Two Peas in a Podcast

Episode 90 - Marcus Filly (Functional Bodybuilding, Range of Motion, and Building Mental Resilience)

Marcus Filly is the CEO and Founder of Functional Bodybuilding, a fitness program focusing on strength, aesthetics, and longevity. His background is in CrossFit, where he was a 6x competitor at the CrossFit Games finishing as high as 12th Fittest in the world in 2016. Marcus is a lifelong learner and continues chasing the goal of being the happiest man in the world.

To connect with Marcus please follow the below links:

https://functional-bodybuilding.com/

https://www.instagram.com/marcusfilly/?hl=en

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 30 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Mark is Philly CrossFit superstar absolute beast of an athlete first and foremost outside of that. I always get all nervous when I find myself in a room with someone who is not only fitter than me but better looking than me. Oh boy. Thank you. Thank you. The thing we're not in the same room. Thank you so much for sharing your time with me and our audience first and foremost. Yeah. My pleasure and I always show up to these with try and keep a pretty blank slate in my mind about what is the purpose of this. Who am I talking to? I like to really just see where these organically go. So thank you for kind of inviting me. Thank you for the intro and let's dive in. I love this. Let's start on the CrossFit side of the world. Tell me what it was like to be on the competition stage with the fittest people in the world and where the journey took you. The CrossFit sport was a very interesting one because I got into it when it was really emerging as sort of a new sport. I think the first time they had a CrossFit competition in a worldwide games was 2007 and I competed in the 2010 CrossFit games. So it was in its infancy. People still like to call it a new sport but you know it's coming up on its 20th year here pretty soon. Being in a sport in its infancy there was kind of like the cutting edge of methodology. I think people take for granted that every sport that we know in modern day that is highly commercialized, these sports have been around for a very long time and the methods that people utilize train and compete and perform at a high level in those sports have been really perfected, people are seeing marginal improvements. For example in the Olympics every four years we may see a world record or we may not whereas in the early days of learning to sprint and learning to play organized basketball, there's people had an opportunity to really be innovative and try new things. So I was amongst that group in CrossFit where you'd have people training totally differently in two different camps and we would show up and we'd see who's the fittest. Nowadays the competition prepares very similarly, there's a lot of known elements that make for a great CrossFit athlete. So that first and foremost was one of the most exciting things because I'm curious as a person particularly when it comes to fitness and health and nutrition and I've been that way my whole life and it's why I do what I do today and so getting a chance to sort of experiment with that as an athlete alongside growing my coaching career it was just very exciting. Beyond that you know I played a lot of team sports growing up and I always regretted not taking my individual sport of golf further and so when I had an opportunity to become an individual you know sport athlete again in CrossFit it was really appealing to me because there's a lot of self discovery that comes in pushing oneself in a sport where you don't have the opportunity to rely on other teammates and athletes to carry you and your weaknesses or to you know collaborate with you when training is hard. So that was something that I just really loved about my time in the sport and then the last part is being a competitor in that sport and sadly people like this has started to come to light very much so in recent CrossFit Games news but the CrossFit Games was a very difficult test on a physical level but on an emotional and mental level too. There were a lot of scary things that we did as athletes and challenging, challenging mental tests and those would often conflict and collide where your mind you were being tested in your mind just as much as you were being tested in your physical body and those tests will never, I'll never forget them and they were some of the biggest obstacles that I faced in my life up to that point and they taught me a lot about what truly matters to me and what my tolerance for discomfort is. Yeah I love that perspective and you're the perfect person to shed light on it. Talk to me about just that. Talk to me about the mental aspect of competing and going through this multi-day test where you're showing up on the first day and you're excited to be there and then you are in such a dark place that you don't know if you can make it through, you don't know what the next workout is going to feel like and you don't know how you're going to make it to the end of the weekend. CrossFit is a unique sport in that way where it prides itself, the brand and the game prides themselves on being the test of the fittest on earth and they like to use the tagline, the unknown and unknowable and what's interesting is that as you compete more in a sport like that you start