's why you're there.
So whatever you get is kind of a bonus.
But so I kind of thought, you know, maybe I'll try to do both.
I'll stay here. I'll still compete.
And then I'll try to get something decent through my education, too.
So I just did my bachelor of science thinking I'll go into physio or go into med or pharmacy or something like that.
And then five years later, I don't even know.
I did a couple of the entry tests and, you know, kind of I think I just applied for radiography as like a plan C if I don't get into physio or anything.
And then I got into that right away and I thought, oh, I'll just do this while I decide what I'm really going to do.
And then, yeah, I went to school for that.
It was only a two year thing after my degree and.
Liked it, enjoyed it, kind of liked the hours was like, maybe I don't want to do, you know, 12 hour shifts and be at the hospital all day and night like a doctor would.
And yeah, I just kind of.
And by that time I had started CrossFit and I was like, oh, well, now this is my priority.
So and yeah, so just kind of kept going.
While we're on that subject, when I look at the way a lot of myself and a lot of other people in the kind of workman's comp.
So you get hurt as a firefighter, as a police officer.
There's a real kind of aversion to, you know, MRIs and an X-ray, not so much X-rays, MRIs and some of the really excellent diagnostics that we have out there.
And a lot of times, you know, people we put weeks and weeks and weeks behind start in PT or that kind of thing because they really don't know what it is.
And it's kind of the well, we'll do an X-ray, which, you know, OK, let's make sure you haven't broken a bone.
Well, that's not really telling you much about any of the other tissues in the body.
And then just see if it kind of heals on its own.
So by the time you realize it hasn't, you know, and you've got something more significant, you're in a two, three months of not doing PT by that point.
What is your perspective on all the imaging that you work with?
And I mean, obviously, you work more with the athletes as well, but just in general, with a traumatic injury, how soon should imaging be done?
Oh, no one's ever asked me that.
I mean, like you said, the sooner the better.
Unfortunately, with our like I work in primarily in CT right now, and patients are waiting half a year, like six months and MRI ultrasound.
Like it's all like six month waiting list, which is ridiculous.
Like anything if you have if you have a torn knee or something, so you're waiting six months, you know, on your rehab, like you said, or like even more life threatening things like, oh, I might have cancer here or something.
So you have to wait six months and just stress that it's growing or spreading like like that's ridiculous.
I don't and I don't know if it's because of covid kind of put everything back with.
So now we're just like dealing with a backlog.
I'm not sure if that's partly why it's so bad right now, but I guess we'll know in a couple of years.
I may be biased here, James, but I think and I personally I feel that if you have someone like a fire officer, police officer, paramedic or anything like that, or someone who's in the front line support, rather than your person who's like, oh, I, you know, occasionally get up and go for a walk.
And I strain my ankle stepping off the curb.
Those people in my, my opinion should get priority.
Yeah, I wish we could do that and go straight to the top of the queue because then it's not going to have a negative impact on all the other systems.
So if we have less police officers, we have less paramedics, less fire officers.
Well, it has a knock on effect kind of thing.
And some surgeons, some of the surgeons that I work with do kind of do that. Like, they take the young athlete or the fit healthy person and I'll fix his hip first because I know he's going to be diligent in his rehab.
And you know, he's eating well and he's doing all these other things like, yeah, I don't blame them like.
If Emily's, and I don't want to go off on a tangent here, but if Emily had her injury in Canada, she would probably still be off. That's how bad it would be.
Well, no, mine was like emergent surgery.
But what I'm saying is if that happened here, like, well, I don't know, because you wouldn't have gotten to the hospital as quickly as you did.
That's the thing. Sometimes we talk about like, oh, what if I wasn't at the games and what if I was just at home? He's like, would you have gone to the hospital? No.
Like I would have gone to train. I would have gone home. Like, oh, my hand really hurts. But just got it checked.
We've got a hacksaw in the in the in the garage and just, you know, gone to town glory style.
Just about the flesh wound.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, with that, I think what what's the reoccurring theme? I just interviewed Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know if you know who that is, but she's one of the people that was on the Democratic card at the time.
She's not with that party anymore, but military, you know, she's super fit herself.
She's, you know, kind of walk softly, but carry a big stick with the whole philosophy of war and sending our troops off.
Really just great human being. But we were kind of talking about all these issues and every single time it was that false economy.
And it's even with this, if you have if you don't invest enough in your radiographers and your MRIs and CT machines, there has to be a much greater cost of all those people on that waiting list that are probably not working or, you know, or, you know, whatever it is on light duty or whatever the thing is.
So whether it's the NHS, whether it's that system and then whether the fire service, I mean, we work our firefighters to death literally in this country.
They work 56 hours a week minimum and then understaffed. They work in 80 hour weeks. It's insane.
And so then they break and then there's this massive cost at the end.
So it seems like, you know, if we could realize this and have the courage to say to a nation or, you know, a province or whatever it is, hey, we're going to need some extra money, but it's going to save us, you know, hand over fist down the road because we're going to get rid of this backlog.
And that means that all those people are going to be back to work. Yeah. Yeah. Cure the snowball effect, I think a little.
A lot of people don't know this, but I think like an injured first responder, I think it costs mainly like one and a half times more to have someone who's injured because you've got to cover them.
And then you've got to cover the person that's going to cover them. So if you have someone that's doing double time or overtime or whatever.
So, like you said, it has an amazing knock on effect. Not amazing. It's absolutely dreadful, but it's a huge, huge impact.
Absolutely. Well, Emily, you talked about entrance tests. Kyle, talk to me about the Royal Marines and then how skiing won in the end.
So I initially started training for the Royal Marines back in 2002, 2002, between 2002, 2004. And I was like, I'll go and do my back in England, the A levels. You probably remember A levels.
Yeah, I'd never got to actually take any because I wasn't smart enough. I was in the A level classes.
I did them and I got a couple of passes or whatever, but I didn't get a sufficient amount of grades to go on to university or anything like that. I got enough to go on to.
I think actually maybe I didn't. I don't remember. I was going to go office all right to go to into officer training. And I was like, you know what? I think I'm just going to go for regular.
So I started training for regular potential Royal Marines course and build up all my fitness and everything.
And I put put it off, put it off, put it off. And then I had a slight medical thing, nothing big, but I just couldn't get past a certain thing because I unfortunately waiting on time things with NHS.
I was like, oh, man, I need to go and do this. I was really fit and healthy. I said, OK, well, all right, I'll get this done. And then it happened like all of a sudden 2010 by this time, like this, let's say how long it took to wait.
And things have gone on and whatnot. I was like, all right, well, I'm going to go and go and do a ski season. So I ended up going to a ski season.
I said to the time I weren't off to be all right. I'll be back after my ski season. I'll come to you. She's like, yeah, fine. No problem.
So I went to switch into the skis. I was like, that was fun. Went back to NHS to work as a contractor and I was OK. Good to go for the.
Oh, there's an application for Canada here. So I applied for Canada. I could do another season. It'd be fine.
When it did another season and said the same thing, I'll be back in a bit. And he's like, yeah, by this time, is that. Yeah, right. Whatever. I'm like, no, no, I'll be back.
So I did a first season and I was like, Canada was a lot of fun. Like we had amazing snow.
Everybody compared to Switzerland, everybody spoke English. You know, it was it was a lot of fun.
I was like, all right, one more, one more and then I'll go back. And by this time I was 20, 24, 25.
So I'd have been older going into the Marines, but still plenty of time left.
I think I was still relatively fit. And then. I met her and I was like, ah, so had to think things through.
I went I went to New Zealand because my parents had just moved there. I went over there, did another season.
I was like, right. Well, I kind of got to make a decision here.
So I moved back to Canada and continued working, set up my now or not now, but my personal training, a sports nutrition business and all that kind of stuff and coaching them.
And I was like, well, I'm probably not going to go in the military now.
I'm going to go a different route. And I was like, well, I've always wanted to do some form of military service or paramilitary service.
So I may as well go towards the policing side of things.
And here I was having to wait. And back when I came here to get permanent residency here was really long.
It took me three, three years to get my permanent residency. It was a long time.
And I just I went down to came down to Vancouver.
I was at school for BCIT for her X-ray and CT. And I worked as a for a thirteen dollar an hour job as a security officer, worked every hour that God sent me.
And luckily, I was exposed to some pretty traumatic stuff.
But stuff that would help me with my application for policing and one in particular as a gentleman, like was going to commit suicide and had to negotiate with him and then get police in and whatever.
