About me

I first walked into a gym when I was 13 years old. Bob Landers Gym in South Hurstville - long gone now, but I remember everything about that day. The weight of the barbell, the effort required, the feeling of becoming capable of something I couldn't do before. I didn't know it then, but that gym planted a seed that would define the rest of my life: the understanding that meaningful transformation requires labour.

 

For the next 25 years, I pursued a different kind of labour - the life of the mind. I became an academic, eventually an Associate Professor, spending over two decades in education transforming lives through learning. My work focused on social and economic justice - understanding systems of power, inequality, and how people could build more equitable communities. I published extensively, won teaching awards, held leadership positions. I was doing exactly what the world told me serious, intelligent people should do.

But I never stopped training.

​

Through all those years - amateur bodybuilding, boxing, CrossFit, and now competitions like Hyrox, 98 Games and the Turf Games - I kept returning to the gym. Not as a hobby or stress relief, but because something essential was happening there that I couldn't find anywhere else. The university taught me to think. The gym taught me to be.

​

It took me decades to understand what the ancient Greeks knew instinctively: you cannot separate the body from the mind. Plato was a wrestler. Socrates was a soldier. The gymnasium and the academy existed in the same place because physical and intellectual development are not separate pursuits - they are two expressions of the same human drive toward excellence and meaning.

​

Modern life has fractured what should never be divided. We separate physical labour from intellectual work, treating the body as either a machine to maintain or an aesthetic project. We've forgotten that strength is not vanity - it's capacity. The capacity to serve, to contribute, to show up for others, to remain useful and dignified until the end of your days.

​

This realisation - that physical training is practice for being fully human - is what eventually pulled me out of academia and back to my first love. In recent years, I retrained as a personal trainer and coach (Cert III & IV in Fitness, CrossFit Level 1), and partnered with 98 Gym to open 98 Milsons Point. The gym I dreamed about at 13 finally exists, but now I understand what it's really for.

​

I'm now in my 50s, and while I train with people of all ages, my clients are almost exclusively 50 and older. Not because we're "maintaining" or "managing decline" - but because we're in the most important phase of our lives. We have the experience to know what matters. We have responsibilities to others that require us to stay strong. We have, if we're honest, a limited time left to become who we're capable of being.

​

Every session is a labour in the Herculean sense: difficult, purposeful, transformative. When you learn to add weight to the bar, to push through discomfort, to show up consistently despite difficulty, you're not just building muscle - you're practicing the discipline required for every other meaningful thing you'll do. The mental fortitude developed under a barbell is the same fortitude required to care for aging parents, to fight for what's right, to serve your community, to leave something behind that matters.

​

The Herculean Way is my answer to a question I've been asking my entire life: How do we live well? How do we remain capable, purposeful, and fully human until the very end?

​

The answer, I've learned, is not in books alone (though I still read voraciously and write regularly here about exercise, nutrition, philosophy, and legacy). The answer is in the integration of body and mind, in the dignity of labour, in the daily practice of becoming stronger rather than accepting diminishment.

The work I did on social and economic justice taught me that change happens when people have the capacity - material, intellectual, and physical - to act. You cannot fight for a better world if you lack the strength to show up. You cannot care for your community if you cannot care for yourself. Individual transformation and collective transformation are not separate projects - they are inseparable.

 

The twelve labours of Hercules weren't just tests of strength - they were tests of character, intelligence, persistence, and service to others. Your labours await too. Not as punishment for aging, but as the path to living your most potent years with strength, purpose, and meaning.

​

If you're over 50 and in Sydney, and you're ready to do the hard work of becoming rather than diminishing, let's talk.

Credentials & Experience

• Retired Associate Professor (20+ years in academia)

• Research focus: Social and economic justice

• Extensive publication record and teaching awards

• Certificate III & IV in Fitness

• CrossFit Level 1 Certified

• 40+ years of personal training experience across bodybuilding, boxing, martial arts, CrossFit, and functional fitness

• Owner and Coach, 98 Gym Milsons Point and 98 Gym Neutral Bay