to know just about everything that you're going to be asked to do. You know that there's going to be some barbell weightlifting, there's going to be some pullups, there's going to be some endurance. So you can train a lot of the skills and disciplines and with athletes taking more and more of their life and committing it to the sport and training it more and more hours per day, you can really become quite skilled and in a broad spectrum of athletic demands and fitness traits so that when you arrive there's no physical task that's, there's rarely a physical task that is too much to overcome. However, the events, the event, the worldwide CrossFit Games was always scheduled over multiple days and it generally ended up being four days of competitive fitness where the order of events was unknown. The events themselves like how the exercises or movements or tests of physical skill and strength were going to be organized as unknown and the schedule was also quite unknown. So we might know that heading into a weekend competition, we would be performing a maximum clean and jerk as one event of 13 or 14 events but we didn't know what day it was going to be on. We didn't know if it was going to be at eight in the morning or seven at night. And so the unpredictable nature of an event like that made physical preparation very difficult because you couldn't rely on all the knowns that many athletes go into their sport with like basketball players play most games depending on the time zone somewhere between five and seven p.m. every day. So they can organize their life schedule, their training schedules and teach their bodies how to be really prepared at seven p.m. every day that they have a game. Similarly with football, you know, aside from Monday night football, you know, Sunday football games like there's there's rhythm to professional sports. The rhythm to the CrossFit Games was very, very again, unknown and unpredictable. And so that created a lot of mental distress for athletes and emotional distress because we could be sleep deprived. We would be shuttered on a bus across the city to an undisclosed site where we were going to perform an event that we didn't know what the event was going to entail. And so just to get us into a pool where we could do muscle ups on a bar on the pool deck, we had to drive two hours in LA traffic to, you know, an undisclosed site where we could then perform a workout and then get back on the bus and drive a certain distance only to be walked into a velodrome where we were going to row for two hours on a rowing machine. But that event was also, you know, unknown to us at the time. So there was there was a lot of physical challenges but mental and almost emotional exhaustion that would take place. And you saw over the years that the athletes who were on paper the most fit who could do the most incredible athletic, you know, performances didn't always perform best at the CrossFit Games because of the mental and emotional side of competing. I was, unfortunately, I was one of them in the first couple of years that I competed. It was, it was overwhelming just to do the physical tasks, let alone be prepared mentally and emotionally to handle that added layer of challenge and test. And that was probably the thing that I did the best at overcoming in my later years was that I had enough experience. I had been around enough and I could anticipate, okay, this is going to, you know, there's going to be a three hour delay before I can actually, I'm actually going to go do this. So I have to conserve energy here or, you know, I know that there's going to be this sort of like mind game that the director is going to play with us on this day because this is how things always go. And I know that these types of events end up showing up on the first days because they can do it when there's less of a crowd. And so you sort of learn those things and that was what I think allowed me to excel on top of just growing my physical fitness base towards my last season. And when I, when I was able to get close to a top 10, I got 12th in the world at the 2016 games. But there's, like I said, there's just so many facets to it that go outside of physical preparation into mental and emotional preparation. And it's really that is the unpredictable part of what the CrossFit Games brings. And sadly, it's the unpredictable nature of it that has also, you know, presented athletes with the most risk and uncertainty about their physical health too. And I think what's so, so inspiring about your story is not only have you been on this mountaintop that a lot of athletes work their entire life to be at, but you're so, so open about this emotional side of it, the mental piece and the most mental component of it. At the time that you were competing, did you know that this isn't the direction that you're probably going to take the rest of your life? And did you think that there may be a better way to be training other than doing CrossFit? Yes and no. I think, you know, now in present day, I am known for functional bodybuilding, which is, you know, in evolving a collection of different methods of fitness, part of which is CrossFit, you know, and part of it is bodybuilding and part of it is, you know, classic strength training. However, at the time when I was Crossfitting, you know, I truly believed I was working inside of a system that