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My Story

From MBA to Crossfit box owner and certified trainer: Not your ordinary career path; Not your ordinary workout.

It all started when I got accepted into business school at Darden – University of Viriginia. Wohoo!  Quit my awesome job at Nestle Philippines and left for the States!

Basically, my two years of business school can be summarized as beer pong, recruiting, networking, beer golf, exams, recruiting, golf tournaments, flip cup (some beer game), free pizza, more recruiting, 80’s themed parties, travelling abroad, free food, keg stands, and a little studying. Get the point? All that may be a little exaggerated but it was definitely necessary to develop lots of friends from around the world.

I then graduated from the best two years of my life and started to work for a paper company in Atlanta, Georgia.  Started working on number crunching – ROI analysis, marketing investment risk analysis, opportunity-gap analysis for a paper towel brand! Can you imagine?! All that for paper towels!? Pretty interesting stuff but once I repeated this process every single day, I started to go nuts!

One day after spending Christmas in San Francisco, I woke up and felt like shit. Saw my gut bloat to a size I’ve never seen before. Pants were tight. Shirts felt like they were baby T’s.

In January 2010, I made my New Year’s resolution and started to look for a gym.  Found a gym near my apartment and inquired.  The receptionist took me to their kickboxing gym and to my surprise they were all chicks! For some, this would’ve been a dream come true or heaven but I wasn’t really looking to hookup (yet!) but was more looking for something different.  I then asked the receptionist if there was something else, something a little bit more intense and so he asked me to enter the box, the Crossfit box.

Observed some folks doing the workout which looked really funny and weird at times – folks were doing handstands, burpees (obviously I didn’t know what a burpee was), kipping pullups. Never seen a workout like this before so I decided to do a free trial.

Did some WOD (workout of the day) and was slammed after 20 mins. My knees were shaking and was trying to catch my breath. I couldn’t stand and all I could do was lie down on the floor. Yes! I told myself that this is the workout I’ve been looking for and immediately gave them my credit card even if the price tag was $140/month (and that was already their promo rate!).
Got so addicted to Crossfit! It was my fitness cocaine because it was short, intense, and got the job done! Crossfit was the only thing I looked forward to and work was just a means for me to pay for my sessions.

Work was consuming me and was getting extremely bored with what I was doing. While chatting with some friends back home, they kept asking me what new thing we could bring into Manila. I kept telling them about this website (Groupon) or this new technology, not really thinking about Crossfit. Then during one conversation with a friend, I was telling him about this workout that I was so addicted to! In an instant, he told me to bring that damn program to Manila because it was apparently the workout of the actors from the movie 300, something which I didn’t even know! Duh!

From that point on, I got certified as a Crossfit trainer, quit my job, went back to Manila, and recruited a team of “athletes” from different sports backgrounds to make the Crossfit MNL box a reality. Now with marketing programs in place, website running, the box in construction, and a couple of free sessions here and there, we are all set for an ass whipping 2011! All that executed in a span of 3 months was definitely the doing of a great MBA education and some kick ass Crossfit spirit!

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