And all the police officers were all VPD officers and they gave me references to the department.
And in June 2016 or April, in fact, it is exactly today that I got my permanent residency.
Ten years ago. Sorry. Eight years ago.
Eight years ago to the day. So that's kind of ironic.
But yeah, I got my residency.
And then in June, I applied for the police because I could now apply for the police after this incident happened and what and what went on.
And in September, I was in the Academy and then I've been working the police ever since.
When I think of Vancouver, I know this is just one area, but sadly, we say if you think of Ohio and West Virginia, the addiction crisis and Gabbo Matei, Gabbo Matei, he's based in there and I've studied a lot of his work.
What through these years have been your insights as far as that problem?
And then have you noticed any kind of common denominators about the root cause of why so many men and women in Vancouver are struggling at the moment?
Well, there's I wouldn't say there's one root cause.
There's a lot of root causes. I mean, the financial cost to live in Vancouver is astronomical.
Yeah, the drug side of things is is there so readily available?
And we passed a more I say we the government passed a bill that now you can possess drugs to a certain amount.
And it's quite a quite a large amount.
Like if I if I saw someone that now I think you know, possession of purpose of trafficking and I'd have to articulate or whatever.
But there is a large amount.
The the issue you have it comes from oxycodone and all that kind of stuff that's come in and people get addicted.
I speak to a lot of these. I see them daily.
People. And so you worked in like the like the downtown like we call the East Side.
But the drug you worked in that it is the most compact and yet.
How am I trying to say there's such a large amount of people in like a two block radius.
I think it's like three and a half thousand people or something in a two block radius that users.
And it's we have people that come from even from LAPD, Seattle, lots of police departments all around.
New Zealand police were here a few months back because they come here and they see our opioid crisis and crisis with the drug.
And and fence and all that because heroin doesn't exist anymore.
Eighty seven percent of all drugs in 83 percent of all drugs in B.C. are cut with fence.
So it's just unbelievable.
And the amount of overdoses that we get a day.
I mean, I remember when I was working in the hospital, I saw one guy, he came in three times in an ambulance.
So different ambulance, different crew, three different times in an ambulance.
And every time when they knock on him or naloxone, he's way he'd be pissed off.
Like you just took my high away from me.
Now I've got to go back and do it again. And he go and do it again.
And the best way I can describe the drugs here is and it's awful to say this, it's like a cookie.
Sometimes you get chocolate chips and you get loads of them and it's like and then other times you get no chocolate chips inside.
Well, this is crap. And then they and that's why we're getting like 20 year olds that just did it once at a party like at the hospital.
Yes. At least these days.
And then those that do use their their tolerance for it goes up.
So they have to use more.
And then the cost of it goes up because of all that happened, like during during the the pandemic, like it's like the cost of it goes up.
During during the pandemic, like it was crazy.
It was insane. And yeah, it's we will be paying for that for years.
Everybody will in the world. But it's it's a fire that we keep fighting as best we can and do the best we can with the judicial system we have.
And the it gets hard. I mean, you as a fire officer, you'll know this more than anybody.
You probably went to your fair share of overdoses and whatever, because that's how they used in in North America.
In England, I never I don't know if I may be wrong in saying this, but fire officers were fire officers.
They weren't paramedics as well.
They probably have training and stuff and they'll still go to car crashes of everything like as normal.
But I don't think they were used as like a second ambulance service.
No, no. They're first responder trained.
So I know that, you know, they will respond to medical calls.
An interesting anomaly is Dublin. I've had a few guys from there now.
They actually are paramedics as well.
Now, if I understand it right, their firefighters are not transporting on the ambulance, but their firefighter trained on the excuse me, paramedic trained on the fire engine, the fire truck.
What's what's really been apparent to me is such a shame because you'll get, you know, a city try quote, air quotes decriminalization and then everyone point and go see it doesn't work.
And I think it's the same as the NHS when that one person dies in the ER waiting room.
They're like, see, you know, socialized medicine doesn't work.
And the problem is, if you don't do it properly, of course, it's not going to work.
And what what I've observed again, I went to Portugal, my son, my family moved to Portugal and sat down with the guy who spearheaded their decriminalization.
And the difference was they didn't just change the law.
They took a huge amount of money again, false economy.
You need to you need money up front and they created addiction centers, mental health counseling, job creation.
And it was a huge success in less than 10 years.
They went from basically the worst addiction crisis in I think it was either Europe or the world.
I never, I never remember which one to the lowest, like they complete.
And now you think about the safety of their offices on the street, the amount of space there are in the court system now.
I mean, everything now you can focus on the dealers and the smugglers and everyone else.
But the piecemealing, the same way as, you know, the Obamacare trying to be NHS, it wasn't even close to that.
So, of course, it failed.
So this is the problem is that I haven't seen one area do it properly yet.
Like actually say these addicts need medical attention.
They have a mental health problem that they are leaning into their addiction for.
And it's perfectly underlined because when COVID happened, what did we lose?
Connection. Johan Hari says the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection.
And so people are lonelier and more depressed and they lean into their addiction.
And it's very easy to be judgy on the on the opioid addict.
But how often are we on our phones? We're leaning into fast food, leaning into alcohol.
Well, that's all socially acceptable. So let's not talk about that.
So this is what is interesting.
And everyone has their opinion and the law enforcement community is the hardest one to really be able to step back because you're the ones told to enforce these laws.
But the arresting your way out of addiction model has been going since the 1930s in America and it just isn't working.
So, again, for me, I don't I think it's going to happen eventually.
But we need to shift from looking at someone as a criminal.
And this isn't the people this isn't the crimes that they have committed aside from that assault burglary.
That's a crime that has to be done. But someone struggling with addiction, if the stigma is removed,
Portugal saw a lot of people ask for help once they realize they weren't going to get arrested for it.
We have kind of tried that here. As you said, I don't think it's been implemented correctly.
I'm I'm nothing. I don't know anything. But I I've been to Portugal. I've seen it like firsthand as well.
I I do agree.
It's the it's the support side of things. The other side of things, though, is there are people that they like all of a sudden.
No, I'm entitled to this. I'm entitled to that. I'm entitled to that.
And so they they you flip it on its head and you've got that bad apple because they're now I'm not going to spend money on this.
I'm not going to do that. I should just get given that because that's who I am.
And, you know, it's a very, very, very fine line. And I think it's I would say almost impossible to do in Canada.
I wouldn't say I would say probably North America, to be honest, because you have such a diverse range of people.
Portugal certainly has immigrants, but you also have a majority of people in there are Portuguese majority.
And, you know, that they they're not the biggest country either.
They don't have millions and millions and millions of people like North America.
So is it possible to do that? Probably because of how their government ran it.
And I do think it is a great idea. And I heard the same thing.
I heard that the government just went, yeah, we're going to provide the support.
No, it's not going to be illegal for you to do it. OK, you're doing heroin. OK, great.
Come see me at this clinic. We'll take you off it. We're going to give you a methodos.
We're going to give you that. We're going to get you out. And we're going to do this, this and this.
And it's the same with schooling systems as well.
Like my my brother's just moved to New Zealand because of the American school system.
He's where he was in the state. It wasn't working for him. Gone to a new country.
It's completely different. And his son's getting help.
They need some tuition and whatnot. So, as I said, there's grass, green grass in every field.
There's also crap in them all. But I think there is a lot of.
And I choose my words very carefully.
There's a lot of politicians who go, I will promise you the world.
And then they don't deliver on it. And there are people like, yeah, great.
And then about, yeah, it's going to be this planet. It's this going to.
Oh, we're going to build a border around this or we're going to build a wall.
Oh, you know, I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus.
There's there's politicians, you know, they'll make these decisions and knee jerk reactions and whatever.
And a lot of a lot of the time, it doesn't work a lot of the time, unfortunately.
So I'm not saying you can't do nothing because you have to do something.
But it's till it's the best idea and it's really, really thought through.
It's very difficult. Yeah.
No, I mean, it's a valuable perspective.
I think the difference in Portugal as well is that they actually address the Portuguese people and they got everyone involved.
So everyone had a part and everyone was part of the solution.
There's very much a feeling here of pointing to a certain government building and saying you need to fix this.
And then your people you're pointing to were elected through a terrible system where they're not even leaders as well.
And then everyone wonders why things don't work.
So, yeah, anyway, I digress. We'll move on to CrossFit.
