 I'm from Morris, Illinois, a little farming community, about an hour south of Chicago. Played, sports my whole life, ran track across country and high school. I never really thought of the military as an option for me, and I was just kind of following the path that you're supposed to follow, high school, then college, then get a job. There was a school shooting in northern Illinois, I lost a buddy that was involved in that shooting, and the way that he passed was he got shot saving his girlfriend's life, and it kind of altered my perception, I guess, on what I was doing. Once I got accepted and chose what I wanted to do, I was at boot camp 13 days after that. I was an E.T. Radleman on submarines. There was a fire on board the USS Miami while we were in dry dock. I was in half my uniform, I grabbed my stuff and started heading towards the base. I reported, and the last thing my wife said to me that night was don't go in that submarine. It was hard to look her in the face and tell her I can't make that promise. I have to do what I've got to do here, you know, and grab some fire hoses reported to the Miami, the port side of the Miami, and I kind of put myself in charge, started routing hoses and kind of directing traffic, you know, what we needed to help combat the fire. And by that time the fire had spread to almost the entire forward half of the submarine. The flames and the smell and the parts of my uniform were melting from the heat and things like that. I didn't know I had like a PTSD or an anxiety or anything like that going on, but my wife started noticing if a fire truck drove by, I was up on my feet looking, making sure they weren't going to base because it would always stick in my head that maybe they're heading to base, maybe something else happened. When we left shipyard, there was another fire drill and I rolled out of my rack. I was bent over putting my boots on to go respond to my area where I need to be for the fire drill. And a pure accident, another shipmate came out of the top rack, it's a fire drill so it's chaos and he just didn't look before, came down and I took both of his heels straight to the base of my neck and my skull and it bounced my head in between my legs. I eventually was diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury from it, lost a lot of memories and things like that. I don't remember my kids being born but I know I was there. The other part of that when you have a head injury you become really susceptible to depression. Almost a year after I got hit in the head, almost a year exactly actually, I broke my foot at a beach outing. It was misdiagnosed for three months as a sprained ankle. So the bones were broken and they were just kind of sawing away at everything around it inside my foot and by the time it was caught, it was too late, I had already developed a complex regional pain syndrome, some people call it RSD. Basically my brain thinks my foot is still broken to this day. So when I run, when I swim, when I do anything on my feet when I walk, my brain thinks it's broken so it sends pain signals. The problem there is the medical community doesn't know a whole lot about it. They don't know how to cure it, they don't know why it happens, they aren't really sure. It's probably the hardest injury to deal with is I've done medication, I've had injections in my spine to try and help the pain, I've done, I've got a spinal cord stimulator implanted in my spine right now and none of it seems to be working. The year before I broke my foot, they were calling for volunteers to be sponsors for athletes, for the Navy team trials out there. So I signed up and I sponsored an athlete and then I broke my foot and the people that run the program already knew me from sponsoring, they're like, hey, come in and be a part so the next trials I was an athlete so I went from sponsoring to athlete within a year. For me the games is really the telltale sign of what this is all about. At one point I was told I couldn't run, you know, and I went out and I just retrained and trained and trained and figured it out and now I'm running. I'm part of Team Navy again, you know, I'm not just retired, petty officer first class, you know, now I'm part of the team again, which kind of helps me, especially one year out of retirement, I feel like I'm still part of the Navy in a way. There's no reason your injury needs to define you as a person, you know, I mean, I'm not going to let my injuries define me, I'll define myself though. Yeah, I have these, I'm 29 with a handicap, but that doesn't have to define me, you know, I can still go out and define myself.