really had the answers for a lot of people, particularly because we did a little bit of everything. You know, the disciplines were varied. What I knew at the time was that there was something I had discovered in the process of learning CrossFit as a discipline and as a brand and as a method that was going to stay with me for a long time. However, the intensity that we trained at, that I was training for the sport, I was clear that that was not the intensity I was going to be training for the rest of my life. That became more and more clear to me as my career progressed was, wow, in order to do this thing very well against other top competitors, I have to do things at an intensity level and really a volume level, so like more than other people. You know, everyone can work out hard, but to go work out hard five times a day as an example is just not accessible to most people, nor is it advisable, right? There's sort of like, there was like a continuum that we talked about a lot in the coaching world, which was like, you know, being sedentary is unhealthy. Getting moving, you climb this health scale, but then at some point, if you move more and more and more and you're keep training, you start to fall off the cliff of health on the other side and then, you know, the highest level athletes in the world are some of the least healthy athletes in a way that's hard for people to really appreciate. When you're peaking for the Tour de France, you know, and you go out and you race that race like it's incredible what athletes can do, but by the end of that event, these are the bodies that are absolutely crushed, like they're on many levels considered, you know, unhealthy, if not close to disease, right? And this is sort of what I learned is that you press your, you push yourself to the physical extremes. There's consequences and your life quality and your fulfillment and energy that you bring each day goes can go down at some point. So that was sort of clear to me like, hey, there's going to be a day where I don't do it as hard. And but it wasn't until close to the end where I started to really long for more of a balanced discipline approach to training where the methods that were crossfit that we were tested on and we were competing in. I also saw as, you know, this isn't just, this isn't the only way to do fitness. There's other ways to do fitness. There's other ways to get people strong, to manage healthy body weight, to look the way they want to look and to feel vital. Whereas in the early days of CrossFit, I was heavily drinking the CrossFit Kool-Aid as people, you know, talk about it as a cult where I was like, this is it. This is all people need. Nobody will ever need to do anything other than burpees and thrusters and kettlebell swings and pullups and you will be fine and you will fix disease and we will cure the world. And it took me, you know, eight years embedded and entrenched to realize, all right, these are great. These are great tools. There's value to this and there's way more beyond this. There was more before it and there will be more after it that makes sense for people. So why, why create a barrier to what people can do, what I can do and how I can train myself and be happy and fulfilled by just saying, hey, I'm just a CrossFitter and that's what I do and that's all, that's the only discipline that I will push to other people. Yeah. And I think this is exactly why I love you so much as a coach, why I resonate so much with your message and why I think there's so much value in it. There is this, I don't know if it's innate, I don't know if it's instinctual, I don't know if it's CrossFit driven message of more is better. And what we find is like a typical athlete understands that quality is much more important that quantity and a lot of the time it comes down to the type of training that you do. Tell me about the idea for functional bodybuilding and the direction that you wanted to take your training and your clients when you actually started the system. Yeah. And yeah, you talk about like the term quality over quantity or quantity is you know, more is better. Yeah. These are some, these are certainly some culturally embedded ideas. The more is better is, you know, you can ask somebody like, oh, do you believe more is better and they're like, no, no, no, it's about, you know, but then you watch their actions and you watch how they approach solving problems. And they often will go with the more is better approach more and more and more. And I'm not saying that more isn't sometimes the solution. Sometimes it is the solution. Like, hey, like you're, you're walking 3,000 steps a day. If you walk more than that, that's going to be good. Right. When we're, when I was looking at, you know, the fitness methods that we were doing, I was realizing that there's a point at which trying to do more was making people sacrifice a certain element of quality. So with, with CrossFit, and then I'll just stick to that as a specific examples, you know, we were trying to go as fast as possible. We were trying to, we were in the business of competitive exercising. Yeah. Okay. So when you exercise, you lift weights. So more is more weight. When you exercise, you try and do things quickly, a certain, you know, in a certain time. So more is going faster, right? Or more could simply just be more repetitions. So if you combine all