I’m finally in the house Steemit family! Please enjoy this introduction to my unique life of stories that include spy tales, bio-hacks, stock trading, fitness, and awesome life experiences. “it’s Juicy & all 100% true”

Warm greetings from the Sunshine state! I’m a man that believes that this life is to be lived and learning never stops. I was a division-I college football player turned Army soldier, turned intelligence analysts, turned Entrepreneurial bio-hacking fitness professional. It’s been an interesting first 40 years of life for me my friends. My joy for writing and adventure attracted me to Steemit. This seems like a very cool concept that is built to benefit everyone involved. I love to share knowledge as much as I enjoy learning it. Steemit looks like a social media platform best suited to facilitate and encourage both effectively. I’m excited to have the opportunity to provide value and learn from the Steemit community. I hope this introduction gives some insight into my experiences and expertise that could benefit the community. Don’t hesitate to ask me anything.

I grew up loving sports, competition and adventures. I fell in love with the game of football at the age of five, while watching Walter Payton, the Fridge and the Chicago Bears of the 80’s. The Super Bowl shuffle was the coolest! I spent my youth playing football, basketball, and track & field. I was born in Nashville, but lived in seven different places and attended seven different schools before high school. That’s a long story that I won’t get into at this time. I went to a small town high-school in Pensacola Florida focused on earning a scholarship to play football in college, but had very little exposure to college sports or knowledge about what it would take. I only knew that I had to performing on the field. I was fortunate to be recruited by Coach John Harbaugh after my 10th grade year “current head coach of the Baltimore Ravens”. Coach Harbaugh was coaching at the university of Cincinnati at the time, and really wanted me to play football for him and his defensive coordinator Rex Ryan. He was the first person to show me exactly what I had to do academically to qualify for a NCAA scholarship. I was very grateful for that and imitatively started focusing on making good grades for the first time in my life. To make a long story short; Coach Harbaugh took a job with the Philadelphia Eagles my senior year, and I took a full scholarship at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee Florida. I played four full years as a linebacker and was blessed to contribute to two conference championships, four playoff runs, and one HBCU division 1-AA national championship in 1998. I received a decent amount of interest from the NFL and was ranked as a top 25 linebackers in the country my senior year by CBS sports. Unfortunately, the red flags related to my torn hamstring and right rotator cuff caused me to move on from playing football. I graduated from FAMU with a bachelors degree in criminal justice in 2000.

I joined the Army in 2001 and spent the next four years serving my country all over the world. Pat Tillman joined a little bit after me. Going into the Army so soon after 911 was very interesting, and there were people from all walks of life joining around that time. I was in basic training with a guy who competed on the game show Jeopardy! I was trained to be an intelligence analyst, but spent a big chunk of my time fill what we call “the needs of the Army”. This included managing weapons as a brigade armorer, driving and managing official vehicles in Korea, supporting special forces search & rescue operations from the National Security Agency (NSA), or chasing drug traffickers across the Gulf of Mexico with the coast guard and “Joint Task Force South” in Key West, Florida.

I was honorably medically discharged in 2006 after three surgeries were done in an attempt repair my left foot, which was severely injured while on active duty in Korea. I was not experted to regain my ability to run, jump or walk for long distances after this injury and therefore, not deployable. This is the point in my life where I shifted my focus from seeking physical challenges to seeking things that challenge me intellectually and even spiritually. Things change when you suddenly lose the ability to be who you’ve always been at an age when most would be entering their physical prime. I was 24 years old when I suffer that injury and I’ve been fighting to get better ever since. Through accumulated knowledge and experience I’ve been rehabbing myself since then, learning as I go. I’m much more physically capable now, at the age of 39, than I was between 25 and 30. The knowledge I’ve gained since then about how to heal the body and exercise around limitations to achieve a high level of fitness has been priceless to me. This is also one of the reason’s I became a personal trainer. I want to be in a position to help people with the knowledge that has helped me over the years.

At the time I left active duty, I was living in Maryland near what we call the “beltway” in the “DMV”, which stands for DC, Maryland, and Virgina. My experience in the military along with my top secret security clearance made me a good candidate for jobs with all of the “3 letter agencies” within the beltway. These agencies include the NSA, DIA, CIA, ONI and others. I took an offer with the Office of Naval Intelligence ‘ONI’ in 2006. This is when I became a real Intelligence analyst. I worked as an analyst with ONI for the next seven years. I won’t go into details about the specific projects I worked on, but I will tell you that I published numerous high level reposts designed to help politicians, senior military officials, and special forces operatives make important decisions. The training I received was much more advanced than anything I did while on active duty. Combat operations, defensive driving & survival training with Navy Seals along with becoming a certified interrogator through the DIA training are just a few of the cool things I had the opportunity to do. I didn’t let my bad foot stand in the way to the extent I could control. I was involved in counter terrorism, counter drug trafficking, counter money laundering, Somalian pirate issues, and a few others. The biggest takeaways from my experience in this area was the development of advanced critical thinking skills, research and vetting techniques, and a unique understanding the physiological elements that drive the human psyche. I also gained a level of mastery in the skill of learning. Mastering the art of learning in the age of information may be the most powerful tool a human can have in my opinion. All of these skills can be applied to all areas of life and give me a justified confidence in anything I choose to pursue.