Well, Emily, you have this kind of athletic journey as a young woman.
And obviously you're exposed to strength and conditioning at that point.
Talk to me about your introduction to CrossFit, your first workout, if that was one that was memorable.
And then what was it that dragged you down that path?
Yeah, so I think just the time in my life, like I say, I was just coming down to Vancouver for school and I was done with gymnastics.
I was done with track and field.
So I was kind of like, what's the next next thing?
So the timing was perfect.
Yeah, I remember just like watching.
We were actually at a CrossFit competition together because Kyle, with his personal training business, you were doing something there.
And he dragged me along to help him.
And I was like, like begrudgingly, my fault, went to help him, was watching these girls do.
I specifically remember like handstand stuff.
And I was like, I can do that.
And yeah, people, you know, some random people were, oh, you should do it.
No, no, no.
Like at that time, I was still like, not embarrassed.
But like I said before, like CrossFit kind of had the bad rap.
I was like, I'm not doing that.
Like, looks ridiculous.
Fast forward, what, two weeks later, I moved to Vancouver.
Just by chance, meet some people.
And they're like, oh, come to this class.
Okay, fine.
So I went.
Drank the Kool-Aid.
Yeah, basically.
I remember the first workout was Helen.
The three rounds of 400 meter run, pull ups, kettlebell swings, whatever it is.
And yeah, breezed through that.
And I was like, this is pretty easy.
And I feel bad for saying that because a lot of people are like, oh, my first CrossFit workout.
Like I was on the ground.
I was dying.
You know, I felt like I was going to throw up.
Me, like I did Helen and, you know, finished like toward the top of the class.
And I was like, okay, I guess I'm kind of good.
And then really wasn't tired.
I remember coming home and I like went for a run that evening because I was like, okay, sweet.
That was just like one part of my day, whatever.
But yeah, I think the it felt like I was doing gymnastics again, like, you know, swinging on the bar.
Like my hands were sore again.
You know, I was learning muscle ups because you don't really do muscle ups in gymnastics.
So like the new skill kind of keeps you coming back for more when you're learning something every day.
And, you know, it helps when you're you do something and you're kind of instantly good at it.
And yeah, so that was all just very like good, good feedback.
And I just, yeah, kept going.
Helen was my first one.
And I wrote a book about three years ago.
And I've talked about that.
It was a bunch of short stories basically.
And the takeaway was fitness or nutrition or back injuries or mental health, whatever it was.
But I remember my friend showing me this cannonball with a handle on it.
And I'm like, what are we going to do with this?
This for a geriatric pirate?
What's this going on?
But it did.
It murdered me.
Absolutely murdered me.
And I was so humbled.
And then it's funny you talking about muscle ups.
I had a realization years later.
I was never good at the kipping muscle ups on the rings.
But I could do the strict as I built my strength up.
And then when I was able to finally do it, I was like, oh, my God, I just realized that all I've mastered is the beginning position of every gymnast on the planet.
Not even starting yet.
Like I've just spent years just trying to get up on the rings in the first place.
So yeah, it's very humbling when you see the people who are experts in each of these disciplines in CrossFit, when you actually kind of look at what high performance is supposed to look like.
Dave Durante in gymnastics, for example.
Yes, you're right.
Like the men, that's how they start their ring routine.
Like you do a strict muscle up.
Obviously, girls didn't do rings.
But our first movement on the uneven bars, it's called a kip.
But it's basically a bar muscle up, which we learned when we're seven.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And it was like and then Helen, everyone was like swinging like worm on hooks.
And I was like, oh, like, you know, coming from gymnastics, everything's so strict and rigid, you know, and I was like, oh, I can just like kind of cheat and use my legs to help me get up.
This is sweet.
This is easy.
What is your like?
We're staying with with pull ups for a second coming from a gymnast.
I learned the kip, but I never did the butterfly because again, I wasn't going to compete in CrossFit.
And when my again, my own personal individual philosophy of this was the what they call it, the butterfly in the pool was because someone found a loophole in the rules from the breaststroke.
That's how that thing came about.
And that's kind of how I saw the butterfly pull up.
So to me, to me as a coach and as an athlete, I never learned the butterfly because I didn't need to be faster at pull ups for what I needed.
You know, I was doing it to be a better firefighter.
So I would do strict pull ups or the gymnastic hip.
Obviously, if you're going to be a competitive athlete in the world of CrossFit, you need to have the butterfly pull up.
What is your kind of philosophy on the non competitive athletes that walk into the CrossFit schools and the importance of a strict, a gymnastic or a butterfly?
Yeah, I 100% agree with you.
You yeah, the only reason why we're doing that kind of stuff is because you're going to lose if you don't like if you're competing, right?
You need to be fast.
That's the fastest way to do them.
And now for me, because I do them all the time, I think it's the easiest way to like he'll program tipping chest a bar every once in a while.
And I'm like, like, it's so hard because you have to hold it here before you go down or else your swings going to be funny.
It's way harder. And then like, obviously, strict is even harder when I give a strict, but they threw a workout with strict this year, didn't they?
And what a loser. They like strict, strict pull ups or whatever.
And I was like, there you go. That's where you do it.
Yeah, I agree with you. Like strict strength first.
Always like if you have the strength, you can learn the technique.
But if you don't need to be.
Butterflying if you don't have any strength.
In my opinion, brilliant. Well, Kyle, you you ended up you talked about personal training.
We didn't go into it super deeply, but you taught skiing.
You taught rugby, obviously got into the strength and conditioning side.
I heard you talking about Reiki as well, which must come in really handy.
And I mean, but so how how did that cross pollination start where you ended up coaching?
Because as you said, you know, you're not a high level cross fit athlete specifically, but you know, you're you're an athlete.
I mean, it doesn't have to be cross fit.
How did you start fusing that where you were able to to become a great coach?
And I guess Joe Kalsagi is a perfect example.
His dad never boxed and he learned how to box and taught his son to be one of the best boxing champions we ever had.
Yeah, I I think if Emily may agree with me, I think why I'm lucky is I have a very good eye.
So through I've been coaching in some form for 24 years of my life.
And I started with martial arts, helping out in the kids class as a teenager.
You help out kids class and I went on to rugby from rugby.
I went on to ski instruction and personal training.
So you have to watch people all the time and skiing, especially.
I mean, I think that's probably what's helped me the most because everything's happening so fast.
And you have to watch certain things.
And I've always worked with I don't deal with symptoms.
I deal with causes.
So if you have, you know, take take a muscle, for example, someone says, I'm not I'm not very good at muscle.
OK, well, why not?
Well, I'm really good at pushing.
I'm not so good at pulling.
Right. Well, simple thing is work on your pull and I think and learn to, you know, engage, engage your lats first, pull down on the bar.
And then rotate over and you're going to be all right at the pushing part because you just got to rotate over.
So work on a pull in.
And that's what I've done with Emily.
So I I one of her first in 2016, she went to a crossfit coach.
I said, look, I said, I don't know anything about CrossFit.
I don't claim to know anything about CrossFit.
So go do your thing.
She went and she was being coached.
And every week there was I'm not going to throw any names in the bus or anything like that.
He was coaching news that I'll do a one rep max back squat every week.
And I said to her, why, why on earth would you do that?
Like, why would you expect to keep getting better?
You can't just get better from that.
You need to be time under tension.
You need to be working in the correct percentage.
And that's all stuff I know.
I've been very lucky.
I continue to research and learn new stuff.
I've got friends, some of the best strength and conditioning coaches in the world that I'm associated with.
And I was like, well, that really doesn't make sense to me.
So I said, here, here's a leg training program.
And Emily, what do you start with?
Like one, one twenty, one thirty five clean.
And I think you could one, you could one rep max, maybe a back squat, one sixty five.
I was like, no, for like a year, for a year.
This is this is ridiculous.
So I did one program with which it was twelve, twelve, twelve weeks.
And Emily went from doing like one sixty five to doing two hundred plus.
Like it was a forty pound increase, like a massive increase.
I said, well, that's because you've done time under tension.
You've strengthened your ligaments and tendons.
You've done things properly.
And then that's what we've done for years.
Now, Emily will be the first to say she said, oh, I'm I'm my strengths, my weakness.
Now, that's not entirely true.
It just takes Emily a lot longer because of her muscle fibers.
So her muscle fibers, predominantly one B and one A and the odd bit of two A.
So I had to train her muscle fibers to do the switchover.