three of those things, I want to lift more weight for more reps. And I want to do it faster. Then there's a point at which you start to, in order to like push that limit, you, you look for every way to cut a corner. Yeah. Right. You know, why go to a full range of motion in my squat where I try and touch, you know, my butt to the ground, when they're only giving me credit for going a millimeter below, you know, my hips below my knees. Oh, I'm just going to go with my hips below my knees every single time. And that'll help me to go faster because I'm not traveling as much distance. It'll also help me to lift more weights because if I only squat this low versus this low, I can lift more weight. And so when you start applying those things that you're in a competitive setting, trying to do more, you cut corners and that little, that one example I just gave, if I just get my hips below my knee, the judge at the CrossFit classes or, you know, the CrossFit coach or the judge at the CrossFit games is going to say, good job. But if I'm capable, if my knee and my hips and my ankles have the physiological capability to squat lower than that, meaning the joint angles can compress and get smaller under load, then that means every time I make the choice to try and go more faster, better quantity, I sacrifice 10 degrees of ankle, hip and knee range of motion. What that means to somebody for their health and longevity is that now their ankles, their knees and their hips are less mobile. They don't have strength at range of motion. And this is the seed of joint deterioration. Not using the joint is how joint health diminishes over time. So people with bad knees have never been, they've taken a huge detour in their life from bending their knees fully. When you're born and when you're a child and a toddler and a young, you know, a young person, your knees can flex to their full range of motion. Then over time, you sit more, you stop squatting and you are more upright. And now your knee joint doesn't ever flex past 90 degrees. If you don't have purposeful squatting in your life, if you sit in chairs, if you never sit on the ground, this is the, this is what happens to most young adults into their adulthood. And that's why people have bad knees. So I just outlined how one example of trying to do more forces you down this path of cutting a corner and then when that, when that corner has been cut, you now run the risk of disease or suboptimal health and I'm talking physical health. But the same logic that I just outlined could be applied to a lot of different principles too of metabolic health, of, you know, you know, cellular health and, and again, muscle and, you know, mechanical health of joints and the body. Yeah. And I think what's so cool about what you do is I almost think about exercise with that exact same curve of, hey, too much is not a great thing. And I think of it as like, when something becomes a sport, when it turns into a competition to a certain level, it's awesome because it gets more people engaged. But at a certain point where you go, hey, we're going to set this boundary and we're going to judge you against other people. It all of a sudden becomes a race where all you want to do is win. What is it about our psychology that makes us want to sacrifice good movement for winning? Hmm, well, I think it was a culture that was brand specific. And it was, you know, that culture really got people motivated to do things, which in the end, if you're, you know, if you're, if I'm a brand owner and I'm trying to grow my business, it probably is a good thing to get people more and more excited. So if you teach people, hey, when you get more reps and you lift more weight and you go faster, you get healthier, you get stronger, you get all the things that you want. You get a better body, you get a six pack like, look at these CrossFit Games athletes. They are beautiful, you know, specimens out there with just chiseled muscles, what, you know, they're athletic, they can do these. If you just do what they do, you'll have it too. That led to a big, I mean, that was a, that was a big part of the growth of that company in that brand. So it's not like, I mean, I think what's inherent to people is the desire to evolve, a desire to get better, to see improvement. I want to be better tomorrow than I am today. I don't want to be stuck in life. I aspire to have, you know, there is a world where the grass is greener and I want to find out what that is. And I want to be able to do it easier, et cetera than before, right? And so if you just message that over and over again, then that's kind of sexy and people like, I want to do that, you know, but I think it's now in the, and that's, that's fed fitness marketing for a long time. Sure. It's not new to CrossFit, although CrossFit came from, it came at it from a new angle of faster, heavier and, and, and more reps. But people are trying to do that in other ways and fitness and they can, they will continue to do that in other ways. And my stance is, look, more and in, in doing more or pushing your intensity has its place and not, not, but not with the exclusion of maintaining other important things. And I think the message has been out there long enough, certainly with my audience, where people recognize, hey, I can move with full range of motion that can prioritize high quality technical