About Me

Born a missionary kid in Guatemala, I learned that the world was a big place, and I needed some guidance to get through it.

We fled Guatemala after it was clear that our home was going to be taken over.

First my father trained to learn horse farming to teach others to go the third world countries, and help natives to improve their quality of life without increasing their cost of living.

He bought a farm in West Virginia to start the school, and began improving it during the summer and working during the winter as a tree planter.

In the winter we followed him around for each of our first 5yrs in the US. My parents started running for exercise, and that started my life of training.

We moved to Minnesota so that he could go to school where I started kayaking. My parents feared winter, and as it approached they became more and more anxious.

My aunt had a school in the Park Cities of Dallas, and invited my parents to come and help her out with it. So we moved to Dallas which I was tremendously afraid of.

There I cleaned the school in the evenings after school, and in the mornings before school. My teacher gave prizes for achievement, and my competitive side brought me to the top of the class.

When they sold the school I went to a Lutheran School called Holy Cross where I became increasingly competitive, and even somewhat combative.

We moved to a nicer neighborhood where I started swimming on a swim team. I began lifting weights, and doing calisthenics, and dreaming. I realized that my parents had helped me to have significant advantages over the other kids that I knew.

My parents loved me, and they had prepared me carefully for living a Godly life. Unfortunately, my life was beginning to become more focused on worldly things. A major crisis was to get a bad grade.

My goals became very material: scholarships, grades, girls, sports. I remember seeing a program done by a missionary family coming back from the field, and that scared me. I thought: I can be the most gifted person in the world, and it may not matter.

That changed my life, because I knew that it was more important to me to make a difference in other people's life than just to achieve for myself. That worked out well because it wasn't very long after that that I was in a serious car crash on the way to the 1989 World Championships which debilitated me physically for the next several years.

During that time I found it very gratifying to help my parents to take care of our family while they had other things as their focus. Still I did not know very well how to be without physical health, and being active.

Slowly, I rehabilitated my body, and meanwhile taught my little brother a lot about sports. He was the greatest joy in my life during that time, and I spent more time with him than anyone. I tried to help and encourage my sisters as well in their choosen pursuits. They were much more independent, and I encouraged them to be.

My mom saw that my siblings were becoming too much of my life, and encouraged me to pursue some other things. The most successful of these attempts was to buy a membership to the Presidents Health Club. I remember my father had been a member, and coming to Dallas it seemed like one of the most luxurious things in the whole world. We went to this little club in North Dallas that had a track on top with banked turns (presumably because you'd have fallen off of the building otherwise!), a hot tub, indoor pool, racketball, etc. . . and he'd taken me over to see this new club that was being built which was supposed to be twice the size of the one that we went to. I wanted to go there, but when my father left we never did.

When my Mom bought me that membership it really meant a lot to me. Not only that but it was on my bus route. So, I could go to the club anytime that I wanted. While I had struggled to overcome the pain of my injuries, I did not realize that there were limits to what my body could do outside of pain.

As a result if it did not hurt then I would do more. I became sick often. In retrospect I realize that I was dehydrated, and overtraining. Admittedly, I was pretty depressed starting out, so my decisions were a little desperate. I wanted to compete in the 1992 Olympics, and I had just lost 2 1/2 years of training because of injuries.

I spent my injured and sick time reading. First I read things that people gave me, but I quickly got tired of novels. Then I read the Bible cover to cover, and the New Testament several times. Then I read some of the great books: Aristotle, St. Augustine, Tolstoy, Machiavelli (I don't even remember how to spell most of these anymore it has been so long), and many essays writen about "Great Ideas."

My best friend at the time read computer manuals, and I tried to do that but only got through some DOS and Basic books, and a Word Perfect manual. Never the less, my Computer Science teacher provide a safe haven for me at school. I was no longer the best, and that was pretty humbling. I had a few moments of greatness, but I did not have the motivation that I had before the car accident. I was lost, confused, sickly, in a lot of pain physically, and emotionally. My spirit was low.

To get healthy I focused 100% of my attention on training. I studied, researched, and observed the top athletes in my sport. Fortunately, I also bought a car that I could get anywhere that I needed to be in. After a little wandering across the US, Canada, and Guatemala I moved to North Carolina. Admittedly miserable, I was at least healthy enough to take on a serious training regimen, and I competed into the top workout group at the Nantahala Racing Club.

So, I had the opportunity to train with the best english speaking kayakers in the world, and one of the best kayak coaches in the world leading up to the Olympics. Still, I was overtraining, and increasingly masochistic about it. Signs along the way included getting frostbite in my hands because I took all of my gear of during one of the coldest days of the year when I was placing second in a mock race. I became increasingly angry, and began cussing. A friend pointed it out to me just in time for the Olympic Qualification race, and that lead to a turn around, but not before a crisis.