And I was like, well, I know the science behind that.
I know what you have to do in the training system.
And we've actually got to a stage in the last couple of years where it's like, all right, now we're starting to catch up
because we bridge the gap with the muscle fibers.
And I trained her in a way or she's trained in a way.
I've just written it down on paper and shout out occasionally.
But she's trained in a way and being very disciplined that it has developed into the areas that she needs to work on.
So when I was starting, if there was a workout under like 15 minutes, like I'm not good.
Like it had to be long. It had to be.
And now it's like, OK, I can do these sprint workouts and I can.
Yeah. So that's what we've done.
And where Emily is incredible and I think the best athletes in the world is they do the things that they're not good at.
And, you know, the iceberg terminology, oh, you see the competition on the top, all the hard works underneath the water kind of thing.
You know, it's all done in.
It's all that hard work done in the dark day in, day out and the nutrition, the sleep and everything else, it all adds up.
And unfortunately, you talk about the phones and everything is that they've put a silver button.
You know, we want this now, we want this now, we want this now.
Everybody wants speed. It doesn't happen like that.
That's not how how we as humans are meant to be.
We want to be. Yeah, no, absolutely.
Well, again, speaking for 95 plus percent that aren't competitive crossfit athletes at this point.
What is your perception of the one rep max for me personally, you know, as an athlete and now as a coach, I find a lot more value in a three rep max.
That's going to require more time under tension, more control.
Obviously, you've got to go down and up.
You know, yes, if you're in a competition setting, certainly in Olympic lifting and powerlifting, you're going for a one rep max if you're in a crossfit competition.
But for everyone else, I feel like that's something.
I think it's a deadlift, for example, like if you want to see the worst technique ever program a one rep max deadlift.
So what is your perception of the average person, whether they're a sedentary granny or a police officer, firefighter, soldier that's not competing in crossfit on the low number barbell movements?
Well, I think you're sorry. Go ahead.
No, I was I was just going to add you're also going to put out all the dads and whatever for two weeks if you do that in a crossfit class.
So if you think about it in a perspective of like working and counting, when does one person do a one rep max?
Think of I'll take a fire officer, for example.
Well, you don't do a one rep max pick up a hose and then and fling it around.
You carry that hose for miles and you do, you know, you hook it up and then you got to climb your ladder, get in.
Maybe you've got to pull up for a window, break down a door, whatever you got to do.
Or you've got to do lots of reps of jimmying to open up a car door or something like that.
I don't I don't know. I'm not trying to speak for you.
And it's the same with a police officer.
They're not going to do a one rep max pick up a guy and push him over his head.
They're going to have a fight with a guy and, you know, try and get him into custody and take you into that.
So I actually find the one rep max to be ridiculous.
I think it's great for feature strength if it's in strongman, if it's in Olympic lifting or not.
But again, it comes down to that work beforehand.
So you've got to do you've got to take all that additional work.
And what people forget about is the ligaments and tendons.
Your muscles can be absolutely on fire and whatever.
But you've got to have good ligaments and tendons.
You've got to have good synovial fluid flowing around.
And I could go on about this all day.
But what I find very interesting is that I would say 99.9 percent of all life is not a one rep max.
And the reason why is because one day and I talk about females menstrual cycles, you talk about people sleep nutrition,
your one rep max one day could be hypothetically 300 pounds.
That's a 300 pounds bench press or clean or whatever you want to say.
But the following day, you didn't sleep as well.
You were tossing and turning or you're dealing with kids or 101 different things.
The following day, your one rep max might be 250.
So it's completely irrelevant.
Whereas if you say to her, OK, now base it off.
And I always say this to Emily when she's training.
Don't base your one rep max off all the time what you are your one rep max.
Like if you're one rep max at the end, I'm feeling good.
All right, push it a little bit more. I'm not feeling so good.
OK, let's dial it back.
It's it's manipulation all the time.
So that's why I personally think anyway, I could go on about this all day.
I won't. I won't.
I won't. Well, let's add to that because you just opened the door of shift work.
I think it's extremely important as well.
I mean, this in the fire service, I told you about the hours they work.
If you think about that over 10, 15, 20 years, you are going to break.
Your performance is going to be absolutely horrendous.
And, you know, all the repairs from your training, the tendons, ligaments,
you know, synovial fluid, the brain bath that it takes every night when we're supposed to sleep.
None of that is happening.
So our performance is going down.
And I think that's the unspoken conversation of the fat police officer.
Some of them are just shit, let's be honest.
But there's a lot of them where the shift work is contributing to the hormonal disruption
and all the things that is making it harder, you know, energy wise,
making it harder to process your food, et cetera.
So but now we're talking about an elite performance, which is, you know, arguably, Kyle,
you're in that foot pursuit and someone's running towards the school with a kitchen knife.
This is when you are expected to have elite performance as a firefighter, the same thing.
So what have you witnessed, Emily, as far as the impact for you on your training?
I heard you touch on it and I heard that you had some very intelligent philosophies to offset some of that.
What has been your experience of the detriment of shift work on a high competitive athlete like yourself?
So I don't do nights anymore.
But when I did, you know what?
Well, you applied for your position you're in, so you wouldn't in that, right?
Yeah.
I think mentally I hated it more than physically what it did to me because I was so regimented.
I made it work and, you know, I was disciplined.
Like I would finish a night shift in the morning, do my training till 11 or 12 p.m., sleep till 9 p.m.,
get up, train again, go to work like there was nothing else.
You know, I prepped all my meals like I made sure I ate really well.
I ate throughout my night of working like breakfast, lunch, dinner, you know, in the night to mimic the day.
So like I could train well, like I was just super regimented.
So honestly, I think I did OK.
But you're right, as soon as one of those goes, like you're screwed.
Like you don't sleep in the day, you know, you like you're not really hungry at night sometimes.
And I know a lot of people just don't eat because like your body's confused, like your stomach hurts and you're not sure.
Are you hungry or you just need to take a poo or like, you know, like you don't know because your body's all flip flopped.
And so I tried everything that I control.
I tried to keep the same.
And I'm lucky I can sleep really well because again, like lack of sleep, like I've noticed it.
Like if you don't sleep, well, yeah, you're tired, you're training, whatever, all that.
But also, like you crave greasy, carby foods, like you crave like not good things.
And like it's just a down slope.
But I was fortunate that I could make it work well.
I guess so. Yeah, you guys, their works harder, their shift works harder.
You know, they they don't get their scheduled breaks like we do and stuff like that all adds up and they're they're on constant high alert all night.
Right.
Whereas I can be like kind of dozy and, you know, till I get a patient, you know, it's so it's a different it's a different thing.
But can I add to that? Absolutely.
Yeah, I think you'd be aware of like, obviously, the circadian rhythm is what gets messed up the most.
And that has, as you as you know, the detrimental effect on everybody.
But as Emily just touched on the code, we call it being in code yellow.
So we code white, you're totally, you know, relaxed or whatever code yellow.
You're on alert code red, like things are going down and then code black is where you're like, there's nothing else but this thing you're dealing with.
You're very focused on that.
And you should never actually go code black because your peripheral vision, everything goes.
And I think you would definitely be able to attest to this as a fire officer when you're in situations, you've got to be wary of everything else and whether the structure of the building is going to fall or if there's going to be people coming out and acting radically.
We have to do that all the time as first responders. And I'm not saying Emily doesn't. But that has that is probably one of these biggest things.
And you talk about mental health is mental health is imperative.
And so and you talked about the fat police officer. I got to a stage in policing and I'm I'm now acknowledging it.
I was the unhealthiest I've ever been as a as a person.
Now, I was still able to luckily, you know, touch wood.
I'm because I have been a very reasonable underplay a little bit, a very good standard of athleticism before I could still do everything I needed to do.
I you know, I was still able to run after people if I need to. I'd still be able to fight and win whatever that kind of thing.
I've never not been able to pass my physical or anything like that, because that is.
But for me, looking back, I'm like, well, I'm heavier than I ever should be.
I shouldn't be this heavy and things start hurting.
You know, if I go to sleep wrong, I'd wake up achy and I'm like, that shouldn't happen.
Like I like sleep shouldn't injure me. Sleep should repair me.
I'd be scared to go to sleep. I'd be like, you know, I don't know if you ever saw Lee Evans as a comedy.
He was like, you sleep. Did it. Yeah, that was exactly me.
I wake up with like a I can't move kind of thing.