execution of, of weightlifting. I can do all these things and set a new standard of, of movement and then build my intensity on top of that rather than let's get the intensity as high as we can and then fix the problems as we go. And that was sort of what was happening. You had all these people going super intense. And then they're looking for every mobility, you know, tool on the planet to fix all the issues that they have where I come up from it now with the standpoint of if we move really well, if we create great mechanics, if we learn how to exercise correctly and then we layer on intensity, the exercise itself becomes your mobility program. You will maintain good health. You will maintain good joint health. And then the thing that we're not talking about enough is, well, the vast majority of people have fitness related, fitness and health related goals that are actually met by and large by lifestyle and nutrition and a smaller part by exercise. And we kind of put the exercise performance up here with, you know, in my CrossFit competitive days and then said, Oh, well, if you eat a little bit better, it'll make this better. And, you know, and it was sort of like the cart was coming before the horse, so to speak. I love that because the smartest people understand that building the most solid foundation that you can makes for a strong house and that solid foundation is good nutrition. It's good habits and it's getting you into good patterns. And with that comes good movement. What I love the most about functional bodybuilding outside of the exercises, outside of the fitness aspect is that you genuinely have this wholesome message of happiness. How long has it found, has it taken you to, and I want to be very specific about the wording I use here, cultivate the mindset of balance and just being happy? I mean, to be perfectly honest, it's a, it's still an ongoing process for me. I'm unwinding two decades of seeing fitness through the lens of I will sacrifice whatever I need to in order to achieve something rather than I need to use this thing to cultivate a happy and fulfilling life. I don't regret the way I went about fitness for a long time because it taught me things about myself that I don't know that I could have learned another way. It also introduced me to pretty much everybody that's important to me in my life now. It has also taught me a certain level of discipline and work ethic that now I can apply in a way that, did I not have that, I just, it's skills that I've learned that transcend fitness. Yet, you know, I have learned through coaching in many, in recent years that the achievement of a particular fitness goal, body composition, sub 10% body fat, you know, weight loss, like people achieving these measurable goals that they believe would make them happy, leave them in some cases, just as unhappy as before in extreme cases, even more unhappy than they were before and it's been something I've experienced to where I've chased a certain ideal version of my, an idealized version of my physical body and in the process gotten more and more critical, self critical and unhappy with the person I see in the mirror. And the more preoccupied with chasing that version of myself. So much so that I've, I'm missing out now on key and core relationships, I'm missing out on a sense of peace, calm and groundedness within myself each day and losing, I mean, ultimately losing connection with, with the people around me who I want to spend time with. Yeah. I love that message so much because it takes a strong man to admit that, hey, even though you're this good looking specimen of a physical human being, when you look at yourself, you see as something that kind of is missing because what I hear and what I saw with myself being really successful in a business world going, hey, even though there's all this money, there's all these rewards for doing good work, there's just a piece of me that's not happy. Yeah. Talk to me about the value of relationships of found, of finding the loving spouse who supports you as you go through this process of finding the best markets you could possibly be. My wife, 15 years ago, and she was a client at the gym and she was at a stage of her life where she was very interested in fitness and we bonded over that. And for the next seven or eight years, my CrossFit career really took off and she was side by side with me through all of it. But we had a life focus around fitness. We built a great community around us of people that were like minded in their pursuit of exercise and eating well and centering their social life around movement. And it probably wasn't until we had kids that we started to feel the pull and the constraint of time so much. I started to feel it and also that, yeah, so now we put pressure on a system and you start to really see where the stress starts to crack the framework of what you have. Yeah. So now we have this added pressure where now we have another human, two humans, two children. Time is now this scarce resource, which means that where we had opportunity for connection before was now not necessarily available to us. It was being focused on another person. And where I used to maybe have before kids, plenty of space in my life and my day to have mental preoccupation in my own physical pursuits. Yeah. Now every time I'm spending minutes, hours, you know, days, weeks