A week after I qualified for the Olympics I nearly quit. Again I had overtrained leading up to the qualification race, and I became really sick after my performance side turned off. I was barely able to get out of bed, but my coach had some of the best athletes in the world in our workout group that week so I could not miss a practice. Since there was a significant amount of time before the Olympics he also made some suggestions for ways that I could improve. One was to change my grip on my paddle. The result was a most humbling week in which I could barely make it down the course up right, much less be competitive with the world and Olympic champions that I was training with.

At the Champion International Race the following weekend I was sick of it. As I sat in the starting line I decided that I was going to leave. There was no point in racing. I was sick, and tired and I wanted something more than to simply be there racing a kayak. I thought I don't even need to take my boat. My appetite was beginning to come back to me, and I was hungry. So I figured that I'd just go get something to eat, and move to Mexico or Guatemala and spend my life reading, and working on building a house. Disappear.

Well, there wasn't a lot of time in the start, because I had a pretty elaborate warmup routine. So my number came up quickly, and I had to decide whether to go or stay. With one minute to go I did my final visualization which is simply to see just how fast I can remember the course. Then when I openned my eyes with my heart pounding at the prescribed rate, and all of my instincts primed towards racing; it dawned on me why I raced.

I remembered how much fun it had been when I first started. With 15 seconds to go I was ready, and when I left the start gate it was like it was a new me.

Since it was only one week after a World Cup Race that determined who went to the Olympic Games, and there were significant cash prizes, this race was pretty competitive. Miraculously, I made my first final at that race! I remember how amazing it was to hear my name called over the loudspeaker with the likes of Eric Jackson, Scott Shipley, Rich Weiss, Paul Ratcliff, David Ford, Peter Nagy, etc. I had an awesome race though I was physically drained. I slept for about a day and a half after that (fortunately my homestay let me stay). I finally felt like I was back to being my old self, and the plagues were past.

I was wrong. That challenge had been overcome, but that just meant that I was ready to learn to overcome greater challenges. . . God had worked a miracle out for me to qualify for the Olympics and to make my first final in international competition, but I was not too grateful. I again took it upon myself to try to do things my way, and as a result I lost my girlfriend and my coach. God told me to support them, I wanted some thing for myself. The result was that I had a lonely Olympics. I savored the day of competition to the fullest, but did not feel that I could share it with anyone.

I went back to school, and got back with my girlfriend. Her mom got me to coach some of the up and comers, and I got my brother involved. I had a lot more fun training, and got a whole lot more healthy emotionally. My best year of racing came the next year when I travelled the race circuit with my brother and girlfriend. They both got really good, and I began focussing more on coaching from then on. Still I continued to get better, and had hopes that I might qualify for the Olympics in 2000, but just raced without true fight in the qualification race. When I returned to the US I met David and Debbie Power at my sister's wedding, and they turned my life around again. First they sponsored our Jr. racing team, and helped us to make the most epic summer racing trip ever.

That lead to us founding the Red River Racing Team formally as a non-profit corporation. I worked on some projects to create whitewater parks in Ft. Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. I hosted an Olympic Team Trials Qualifier, the 2000 Jr. Olympics. Then the Powers bought a house on the water for us to use as a training Center.

I tried to finish school while getting the training center off of the ground. That prompted me to change my major to business. I lived on student loans, because I didn't know the first thing about business. Miraculously, I finished school two years later.

In the two and a half years since I got married to my longtime girlfriend Michelle Clements.

I tried to expand the business to quickly in the first year out of school. Then worked feverishly in 2004 when we were featured in some media that brought us a lot of business.

I nearly quit and fled when my wife and I were attacked and burglarized at the end of the summer in 2004.

That lead me to get a job with Brinks Business Security where I learned a lot about criminals, and wasted away physically because of working long hours and not working out.

I quit the day after Chris Weigand and the Hinton Family brought me to Colorado for a team trials qualifier, and I realized how much I missed my wife (who was training full time), and the athletic life.

I got back into shape over the summer by paddling, and my best friend Jon Dale helped me to get into better financial and spiritual shape.

I was again on top of the world when I left to do a trip to Jr. Olympics. Unfortunately, I was excluded from many of the things that I'd planned to work on there, and I raced very poorly both with Jon and another friend Joel McCune. Both decided not to race with me over the following weeks.

When I returned I struggled. I did not make the kind of sales that Jon did, and my wife was in a bit of a crisis about paddling because her shoulder was hurt. Mark Poindexter agreed to race with me to try to go to the World Championships in September. We had an amazing trip to the National Championships, and beat out some good competition by significant margins, but did not qualify for the Worlds. Mark hurt to much to continue training, and I began to find that I was in financial trouble.

So, I focused more on work, and God provided. I'm still there, though now I have a whole lot more experience with this new way of life.

Larry Lewis became a part owner of the Center which helped us to pay for taxes, and a few other things.

Miguel Garcia has helped me to expand our kayak school operations into Mexico.

I am healthy, challenged, but motivated, and I am starting to dream again of going to the Olympics. It once again seems impossible on a worldly scale, but God has worked miracles throghout my life. So I intend to keep doing whatever I can for him, and see where he leads me. . . Please put me in your prayers.