And I've been fortunate recently, like in the last couple of years, I've been OK, get back onto regular training and and better still eat like crap because the North American diet.
But and then Emily will kill me for this. I do make some bad choices because I buy all chips or, you know, like, unfortunately, I like food, but I'm doing much, much better.
I'm in a much better place. And everything you talk about knock on effect.
It has a knock on effect because I'm sleeping better.
I'm able to train better. I'm able to do more stuff.
And then I'm better at my job.
I'm better at providing service to the public because I'm more alert.
I'm able to do much more.
And I'm really, really starting to see that even in the last, I would say, probably last three months where I've noticed a massive, massive difference in that kind of stuff.
So it's spurring me on to keep going. Plus, I've set a goal for what I want to do in my career and where I want to get to.
So goal setting, I think, is very important. Go ahead.
I think we're also lucky in the stages of our life right now.
We don't have kids. We don't have a dog. We don't have anything else to worry about.
And I think that's when you're shift worker and you OK, I can only sleep till 2 p.m.
Because I got to pick up the kids from school or I got to do this.
Like, that's a whole nother ballgame. Like, I think that's that's what you're talking about. Detrimental.
Like us, we can afford to be selfish and I'm going to black out my room till 9 p.m.
And put in my earplugs and like, no one's going to bother me.
Like, that's very privileged. 9 p.m. She sleeps the whole day.
No, I'm saying if I work at night.
Brilliant. Well, I want to get to one more area of training and then we'll go to the kind of the medical side that you experience.
But when it comes to training a tactical athlete and I talked about this a lot,
what I realized is that CrossFit was doing so many things well for me as a firefighter,
but I wasn't really moving weight over distance.
And so I incorporated Julian Pino's work.
So the sled push and pull, the rope pull, the sandbag work, some of the kettlebell carries.
And that's those strongman movements with the perfect compliment for me to add to my CrossFit training,
to give me a well-rounded kind of athlete.
I've seen that play into a lot of the CrossFit games, you know, the actual workouts now.
And I've seen also, it's funny, I've seen those really good CrossFitters come do competitions at the gym where I train
and they do all these kind of wonky, funny looking ring muscle ups that, again, find the loopholes and the rules
and, you know, putting them all together, but then you give them a hundred and fifty pound sandbag and it destroys them.
So, you know, Kyle, from a police officer's perspective and Emily, if you want to throw in your perception as well,
talk to me about the world of strongman and then how you apply that,
whether it's as a police officer or how you train for it as a CrossFit athlete.
Do you want to go first?
Well, I'll go quick. I love that kind of stuff.
Like, that's why I love the game so much.
One, because of the surprise element, like they're going to tell us right before we do it. Great.
Like, I don't want to practice it really.
But also, like if we know, you know, things like the pig, like weird things are going to come up at the games that we don't do
throughout the year. Like, I love that kind of stuff. And he's really good at programming weird things.
And yeah, that's that's my favorite part, really.
I've been very lucky from playing a fairly high standard rugby.
I've been messing around with heavy object, be it tires, sledgehammers, sandbags, all that kind of stuff for years.
But I really do truly believe that that is the most carryover for life, because you're never going to have,
especially if you talk about deadweight. Well, people say deadlift.
Well, deadlift is a stiff bar, for example, with a weight on it.
But a dead person that weighs 200 pounds and moving around moves completely different to a bar.
Like when you've just got a piece of iron and a couple of iron plates, the other is completely different.
So true strength. I think sandbags is one of the best thing.
And we're very fortunate. We've got sandbag kettlebells, sandbag medicine balls, sandbag sandbags, heavy sandbags.
You've got a sea bag. That's what her go-rock stuff comes up.
Plus we have a tank and sleds and all that. I love all that kind of stuff.
And I will program the most bizarre stuff for anybody.
I said because one, because I think especially how Dave Castro thinks as a Navy SEAL officer is like anything goes.
And when I've beaten Emily down and I'm pretty harsh, she'll tell you I'm a harsh coach. I'm pretty ruthless.
I'd be like, give me 100 percent. And when you've done that, now go do it again.
And she's just like and she'll break down in tears or whatever kind of thing. But she does it.
But that is the mindset of the Navy SEALs and the Royal Marines and all the elite kind of guy.
And you guys, because you could go out there. Yeah, you've gone into your house. You've rescued the family.
You get downstairs. The mom comes back conscious. My other kid is in the bedroom underneath the floorboards.
Like, you know, all right, I got to go again. So it's about that kind of thing.
And I think the odd object thing is incredible.
If you want to train and I'm not saying like a strongman like the Mitch Hoopers and Cooper Cooper Cooper Cooper,
he's incredible. And he's really, really quite an incredible athlete in regards to his lifting side of things.
And he can move bags around. If you ask him to run up and down like the Birds Cleaver,
I think would he be able to do it? Maybe. But I don't think as much.
So I think the biggest thing we're seeing for CrossFit is we're doing rugby is a huge carryover, I find,
because it's 80 minutes running, powerful hitting, carrying people, lifting people.
I think it's really good. Gymnastics is also incredible.
Professional rowers and swimmers, if they now gone into lifting, you see all that kind of stuff because they've got the endurance.
But if you had honestly, if you had Mitch Hooper who lost a load of weight and gained a load of endurance,
which would take years, Mitch is probably what, 325 I think he is. He's a big dude.
But could you imagine someone who can move odd objects like that and have the endurance of Emily or Tia or, you know,
I even say, then that's what a CrossFit athlete is. So there's these guys and girls that do all these odd object stuff.
And you throw in anything to them and they just go, all right, that's going to be like this. And I'll do it.
And not to blow Emily's trumpet, but she's very good at, like I said, I'll throw things in, I'll be like,
that seed bag, you can only hold it this way or whatever. You can only grab it this way.
And she will like, I'm like, figure it out, because that's how it could be.
And the more problem solving you do is, as you definitely experienced as a fireman, I certainly experienced as a police officer,
the more problem solving you do, the better you get at doing different tasks. Problem solving is ironic.
But like the more problem solving you do, the easier tasks become because you're like, oh, that's like doing this or this is like doing that.
And I think it's incredible. It's really interesting to see. And I do think it's quite an exciting time for CrossFit
and the competition side of stuff for where it's going, how they're throwing that kind of stuff in there.
And now they're doing tactical games. They're doing, well, if I could train more like that all year, it'd be great.
But like, yeah, obviously you have to do the classic CrossFit to make it through the ranks first.
But yeah, brilliant. Again, another thing I can go on about all day. I love it. I love it.
Brilliant. Like I said, when those two were put together, the machine that you create with the actual CrossFit was,
and even some of the functional stuff inside, like I loved, I could barely do like more than one pull up when I was 20, I think it was, like pitiful.
And then fast forward 10 years in CrossFit, I could climb the rope in an L-sit all the way up without using my, you know what I mean?
So you see these progressions and they're incredible. But then when you add in the stuff that we just talked about,
now, as you say, you just don't know what you're going to experience.
Firstly, I'd want to ask that mother, by the way, why is your child under the floorboards?
That would be one of my questions to the police officer. But yeah, you don't know what you're going to experience.
And you literally could be climbing into a sewer pipe, climbing up a tree, you know, throwing ladders and then realizing you got the wrong building
and picking up that ladder and down a dark alleyway in the middle of a lightning storm in Florida.
So there isn't that, you know, that clinical setting. And then with the bar, as you touched on, people don't have handles.
That's the big thing. And I give someone one of those, I've got a Rogue 150 and it's like a stone.
And you give someone like that and that's the same as, you know, 135 and then 210s on each side, completely different experience.
People can barely get off the ground. So I think it's good to have that humility with the odd objects.
And then what CrossFit does so well is that red zone as a police officer, as a firefighter.
I want the last time I thought I was going to die to be a few days ago, not a few years ago in the Academy.
Yeah, agreed. All right. Well, speaking of almost dying, let's go to the 2022 CrossFit Games.
That's a good segue. Get away from the kid under the floorboards.
So prior to that, walk me through if any kind of injuries or any contributing factors had happened before.
And then let's walk through day one and then the issues that you started seeing.
Yeah, so training up to the Games was great. I was feeling good. I was feeling fit.
About two weeks maybe before the Games, I felt just a little bit of a twinge in my bicep area here and thought, oh, OK, like just pulled it a bit.
Just felt like I, oh, maybe I did too many pull ups and rope climbs and, you know, I'm tired.