getting too focused on it, I don't have, I'm not available emotionally with another human. So my wife happens to be a clinical psychologist and beyond just like her, her degree and her training and what she does as a professional, she's, before she ever became a professional, she was like, you know, almost like a, she was world class when it came to understanding relationship dynamics and relation relating to people. I think that's what drives her the most in life is like, I just want to, I want to connect with people. Right? Yeah. Life means absolutely nothing to her if she's just alone on an island. It's like, if I can't share this with other people, if I don't get to learn and be curious and discover new things about people and have them want to discover things about me and show curiosity about my life and what's inside of my heart and my brain and my emotions, then it's just no fun. But as I was sort of very different in that, like, I kind of believed, hey, just let me be by myself and everything's going to be great. And it's, I've learned through our relationship that even when I thought that like the solo pursuit of personal goals was the most fulfilling thing in life, it was really, it really meant nothing without being able to share it with people and getting to share it with my wife was one, you know, one example of that, getting to share it with the fans and the people that followed my athletic journey was another example of that. I didn't see it at the time, but I saw it more and more and then after children, it's like, oh my gosh, like there is, there's a whole different element to sharing my life experience with other people that I was really blind to for a good portion of my life. And the work that I've done on myself and with therapists and with my wife has been to uncover that as, you know, we all experience some level of anxiety and it's a human emotion. My experience of anxiety or the way it infiltrated my life based upon my upbringing and my fears and what I was programmed to think was very, very high. And I spent most of my time trying to solve anxiety by being hyper focused on outcomes that I could control like my body, the way it looked, how much fitness I had, my business and the cycle of business and the cycle of competitive sport can exacerbate that in certain individuals and it certainly did for me. So I have been working hard against that my whole life and not realizing that like, hey, this thing that is anxiety, uncontrolled and being fed by, you know, social media competition, trying to build a business, like all of that has kind of blocked me from being able to connect with other humans and like be happy and fulfilled and grounded and so if I steered off course there from your question, forgive me, but I think it does just, it just, it lands me at this, you know, real like the biggest lesson of 2024 for me was my gosh, anxiety and trying to solve for my own personal fears and anxieties over my whole life as an adult is what has stood in the way for me having a lot of fulfillment. And if we go back to talking about quantity over quality, it's like in the pursuit of quantity and trying to do more in less time, all right, and this could be like a message of life, it just raises fear and it raises anxiety because it's, there's a scarcity of time, you got to do more and you're constantly in this wheel of like, I'm never going to slow down and when that's present for me and for many others, there is a block to connection into love and to what, what ends up actually mattering in our lifetime. And as a man, this is where I get so inspired and I find so much value in exactly the way that you talk about this. It is so, so hard to find and get in tune with exactly who you are as a person. So you can show up as the best version of yourself for the people who matter the most. It's amazing that you have fans, it's amazing that you have followers. But I think the one thing that's always clear is at the end of the day, the people who matter the most is your family and your kids because they're the ones who are getting inspired by and learning the everyday lessons from you. And let me ask you this super powerful question. How good does it feel waking up in the morning, knowing that the person getting out of bed is this happy guy who doesn't have to be in the gym for six hours a day to prove something, but instead does it by creating balance and being present with the ones who matter the most? Yeah, because I still don't wake up everyday feeling that way, when I do feel that way, it's a special feeling and it's what I'm striving for. I continue to strive for and I was asked a really important question by my therapist recently because my 40th birthday is in just a month away. And I started to have this sort of fantasy of like, I wake up on my 40th birthday and I will be in the best shape of my life. You know, like so many people want to mark a very big occasion with, look at me having the discipline to control this physical outcome and feel great. And she challenged me to say, okay, well, that's great, Marcus, you know, by all measurements, like you're already like you wake up tomorrow and you've got it, you know, like there's nothing more to optimize physically. Yeah. Well, how do you want to wake up on your 40th birthday? You know, on October 2nd, 2024, 40 years from the day I was born. What's the