I Am Not Here For Me
I came to F3 for me… but I stayed because it was never about me.
When I first joined F3 Austin, I was looking for something.
Life was good. Great family. Stable work. Nothing was falling apart.
But I was coasting.
I wanted to get fitter. Lose some weight. Feel sharper. If I’m honest, I joined F3 for what I could get out of it.
I posted because it helped me.
I pushed hard because I wanted results.
If I skipped, the only person I felt like I disappointed was myself.
I even grabbed my first Q about a week and a half in. I remember Spike asking if I did that on purpose.
Oh, absolutely.
Give me the mic. Give me the cadence. I’m not exactly shy about being center stage. At the time, even leadership felt like it was still about me.
Then something shifted.
I became ComzQ..... more “voluntold” than called. Suddenly I wasn’t just attending workouts. I was responsible for communication, for connection, for the ecosystem of men showing up.
Around that time, a PAX from F3 Katy named Covenant was playing HALO (yes… the online video game, for those of us of a certain age). He was gaming with a guy named Steve Flores — now affectionately known to us as HammerTime.
HammerTime opened up about struggling in life.
Covenant did what F3 men do....he went searching. He looked up F3 in Austin and sent a message through our Facebook page.
By pure luck, I had taken a break from archiving Slack channels (IYKYN) and happened to check those messages. I was able to point HammerTime to his closest AO Sasquatch.
That one small moment mattered.
HammerTime showed up.
Legend has it he was skeptical. Fair. We all were at first. But he met a group of men at an ungodly hour, got in a workout, and more importantly got heard.
The PAX listened.
He came back.
Slowly, he started becoming the man, the husband, and the father he was meant to be.
I wasn’t there that first day. But I heard enough to know something.
This wasn’t just a workout group.
This could change lives.
And that’s when my mindset flipped.
It stopped being about “What’s in this for me?”
It became, “What’s in this for someone else?”
I made it my mission to keep finding men to show up for and men I’d want to show up for. Ironically, that probably helped me more than anything else.
But over time, I realized something even bigger.
I’m not just showing up for the guys beside me in the gloom.
I’m showing up for people I may never meet.
HammerTime’s wife later shared in a HIM Highlight that she felt lost unsure how to help her husband. She credited F3 and the men of this region with helping him shift back into being a better husband and father.
Let that sink in.
This isn’t about me.
It’s not even just about the men I post with.
It’s about the wife praying to get her husband back.
It’s about the kids looking for a father to look up to.
That’s why I show up.
That’s why 4:00am doesn’t suck.
The moment this becomes about more than you about someone else, maybe even someone you’ll never meet is the moment you start getting more out of it than you ever imagined.
I came to F3 for me.
But I stay because I am not here for me.