And it kind of got a little worse, but not too bad. Like it was enough to ignore.
I started feeling all more things. I remember I was rowing and it started to kind of light up.
That's kind of the word I used for you, right? Like it just said, oh, it's kind of just lit up.
I had a small little bruise, so I thought, oh, like I've just strained it. It's just whatever.
A few days rest, nothing a few days rest can't fix.
So I went on with training and started to taper, flew to Madison.
I saw a physio there because I was getting regular physio.
And I remember we were training, what was it, maybe three days before the Games started, two days at the gym.
And he had me do some pull ups and I couldn't even, whatever you prescribed, I forget.
I think it was like eight.
I couldn't even do eight in a row. It's just like, and I remember saying to him, like my arm is just lit up.
Like it just feels like, yeah, I just couldn't really describe it.
But you're kind of at that point, you know, you're competing, you're in that mindset, like whatever.
If I'm injured, like I'm still going to do the Games.
Like, you know, just like you're, you know, you're that athlete mindset.
Like nothing's going to stop me now.
So whatever it is, it doesn't really matter because we know come day one, like I'm doing it.
So yeah, just kind of ignored it. I put my, what is that, compressing.
I have this air compressor thing for my legs, put it on my arm.
Thought that might make it, that made it a little worse.
So I'm like looking back, it's so easy to see, OK, like my hand was freezing, you know.
Well, I always have cold hands. So, you know, like it's just, you know, like anything in retrospect, you look back, you know,
here are the signs, Emily, but when you're in it, of course, it's easy to make an excuse about everything.
And yeah, I just remember just hoping, OK, the rest day before the Games, like it'll feel better after that.
And, you know, it didn't really, I got it taped the morning of the Games and just,
hope for the best. 3, 2, 1, go, wasn't it? Yeah. 3, 2, 1, go.
And the first event had, I think it was 75 Tota Bar, then a bike and then 75 Chester Bar and a bike.
And I was one of the first off the Tota Bar. You were one of the first out, fourth in.
And then the bike, I just remember it throbbing and aching.
Kind of just like shaking out my arm during the bike and like, what the heck?
Somehow did 75 Chester Bar, kept like peeling off on one side because I was,
this hand was just kind of there for support, but I wasn't able to grip with it at all.
13 sets. Yeah, kind of my.
And then I remember the second bike, I ripped off my grips because I thought, oh, maybe like it's too tight on my wrist.
That's why my hand's kind of white and it hurts so much.
Finished the event. I think I was mid pack. We're better than mid pack. 14.
And then I just remember like the pain was really, really bad after that event, like just throbbing.
My hand was throbbing. My whole arm was throbbing.
It was like, I don't know if you ski ever, but it was like when you take your
feet out of your ski boots at the end of the day and the feeling comes back because they were they've been numb all day.
And, you know, that hurt. It was kind of like that. That's probably the best way I can equate it.
And then at that time, I knew, OK, maybe I'll go to medical, see if they can do something about this.
And yeah, that was that was when I met Dr. Rocket. And that's when the whole thing started.
But so walk me through them. I was going to ignore it as long as I could.
Because, yeah, I mean, obviously, Dr. Rocket was the one that connected us for this conversation in the first place.
And, you know, he's a phenomenal guy.
But when people listening, you know, it's not it's not like your arm is hanging off.
It's not like, you know, your eyeballs are in the back of your head.
It's more of a harder thing to identify, especially if I'm assuming the rest of your body was probably warm and maybe compensating for some of the coolness.
So what was it that they started to realize when you were initially being seen and then walk me through the diagnosis and the treatment for that?
Yes, you're right. So I walked off the field with all the other girls and like later they message me.
They're like, what happened to you? Like you were fine, you know, because I didn't say anything.
But yeah, the main thing I think Dr. Rocket will tell you, I had no pulse in my no radio, no radio pulse or on there.
Yeah, no pulse in this arm.
And I think that was his main concern.
The pain had kind of gone away for me at that point.
So I was kind of like, it's fine. Can I just like forget?
Like I came to you. Can I just go now?
Like kind of thing. And obviously he didn't let me go smartly.
And then at the games, they have the ultrasound there.
So they were able to see that it was like blocked.
And that's the time when they withdrew me and said, you need to go to the hospital now.
And then I had surgery two hours later, like a five hour surgery.
It was it was quite five and a half hours.
It was longer than five hours.
Five and a half.
You try being on the other side of it. You have a nice little sleep.
It's not good for a slot.
Well, Kyle, talk about that then. So you're watching Emily compete.
All of a sudden she walks off with the girls. You know, what was it like through the patient's loved ones eyes at that point?
So, Emily, we have two hats. I have husband hat and coach hat.
So when I wear the coach hat, I'm yes, I am a husband.
I always will be a husband. That's the most important hat.
But I am I try and kind of separate the two, especially when competing.
So I've seen her go around and I'd seen this on the bike.
I'm like, what the hell is she doing?
She's like flicking off chalk or whatever, because she'll tell you she talks like a monster.
And I was like, I don't know what's going on.
And I saw a go I go in on the first thing before she even did this.
I was like, wow, she went in. Why? Why?
Why is she not out? I was a bit worried like something had gone on.
Anyway, she didn't come outside. Oh, man, she's got some work to do.
So she pedaled down, finished the workout.
And I went to see her and yeah, rocket was there and he's testing a pulse.
He's like, she hasn't got on all, you know, hasn't got a pulse.
And he said, and her hands blue.
And I touched her hand and you know, well, you probably dealt with dead people,
but dead people are very cold. That's how it felt to me.
I was like, but for strength, they're always cold. Warm heart, warm heart, cold hands, warm heart.
It's fine. But I was like, you try not to show too much emotion because you don't want to worry your athlete kind of thing.
So she goes and gets an ultrasound.
And I, for me, I was like, OK, I'm going to have to like put this husband hat to one side for a second and be very, very matter of factual.
So I went outside and I said, OK, like call it as it is, guys, what do we have here?
And Rockets said he's like, he said, she hasn't got a pulse.
I think there's a blood clot in the arm. She needs to get a hospital.
So right. I said, so are you telling her that she needs to be done?
He was like, well, she needs to kind of quit. I went, that ain't happening.
I said, she's not going to quit. I said, you're going to have to tell her.
And they went, oh, I see. I see. Ain't coming from me. I'll never get the end of it.
But I was kind of steering them in that direction. I had I had to make that decision side of things and be very whatever.
And then we go to the hospital.
They were like, oh, we'll call an ambulance. And I'm like, I'm thinking of strain on the system.
I was like, don't worry about that. We'll get an Uber.
You know, we'll get an Uber from the thing. Like, don't worry about the ambulance because it's all added up and costs and everything.
There's people she's obviously just on a competition. I didn't want to go on an app.
You didn't want to go either. I was still ready to do the next event.
Well, because you talk about thunderstorms, the thunderstorms started happening.
So I jokingly and she got right on it. I said, oh, there's a thunderstorm.
You'll be all right. You'll be back for the next event.
She was like, really? And the doctor in the hospital is like, no.
So Emily goes for a CT and a doctor pulled me to a side and I said, OK, I said a spade, a spade.
Tell me what you've got. She said, right, we're going to have to prep her for bypass.
We're going to have to potentially. Well, we're going to have to cut her open and remove whatever they've got in there.
So, OK, I said, what do you need from me?
Kind of thing. She was like, well, you have to sign all these resuscitation forms and all that kind of stuff.
So I'm not letting on any of this to Emily because she's already traumatized as it is.
And then I had to go back and speak with her parents and stuff.
And I said to them, OK, she's gone off to surgery. This was two.
So by two o'clock, she was in surgery, two o'clock in the afternoon. She was in going under.
And I went back to the hotel, got stuff, picked up her mum and dad who had been at the event or just missed it, whatever it was.
And they were like, well, what's going on? I said, well, the surgeon said they've got to go do this, this and this.
I said, well, get a call in a bit. I said, but I'll probably head to the hospital in a couple of hours because she's going to have pre surgery and and afterwards.
So about three hours after that happened, I showered, got changed and whatever.
And I was like, well, I should probably head back. I've not heard anything, but I'm going to head back.
And I said to her parents, so her parents came with me. So we went back.
We got four, four and a half hours, four hours in.
And he rang me because I'd rang to see if they were and he rang me back and he said, I'm still working on it.