feeling that you want to have? And the feeling I want to have is I wake up and have full self acceptance of where I'm at. I wake up. Wow. I just kissed my wife. I got out of bed. I have this beautiful home. I have these beautiful kids. I have this beautiful wife. I have this amazing support system around me. I've built a business that I'm proud of and I'm serving people that I care about. I have the physical body that can do tremendous things. Even if it's not fully optimized, I am proud of everything that I've done. I have a sense of calm about me and I still want to go to work and be better. And that's how I want to feel and the part that I have every day as I want to wake up and go and be better. The part that is fleeting is I wake up and I can say to myself, look in the mirror, you are great today. There's nothing that you need. There's nothing more you need to do. You've arrived with a sense of calm and peace, enough that you will look each person in the eye today and truly connect with them and see them because they see you and still be inspired to go and make tomorrow better and the next day better. So I had an exercise to write all this down. I haven't done it and this was the first time I've articulated it. So this is the homework that my therapist gave me. I love that because outside of being an amazing story and a great piece of homework, there is a bigger kind of gem that's hidden in here and it's that from the outside and when someone just looks at you, they're like, how could you not wake up and just feel like you are this amazing human being and super successful and have everything. And a lot of the time it's, I talk about this as what's going through your mind is some version of reality that you get to construct and the best people just spend their life chasing being okay with exactly who they are, like it's the final question I'm going to ask you for today is going to be a good one and it's this. Let's do it. Give yourself some advice back when you were competing back when you were obsessed with just being the best in the one category. What advice would you give yourself today about balance and being this happier version of Marcus that is sitting with me today? That is really good. You know, I think maybe what I would say and this is, yeah, this is hard because if I knew what I know now and I tried to balance myself out back then, I wouldn't have achieved what I did. I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have pushed myself in the way that I did. I wouldn't have learned some of the lessons that I learned, built the same relationships and friendships, evolved and built my skills. So I don't want to ever go back and, you know, counsel myself out of the path and the choices that I made. However, I would probably go back and tell myself at different stages in my younger life, particularly the one where I was very competitive, was to say, you know, I'd sit myself down and say, okay, Marcus, like you are on the path right now. You're on the right path, you're doing everything you're supposed to be doing. You don't need to do more, but I know you're going to keep trying, but just know this. This is a season of life. It will come to an end and just be hyper, hyper attune to when you start hearing the sounds and the signs that this is, it's time to stop. And it would almost be a way to teach myself that when seasons come to an end, there are people that have a great superpower to just say, okay, time to move on. I think people who suffer don't know how to change and transition through seasons of life. There's a hyper successful, you know, financial advisor to a very high wealth net worth individuals that had it. There was a season of life and then there was probably a time to change where you realize I needed to go a different direction. But it's difficult to close that chapter and just be like, oh, it's really behind me. There's so much, I'm going to carry these lessons with me to hear or I long for that back, you know, when I could do that or, and that creates again, a lot of suffering. I'm in a season now. My kids are five and seven years old and this season is going to be, you know, finite, right? And what I got to do now is not what I'm going to do in five years. It's not what I'm going to do in 10 years. And so just to be able to say to myself, like, hey, look, this is a season you're in, you're doing awesome, you're doing great, don't stop. And it's not going to be forever. So recognize that this is a special time and there'll be a time to move on. And when it's time to move on, the next chapter is going to be even more beautiful, but it will look very different. So accept that and embrace it. And maybe that's, you know, that's as far as I might go with my teaching my younger self how to navigate a difficult or in a tense period of time. Marcus Philly, I got some really good news for you, brother. As good as the next chapter is. This one is pretty dang good as well. Thank you. You are an inspiration to so many. You are a great, great man. You're an amazing athlete. And all I see when I look at you is just someone who makes every single person around them better. I'm so proud of everything you've done. And I cannot wait to see exactly where the journey takes you. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us. We really appreciate you and we love you, brother. Thank you.