About

People often ask why I’m building Lactic Fire, and the honest answer is that I couldn’t find anything that reflected my own experience.

The fitness industry is full of impressive people doing impressive things. There are athletes, bodybuilders, coaches and influencers who have achieved results that deserve admiration. I’ve never had a problem with any of that, and I don’t spend my time criticising an industry simply because it wasn’t built with me in mind. The reality is that much of it is aimed at people who are already well on their way. They have found their momentum, built their habits and discovered a way of living that supports the goals they have set for themselves.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to become one of those people.

Weight has been a problem for as long as I can remember. I was a chubby child who assumed things would sort themselves out eventually, an overweight teenager who believed there was always another opportunity around the corner, and then an overweight adult who kept telling himself that there was still plenty of time. The years passed more quickly than I expected. What once felt like a problem I would solve one day gradually became something that followed me through every stage of life, and before I really stopped to think about it I found myself in my mid-forties wondering how thirty years had passed while I was still fighting the same battle.

The strange thing is that a lack of knowledge was never the issue. If anything, I’ve probably spent far too much time learning about fitness, nutrition, psychology, habits and behaviour change. I’ve read books, listened to podcasts, watched documentaries and consumed enough self-improvement content to fill several lifetimes. Somewhere along the way I realised that knowledge and action are not the same thing. Most people know more than enough to improve their lives. The difficult part is applying that knowledge consistently when life becomes stressful, inconvenient, frustrating or exhausting.

That is a lesson I have learned over and over again.

In many ways Lactic Fire exists because I grew tired of listening to people who already had the answers. What I wanted to see was the middle of the story rather than the end. I wanted to see the difficult weeks, the failed attempts, the moments of doubt and the reality of trying to change after years of getting things wrong. Social media is full of transformation stories, but most of them begin once the transformation is already underway. What interested me was everything that happens before that point, when somebody is still trying to work out whether they can change at all.

The older I’ve become, the more important that question has become.

For a long time I thought I had unlimited time. If I didn’t lose weight this year, there was always next year. If I didn’t get fit in my thirties, there was always my forties. It is only recently that I’ve begun to appreciate the cost of carrying those assumptions for so long. Years of football played at a weight I shouldn’t have been carrying have left their mark. Old injuries have become less forgiving. Aches and pains that were once temporary have become regular companions. None of this is tragic, and none of it is unusual, but it does have a way of forcing an honest conversation with yourself.

The hardest part is not the physical reality. The hardest part is recognising how much time has been spent preparing to become the person you wanted to be rather than actually becoming that person.

There are plenty of moments I could point to when talking about what it feels like to be overweight. There are the jokes that people make without realising how hard they land. There are the jokes you make yourself because laughing first feels safer than admitting something hurt. There are clothes shops where you already know the answer before you walk through the door. There are rollercoasters you don’t fit on and photographs you don’t want to be in. None of those moments define a life, but they accumulate over the years and leave their mark in ways that are difficult to explain to people who have never experienced them.

Despite all of that, I don’t think this is really a story about weight. I think it’s a story about potential.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself is that I take far more satisfaction from finishing something than I do from succeeding at it. Success is strangely fleeting. I achieve something, enjoy it briefly and then immediately move on to whatever comes next. Finishing, however, feels different. Completing a task, honouring a commitment and seeing something through to the end creates a sense of satisfaction that stays with me much longer. Perhaps that is because I know how many unfinished projects sit behind me. Like many people, I have ideas I never fully pursued, plans I abandoned and ambitions that never became reality. Fear of failure has probably played a larger role in that than I would like to admit.

What I’ve come to realise is that failure was never the thing I should have been afraid of. The thing that genuinely worries me is reaching the end of my life knowing that I never gave myself the opportunity to become the person I was capable of becoming.

That idea sits at the centre of everything I am trying to do.

When people talk about getting older, there is often an assumption that the best years are behind them. I understand that feeling because I have it myself from time to time. The difference is that when I look back honestly, I don’t see the best years of my life. I see years that were often good, occasionally difficult and sometimes wasted. I see opportunities I didn’t take and standards I failed to maintain. If that is true, then there is no reason to believe the best years are behind me. In fact, there is every reason to believe they might still be ahead of me.

That is why I keep going.

Not because I think transformation is easy, but because I think it is worth attempting. Not because I have finally figured everything out, but because I haven’t. Not because I want to teach people from the finish line, but because I want to share what the journey looks like from the middle of it.

I believe strongly that most people are capable of more than they think they are. I don’t believe life owes us success, happiness or fulfilment, and I don’t believe there is a shortcut around hard work, sacrifice and personal responsibility. At the same time, I understand how easy it is to become trapped by your own habits, excuses and fears because I have spent much of my life wrestling with them myself. The challenge is not pretending those things don’t exist. The challenge is refusing to let them become your identity.

That is what Lactic Fire is really about.

It isn’t about becoming perfect. It isn’t about six-pack abs. It isn’t about creating another self-help platform filled with recycled advice and empty slogans.

It’s about proving that change remains possible, even after years of getting things wrong. It’s about recognising that the second half of your life does not have to be defined by the mistakes of the first. Most importantly, it’s about continuing to try, because after everything I have learned and everything I have struggled with, that may be the most valuable lesson of all.

As long as you have breath in your lungs, you can keep trying.

For me, that’s enough reason to keep going.