He said, I've seen her hands. I can see that she's a professional athlete.
She obviously does a lot of work. It's it's urged me to continue on.
I want to keep working because I think I can remove all three blood clots without doing a bypass.
I'm like, three blood clots. OK, sure. That's kind of that's a new one.
And he's like, and they're arterial. I'm like, oh, OK.
So I don't know much about the anatomy. I know a little bit. I was like, that's not normal.
So anyway, pulls him out. She comes out surgery and I'm looking at the board at this point.
And it says Emily Rolfe out surgery into pre post recovery.
And the doctor comes down, he speaks to me, he's like, yeah, he said, I pulled out three blood clots from her arm.
You know, she's going to be OK. She won't be able to do this.
And it's told the whole thing. Go into the recovery room.
She gets wheeled in. She comes in. She's like, obviously been through a huge traumatic surgery.
And the first thing she says, she's groggy. And she's on obviously whatever.
She's like, she's like. What was the next event? That was the first question.
What was the next event? And I and I told her and she's like, oh, I've been really good at that.
Hi, how are you? Like, yeah, yeah.
So she won't remember it at all. She was high as a high as a kite.
And you talk about drugs and whatever.
I read through her her chart and said that they'd given her a dose of oxycodone.
And I was like, OK, don't give her any more of that.
And they were like, oh, no, you know, I'm a I'm a husband.
She's not in the right state of mind to make the decision right now.
I said, if she is in extreme pain, she will tell you.
I said, but I can assure you she's not.
And I cut her off and they were like, oh, I'm like, no, you are not giving my wife any oxycodone.
It's not happening. So do you want to.
So it's funny, they kept asking me my pain levels like that night the next day when I was still in the hospital.
And I was like, I'm fine.
Like compared to the pain that I was feeling before the games, like nothing like I was in zero pain.
It was it was unreal. She was high.
Well, it's crazy because you look at the back story.
I use that pain scale and there's a there's an actual name for it.
I used to call it the smiley face scale because I wouldn't even ask the patient.
I just look at it and go, you're only a two.
I don't need to ask you. Your face is telling me everything.
But then you discover that that was actually created by Purdue.
So their salespeople could tell that, excuse me, sell that as the fifth file a sign.
So the tool that I use as a paramedic, my whole career that I thought was a bit shit.
Finally, after I transitioned out, I realized that it was a bit shit because it was made basically to push drugs on people.
Hmm. Yeah, interesting.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And also, I've always said that people will play it up more than it is because they want they want more reaction.
However, if anybody says to me, I'm a seven, I'm like, you're probably a nine.
So it's I've always been the kid that's like going to downplay it because if I say it how it really is, like, yeah, my mom's not going to let me go to gymnastics or I'm not going to be able to do this.
So like, yeah, she's she's she's still like that with me.
I'm the same. I don't.
Again, like same with Emily, like if you were in pain or whatever, you weren't able to go and do your sportswear.
So how is it? Ah, you know, like a one or two.
It's like falling off.
What about when I think of, you know, obviously a complete arterial block, you're talking about death of tissue.
So what did they tell you? Was there a little bit getting past the clots?
Let's talk about how big the clots were, because from the pictures that that I saw, it wasn't like a little, you know, five millimeter clot that was blocking your artery.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't see them, but apparently they were like there was a couple big like well, there was one in your shirt.
There was one in the bicep here.
It's so good. I'm not trying to show the scar bicep here. And then there was two in the forearm and by the sounds of things,
her body had grown an additional blood supply to supply to the hand.
So they were chronic.
And I heard that word and I was like, oh, sweet. That means like it's not acute, like chronic.
I've been dealing with it for a bit. That means I can probably compete and then we'll deal with it later.
But it became acute because of her gripping onto the bar and doing whatever.
So there had been some sort of blockage for quite a while and the body is so incredible that it created a bypass of its own, basically.
They figured a month at least.
It's crazy, isn't it? It's amazing.
They crazy the body just went, oh, I'll grow under the artery path.
Yes, I'm going to get blood to my arm.
And like in training, there's nothing I noticed. Like, oh, my arm's kind of weaker.
Like there was nothing like that.
Yeah, that goes back to the medicine conversation.
There's so many good things about medicine.
We just discussed a perfect example of where modern medicine saved your arm, if not your life.
But I think that there's a lot of arrogance in chronic disease management that says, oh, well, the body doesn't know what it's doing.
We'll give you a pill for that. Like if you give body exercise, daylight food and some community, just sit and watch.
You'll be amazed. Yeah.
Like the yeah, you're right.
The amazing things it does to maintain like homeostasis is like, yeah, I was very lucky when they put the life or limb bracelet on my hand.
I was like, don't cut this one. Cut this one kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Labeling the all up. That was quite the experience.
And then, of course, the recovery was like I hadn't dealt with anything like that before.
Like, yeah, it was tough just like lifting, like lifting a cup of water.
Like you couldn't do that at the beginning, just like starting from square one.
And I remember trying to grip a barbell.
It was probably three weeks after something and I couldn't even get my hand in that like weird position to hold a barbell.
And I said to Kyle, like, how am I ever going to you know, when you're so injured, you just don't see yourself ever getting back there doing what you did before.
And, you know, I couldn't get my heart rate up even because because it was a blood issue.
Right. So they didn't want blood like streaming into this arm.
Like it had to heal. So it was like I had to take it easy on that.
What she's trying to say, it was the worst, worst four weeks of my life because I got this ear bitten off.
The longest I didn't do physical exercise.
Yeah.
It was probably a full week.
So how did you incrementally work back in and then how did you maintain strength in other areas?
So you you you try to prevent as much atrophy in the unaffected parts of your body.
Right. So by the time I could train again, I would say it was around September.
Not with my arm, but I could, you know, I could do squats.
I could do like the biker stuff like that.
So Kyle, he's trust him to put an elite program together that kills you.
Like I had no. That was when I was doing that 10 sets of 10 with the tempo.
Yeah, but I wasn't getting any heart rate up.
So that's why it was hard.
He had me on a hard leg cycle that I did not feel like I was going to atrophy at all.
And and then simultaneously he had me on.
He built this whole rehab program for my arm, which, you know, started with super easy thing, like lots of banded things,
because I couldn't I couldn't hang on the bar like I couldn't.
So he had to read devise.
It was a grip thing we started with. Right.
Every morning I was because talking of like hands and dexterity and stuff like they say the best thing for people to break their wrist is actually like gaming and texting and stuff like we have such intrinsic muscle groups in there.
So I was like, well, we did.
So every morning I just get it to do.
I hold. Excuse me.
I'm not trying to give you the finger, but I say this finger.
Then I'd be like, now grip this finger and I would be able to tell from the pigmentation on my fingers of how much she was getting better and how quickly the blood would return supply.
So it was very it was a great learning curve for me.
And she and and Emily was like, they said, oh, don't pick up more than a jug of milk.
OK, well, a jug of milk was a pint and it was a liter.
Now it's too late.
And then by the end, it was for, you know, a full gallon kind of thing.
So develop just little things like that every day.
And I think just life, like things you do in the kitchen, you know, you're doing stuff like you're kind of moving.
That's all helping.
You know, I couldn't lift a pot.
It was too heavy.
But like little things that brushing your teeth, like some things you did with the other hand, right.
So get that dexterity back.
But it's quite humbling how you start on ground zero.
All these things that you don't even think about that you do every day, you have to think.
I'm sure anyone with an injury can relate to that.
But what about mentally?
You know, you have this identity as I mean, not you know, you're obviously a radiographer as well, but you know, an elite cross fit athlete and whether it's a policeman or a firefighter or, you know, an athlete.
Sometimes when there's an injury or a medical problem, it's it's kind of jarring for people.
So what was that like for you? And then also, what about the the kind of the emotional scar as you start getting through training?
Was there a kind of mental block that you had to push through to?
Yeah. So my identity, I try to not have my identity in CrossFit because we know it's like it's a short lived thing.
I try to have other things in my life. But in that regard, I would say I never lost that identity because I just knew that I was going to be back.
Like there was never any doubt. You know, like I said, yeah, there was doubt like, oh, am I going to be able to pick up this bar?
But in the back of my mind, there was no question that I was going to go to the Games next year.
Like, I don't know how I was going to do it, but I just felt like there was no like, oh, is this the end of me? Like nothing that never entered my mind.
So I think that kind of made it easy because I was like, well, you know, I have this I'm dealing with it.
