My parents have four boys I’m three out of four the last is six years younger than me, there is a two year gap between my two older brothers and myself. We grew up in suburban Ct. we lived near a lake with a lot of woods and trails, all the kids in the neighborhood hung out there, playing hide and seek fishing we all learned how to swim in that lake, building fires to cook the fish we caught. Ice skating during the winter months thru all of our childhood all of our parents were nowhere near us. We were pre-teens with an abundance of imagination and completely self sufficient, truly the best of times. As we were entering our teens and our bodies were changing along with our chemistry the girls who were our friends, pals, BFFs suddenly became attractive in a I want to bang you kind of way. No one in my family ever had “the talk” and it wasn’t taught in schools yet. We had home economics and that was as close as we would get to sex education. Basically I learned about sex on the streets where no one was telling the truth the girls were still virgins and the boys were man whores. I was 21 before I even got an opportunity, at 18 I went from an overweight high school kid to a much leaner smarter young adult. I was so sick of how I looked and felt I made up my mind to do something about it. Exercise and physical fitness was just becoming a thing in the country and society, but I knew very little but I was determined to shed all this fat and be skinny. The first thing was controlling my diet which really wasn’t that hard at that age, the next was activity I started running mostly because I used to see an older man running by our house. Progress was quick within weeks I was dropping weight, that summer I went from 205lbs to 155lbs and felt like a new person. That winter I took up karate, because I was never really a team player karate was perfect it’s me against myself and if I wanted to be better I was the only one to make that happen. It was the 80s and Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris were the two guys making martial arts awesome. For years myself and some friends fought at an entry level just under amateur level. Many nights after the gym I was going home with 2 black eyes and some bruises only to have to listen to my mother lecture me.