S01E07 - Wingnuts, Waterloo and Class A Trainers

In this episode Niko develops a nasty addiction, wants to commit murder in Waterloo and witnesses a drug fulled PT session...

Transcript

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Welcome back everyone 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. Now let's get into episode 7. Wing Nuts, Waterloo, and Class A trainers. If you're wondering what happened to the client that propositioned me in the park at the end of the last episode, I said no. I was already seeing Sophie, and if you become that trainer that sleeps with all your clients, we all know a few of these, then you're just done. It doesn't matter how good you are, that's what people will know and remember you for. So I said no. And Maggie, the client, flew away forever to Dubai. At this point, we're about eight to nine months still in my PT career, and I'm still living in Kennington, working at boot camp Pilates, training people off a tree in the park, and doing some home visits. Business was booming, so I was able to work in at least a little time off now that I'd calmed down from working every hour of the day and sleeping in my car. The problem was is that I then found the TV series The West Wing. Now back then there wasn't Disney, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix. There was just whatever box sets you could get your hand on. And at the time, the big ones were the wire, the sopranos, and the West Wing. Now the West Wing for me is still the best piece of series writing I've encountered. Now once you watch the West Wing and you really get it, you become an addict. Now there's a lot of us addicts to the West Wing around the world, and we are called Wing Nuts. We, probably quite sadly in your eyes, watch the entire seven seasons annually. I do, I watch it every year, sometimes I watch it twice a year if I'm looking for a bit of inspiration. This first time of watching severely impeded on my work and my social life. I would cancel social engagements, sometimes move clients a couple of hours forward or backwards just so I could get a couple of episodes in. It was bad. One of these such clients was Nina. Now she lived in a beautiful apartment in Waterloo. We became good friends after this, after she'd left the UK. There's a theme here, all my clients keep leaving. Anyway, while she was here though, she made me homicidal. What that means is I wanted to kill her. She's the type of client to count the missed minutes for me travelling up the eleven floors in an elevator and walking to her door and then try to add it on to the back end of the session. It's a service industry, yes, but there's an understanding between PTs and clients. Sometimes one of you will be late. Not Nina though, no no. Every second I counted for. And after a while this wears thin. I'm actually glad we became friends and trained less because besides wanting to throw out the window, she had the most powerful right hook I've experienced on the pads from a female client. My joints in my elbows were starting to suffer. Because if you're a personal trainer out there and you still hold the pads every day, you know that multiple clients hitting you in the hands every day wears thin on those elbow joints. In the end, you end up a tendonitis. So hats off to any PTs that still teach boxing out there. I'd hang my TRX off for apartment door to trainer. In fact, the weird places I was now squeezing myself into were multiplying rapidly. Doorways, corridors, lampposts, trees, cages. That's the one thing with the TRX. If you're a mobile PT, you're unstoppable. Gym-based PTs are limited to the gym. They need that bevy of equipment to be able to fill their sessions. Even now, if you're a PT in the gym and your back's getting up a little bit, you'll be saying, yeah, yeah, weights are better, mate. Only for some people, guys, open your mind and open your skill levels. I had to at some point. One such location was this little bandstand pagoda thing in Hyde Park. I would take two of my lovely clients there, Anya and Helen, each Saturday. I'd whip up two TRX off the same water pipe, and we'd fill the hour with inane chat and total body workouts. Lovely stuff. Now one Saturday, we're setting up, and all I can hear over my shoulder is, yeah, so uh I got out of prison, fucking blitzed it, mate. Fuck it. I turned to see this huge brute of a man, three times my size, shaven headed and unable to speak in complete sentences without using the word fuck to link all of them. Now this guy was a PT. He and his client set up in the bandstand opposite us. This thing is about eight metres wide. He may as well have stood on our feet. Anyway, I crack on with my session and this moron and his clients start setting up with head guards and boxing gloves. They start sparring, and I mean sparring. They are knocking absolute lumps out of each other. They're basically trying to annihilate each other. Anyway, so my my clients, Annu and Helen, are petrified. And to be honest, me too. I'm a lover, not a fighter. So as we're watching this sparring, the client catches the PT beautifully in the ribs, winding him. You could hear him go. The PT flew into a rage and fired like a barrage of accurate punches at the client's body and head, leaving him with a broken nose and surely a broken rib. The client was bleeding from his nose and spitting blood from his lips. They packed up, patting each other on the back whilst my clients basically stood there freeze-frame for five minutes in disbelief. Now, fast forward two weeks, I'm in the electric bar and diner in Notting Hill, queuing for a drink at the bar. And a guy next to me looks at me and goes, You're the TRX guy. I was like, You're the boxing client. He's like, How are you doing, mate? Love what you're doing with your clients. And I was like, mate, your PT is mental. And to be honest, mate, you're a bit mental. And you know what he said? I gotta be honest, mate. I absolutely fucking love it. I work in car sales, I'm stressed as fuck, and I just want him to kick the living shit out of me every week. And he does. It's amazing. When he was walking towards the bandstand, I thought he looked a little bit hungover, and I said, You did look hungover, mate. And he goes, It's alright, he gives me a line of coke every time we train. I'll let that hang in the air whilst you absorb that one. A line, cocaine, coke, snow, naughty salt, nose candy. Before a session, some of my clients to this day turn up knackered sometimes because that's life. I don't go give them bloody stimulants and cocaine and then try to explode the heart in the session. The lunacy of this is staggering. A good story, but good lord. The storm was still approaching, and I had a video and a photo shoot to get ready for. I'll see you in episode eight.