S01E04 - Snot, Purple Ears and Destiny

In this episode, Niko has to combat an inconvenient blockage of the nose, gets attacked by a resistance band, and receives a gift that changes the course of his life forever...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

A very warm welcome back to the PT Chronicles Podcast. The story of a small town Welsh boy and his rise to the very middle of the fitness industry. As always, I'm your host, Nico Algieri, and I'm also the main protagonist of this story. So let's get right into episode four, Snot, Purple Ears, and Destiny. Now, if you remember rightly, I'm still trying to build up my PT business. So I'm accessing the clients of a very busy personal trainer named Gina Hemmings, and she sent me another one. Her name was Eliza, and she lived in Kew Gardens in Richmond. Now, Eliza lived right on the edge of Kew Gardens, so on the main road surrounding the actual gardens themselves. Now this was a one-session gig, so I needed to impress so that Gina kept sending me clients. So Eliza was a runner, which is the worst thing as a PT. To go running with your client in the morning, yes, it's part of the service, but personally, as a personal trainer, you're always thinking, oh come on. You don't want to run, you're getting sweaty, you're having to actually work out whilst working. So it's not ideal. And also, she was a great runner. Something to note, I developed a little bit of a cold before actually getting to Eliza that day, but I persevered. Anyway, so we set off on the run around Q Gardens at a conversational pace, chatting and getting to know each other. She's a nice enough lady, but a touch reserved. Put it this way, we're not exactly kindred spirits. Now, towards the end of our 45-minute canto around Richmond, my cold decided to get a little bit worse, let so to speak, to the point where my left nostril was completely blocked and it was changing the sound of my voice. It was affecting my breathing, and I was nearly blowing snot bubbles out of it. And being a personal trainer and all about preparation, I had not prepared a tissue to be in my pocket. So my plan was to somehow do the sportsman thing of ejecting the snot from my nose powerfully, just blowing it out. One powerful blast just to clear the nostrils. Now to pull off this snot heist without my new client seeing, because let's be honest it's disgusting. I started to develop a plan. Remember, we're on the main road in Kew Gardens in Richmond, so we're running past cars, and cars are flying past, making a lot of noise as they speed past, which gives me a masking sound for my plan. Total genius. I was gonna wait until one of the very noisy cars drove past, and as they did, at the perfect time I would eject the snot from my nose. Faultless. Now, a car sped past, a ninja-like timing. I ejected what felt like two kilos of snot from my nose without the client noticing. What I hadn't planned for was the pedestrian walking towards us 20 yards away, and as she got near us, she said, Oh, that was absolutely disgusting. My client turned around to me and just shook her head. Remember, I said it was a one session gig? Well, I'd absolutely made sure of that. Now, being in my first year of personal training, it turns out that this was a week of classic Nico errors. So on a Tuesday morning I got myself to Clapham to train super powerful barrister Sarah. She'd also wanted to go for a run. But the session finished at your house with some resistance bands. Because that's all I had back then. I hadn't discovered TRX, I didn't really have dumbbells to carry around or kettlebells, it was all about resistance bands. Now, a good PT will always test his methods before applying them to a client. Back then, I was just cocky and I wasn't a good PT. All my trainer family out there in the world will know that if you haven't prepped a session, you're just thinking about filling all the way through. So Sarah had a Swiss ball in the corner of her living room, so I instantly made up a chest press on the spot. Now, if you can't guess what's happened already, yes, I actually rolled the Swiss ball over the top of my resistance band, laid my back on the Swiss ball, and grabbed the handles expertly. I'm the man. I drove the handles upwards to obviously mimic a chest press. Rep one, phenomenal. Went down, came up for the second rep, pulled it, pulled the resistance band out from underneath the Swiss ball, and that resistance band hit me across the ears like someone hitting a horse with a whip. Honestly, purple ears immediately ringing, the pain was unbelievable. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, I was in that much pain, and Sarah is just standing there pissing herself, laughing at me. So after a week of total idiocy, I was due a break. I didn't realise that someone was about to place Excalibur into my hand. Remember that my father was a bodybuilder? He also sold supplements for a protein company. He'd come up from Wales having visited a client in Bristol to deliver some supplements, and they'd given him a little bag containing a piece of equipment. He asked me, Do you want this T-Rex tracks thing? I don't know what it is. Now back then, Mr. Ornico dismissed it. I threw it in the back of my car, knowing full well I'd never use it. I had my thing. I knew my resistance bands. I was top of the tree in the Reforma Pilates studio. I knew it all, I didn't need anything else. Little did I know that what I'd thrown in my boot was a TRX suspension trainer, a khaki green piece of webbing, a strap, so to speak, that would change the course of my fitness career, my life, and the way I train myself forever.