I'm going to work through it, but I'll be back. And maybe that was I don't know.
Maybe that was naive of me to think, but it worked. So positive mindset. Yeah.
And then what was the other thing you said? So, for example, I heard my back as a firefighter and it was actually foundation training was the big thing that helped me heal that no surgery, no meds.
It was incredible, but it was deadlifting again.
You know, it was lifting a patient, but the deadlift is the thing that I really worried about, you know, as I was getting back in.
And there was a mental block for a while until I'd shown my mind that my body was strong enough to do the thing it was scared of because it got hurt doing a similar thing lifting a person in the past.
Right. Did you have that kind of mental block with this or was it because it wasn't an acute thing?
It wasn't as much of an issue. Yeah, not so much of an issue because, you know, it didn't happen during a certain skill.
I think if that then that's harder. I remember my first muscle up.
I was a little scared just because you have to be so aggressive and pull so hard.
And I'm like, is it ready? Like things like that.
And then things that I remember, I was back competing four months later in Dubai, and I still had to like wear little socks on my surgery area here because it was still like.
We had to do an event carrying a sandbag and I couldn't stand like the rubbing of the sandbag on my scar area.
Like it was just still very sensitive. But I think mentally that was fine.
I was just like, oh, this is still like I'm still hurts. So I just like wrap it, wear a sock, whatever.
You did. She did a thing every morning of any time she'd have any form of pain in the army blight chip pulse.
OK, I got some good. I still do that. You're right. That is a that is a mental thing.
So any time my fingers are freezing or something, I'll just like check my pulse.
OK, we're good. It's hard when you do get cold hands already, though.
My wife, my wife is the same. She's always cold.
And I shared a meme the day on the Internet and it's a lobster boiling in a two lobsters boiling in a pot.
I'm cold. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. Well, then I want to hit one more area.
When when we have a discussion about working in uniform and again, this ties in with the dense identity,
I think one of the dangers is as a soldier, as a police officer, a firefighter,
if you go all in and as an athlete as well and then something happens,
whether you choose to retire, whether you get fired, whether you know whatever the thing is,
it can be very jarring. And I think that where I am really excited now is when I see entrepreneurial ship in our professions,
because then that gives people a great opportunity to transition and still have something that they're already a part of.
So have that new tribe that they've created. So talk to me about Code 3 conveyance.
So I came across this. Yeah, yeah, it's a good I came across this through a friend of mine
who had set up a business and it was basically for first responders to drive snowbirds or people that I call them snowbirds because they migrate down for the winter
and they basically want their cars down in the area that they're going to.
So I ended up doing a drive for him and he spoke to me and he was like, I'm sorry, I've got some stuff going on in my life and I'm not going to be able to do this anymore.
So I said, well, I've I've always been entrepreneurial, I think I don't I know I'm very good at it,
but I've always enjoyed challenging myself with new businesses and that kind of stuff.
And I'm like, I've always been that you talk about uniform and stuff like that.
Uniform is a part of me. It doesn't define me. Yes, I'm a police officer.
I'm very passionate about being a police officer, but I'm more than a police officer.
I was a person before I was a police officer. So don't go around love my job and all that kind of thing.
But I do think there's some people that go into careers or whatever and it defines them.
And then unfortunately, it can be a negative thing as well, where that's all they have and they have nothing else.
And it can be detrimental. So I was like, well, this seems like a really, really good idea.
And I said, look, I really enjoy driving for you did a lot of good for me. I love driving anyway.
I like getting on the road, putting on your podcast or, you know, your favorite album of music and whatnot.
So I said, Would you mind if I kind of take this over?
He's like, No, not at all. I said, Look, I'm not trying to sit on your toes.
Anytime you want to come back, you let me know I'll step aside kind of thing. I'll do whatever.
Anyway, moving on, it's actually only been coming up a year tomorrow or next month.
And he said, I'm not I'm not coming back.
So in short, what we do is we provide a service more for the actual first responders or retired first responders,
because the way he worded it was so well put is road trip therapy.
Because you get in a car, you turn off like you focus on your driving and you either you miss listening to the latest Joe Rogan podcast or whatever, you know, kind of thing.
Yeah, I did some studying. I did some studying for an exam I was doing.
Unfortunately, it passed. It's not hard enough. But that's another matter.
But I did some study and I did a lot of music, talked to a lot of friends, you know, just.
And I just drove from California back up to Vancouver.
And since then, I've driven from Vancouver down to California.
And I've got drives from Arizona to the island or I've got stuff from Florida to the East Coast and all that kind of stuff.
So what I've done is I've advertised for first responders or ex first responders to come and drive for us.
And they're not employees. They are volunteers that are paid for their expenses.
So there's no real money making in it. But what they do get is the mental health side of stuff.
I'm not making a huge amount of money out of it either.
Yes, it is a business, but I'm not making hundreds of thousands of dollars and I'm not charging these people.
I think so. The people are important as face employers.
They get a driver that knows how to handle a vehicle because they've had additional driver training from a paramedic fire service or in the police.
We do have some CBSA guys as well because they do some driving stuff and they have someone that they can trust the vehicle with.
It's not going to be a 20 year old spotty kid who's going to absolutely rag the hell out of your car and try and get it to eight thousand RPM.
And their vehicle gets delivered there, a bit more mileage on it or whatever.
But the guys and girls get a trip out of it.
So they say to a lot of the guys and girls like maybe play golf.
It's like Chuck your golf clubs in the back and then bring them back on a plane.
You don't have to pay for one ticket kind of thing.
And we cover the part of the expenses that it covers their airfare, it covers their hotels, their meals and all that kind of stuff.
So it's a win win for everybody.
I love hearing all these different ideas because everyone is unique.
If you're the kind of person that there's a lot of people out there that do just enjoy driving, that do like taking road trips.
Then what a great opportunity.
It's obviously not a race either.
So it's not you have to do like a 22 hour nonstop drive to get the car there.
I have done that.
No, you don't have to do it.
I can't.
I think the most I drove from California to Florida, California when I got hired out there and then a few years later, California back to Florida.
And we took five days.
I'm like eight, ten hours at the most is all I can do.
So but yeah, but I mean, what a beautiful way to see parts of the country.
So I think and then like you said, with the road trip therapy, you know, if you go with someone, I mean, I just took my son to the beach today, which by the way was incredible because I was standing in the ocean and two dolphin appeared like 20 feet from me.
So a real God moment there.
But just to drive there and a drive back, you know, we just we talk.
It's when you're side by side with someone in the car, you do tend to kind of open up.
Yeah, I mean, I just had actually a fire officer from Winnipeg.
He just did a drive. He dropped off a car for me yesterday in Winnipeg from Palm Springs.
And he was just like, thank you so much.
The opportunity I can't divulge too much, but he lost his partner in a, you know, due to medical health and whatever.
And he was like, this is a real thing.
I'm like, the fact that you get to open, I mean, he's got, you know, he has a new girlfriend that he's he drove back with and kind of thing didn't smuggle in the country as well.
He could just like the kids.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
It's it was great for him and he was like, anytime you need a driver kind of thing, love it kind of thing.
And it's awesome for me because I've got a really reliable driver that is going to represent the company that we have in a really good light.
And he gets something out of it as well.
You know, he's able to have a bit of a time with his new girlfriend, go for nice meals, you know, stop off.
And it is a beautiful drive from the West Coast on the West Coast and then not so much to Winnipeg, I wouldn't say.
But, you know, going up through the mountains, it's pretty picturesque.
So it was great.
It was a win.
Brilliant. So people listening, where can they find out more about that?
Just go to our website, Code3Conveyance.
Brilliant.
All right. Well, for people listening for you guys specifically, if they want to learn more about you, follow you during the games, any of those kind of things, where are the best places online for each of you?
I would say my Instagram.
I do not unfortunately have a YouTube channel.
So don't have time.
Emily Rolfe 19, isn't it?
Is your handle that way?
Yeah.
I use social media to look at everybody else.
That's what I do.
Yeah, you will not find Kyle on social media.
Yeah, I got the I've got the odd bit on there.
That's it.
Brilliant. Well, I want to thank you so much, both of you.
I know you just came in from work.
I'm sure you got a lot of training ahead of you as well.
But it's been an amazing conversation to lead through all the different topics that we discussed from two very unique perspectives.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time this evening and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast.
It was absolutely pleasure.
Nice to meet you.
It was fun.
Thank you.