After completing a three year assignment in Jacksonville Florida, I decided not to return to the beltway and take a different direction in life. Over the previous four years I endured some major turmoil in my personal life while my professional life was thriving. My first wife and I separated after four years of marriage and had to short sell the house after the real estate crash of 2008. I paid $290k for this house in 2005 and the value dropped to $150k after the crash. This helped me understand why one should not trust the media and do your own research on things that are important. Up until that point everyone always said that a house always gains value and never loses it. We learned in 2008 how untrue that really was.

During the separation, my first wife suddenly passed away due to a stroke at age 32 while still serving on active duty in the Army, stationed in Texas. We were both tied to our jobs, which was a part of the reason for the separation. I was at her side at the hospital with her mother as things went south and her life ended. Physical life is a fragile thing that should never be taken for granted. The young and the strong die just like the old and weak. That was a tough few years that stated with separation, to the housing crash, to my best friend from the army getting shot and killed in the streets of Baltimore, to my wife's sudden stroke and eventual death. I learned my lessons and had to move on because as long as I have breath it is my duty to do everything I can not to waste it.

I later remarried and vowed to always put the well being of my household over any job. My wife is a beautiful strong women with a strong faith and plays the violin professionally. She was there for me during tough times and I was there for her during some very tough times for her. Shortly after the marriage, she began having life-threatening health issues that caused her to have multiple visits to the ICU. Taking care of her was a big part of the reason I decided not to return to the beltway. I decided to pursue a path that would allow me to help people directly, be an entrepreneur and be there for my wife.

I initially started day trading on the stock market from my home office and exploring other investment opportunities. My focus was on small cap companies in hot sectors. My first stocks were in the energy sector that included oil exploration and natural gas companies. I later migrated to precious metal stocks, 3D printing, and the new cannabis related companies as talk of legalization started to heat up the sector. I would usually wake up a few hours before the market opened and do research as I plan my moves for the day. This was a great educational experience. I learned how to evaluate a company, how the market works, and the different motives CEO’s have related to the value of being a publicly traded company. I was a full time trader for about six month and continued to swing trade for a few months after that. It was really exciting during my first few months while the cannabis sector caught fire. Everybody was making money and everybody was an overnight expert. It had the feel of a movie called “The Wolf of Wall Street”, and even lead to the emergence of social media characters like “The Wolf of Weed Street”. Yes, that is a real person. Traders were having a ball and twitter was highly entertaining with all the new penny stock guru’s. I was able to turn a $10k initial investment into over $140k in only a few months. $SPLI was a big winner for me along with a few others. Things slowed down as the SEC stepped in and started putting halts on some of these companies and scaring investors away from this sector. I gradually extracted my returns as cleared the market for the most part. It turns out that the free-market is not as free as we were lead to believe.

While trading stocks, I was also looking into another investment. Rohan Marley “son of the great legend of reggae Bob Marley” started a company called Marley Coffee. He inherited the Marley family farm land located on the famous Blue Mountains of Jamaica, which are known for producing some of the best coffee in the world. Marley Coffee sources organic beans grown on the Marley farm and other locations like Ethiopia. Rohan’s company partnered with a company that builds cutting edge vending machines of all kinds. I became the first owner of a Marley Coffee 360 Kiosk in the southeast region of the United States. This Kiosk was able to ground whole Marley Coffee beans and brew one cup at a time per order. It was the best tasting coffee you will ever get from a machine. Unfortunately, I recently had to retire the kiosk because of a combination of bad technical support from the vending machine company, that eventually went out of business, and the lack of a proper location for it in Jacksonville. It’s a shame because it had a lot of potential provided you have a good location and excellent technical support. I had it setup in a local mall for around two years but the profits were not out pacing the cost at a justifiable margin. This was also a good learning experience. Every venture doesn’t have to be a glowing success to be a valuable experience worth having.

A local story was done on this. Check it out here. https://www.jaxrestaurantreviews.com/coffee-2/marley-coffee-sustainable-organic-coffee-robot-vending-machine/

I was also working on completing a two year degree program in personal training at this time. I started this program with in a couple months of my 4th and last foot surgery followed by an emergency gall bladder surgery. I couldn’t workout at all during the first couple months of this program, but I had a gaol to be in my best physical shape by the end of this two year program. This period of time ended up being a great time of learning and putting new knowledge to practice on my own body. Training my body was not new to me. I’ve been training myself and others since I was in high school; however, this was an opportunity to make it official with a degree and nationally recognized certification. By the time I successfully completed this program, I was also certified by the National Association of Sports Medicine “NASM” and the American Council on Exercise “ACE”. I was working as one of the lead trainer with leading athletic training facility in Jacksonville called SET Performance. I eventually became their general manager and program designer while continuing to training professional athletes, youth, and group fitness classes. I gained a ton of valuable experience with SET Performance and will always be grateful for that.

I am currently working independently as a personal trainer in-person and online through my website while taking classes full-time at Jacksonville University towards a masters degree in kinesiology and possibly a doctorate. I love the challenge of learning new things that I can use to provide value to others. I’m a much better student now, than I was 20 years ago in college. I may have reached my physical peak many years ago, but my mental game is only getting stronger as I age like fine wine or cheese. I am very thankful for that considering the numerous concussions and traumatic events I’ve had in my life. This leads me to the next topic.

See more about my personal training business here: www.coachcola.com

The term bio-hacker is a relatively new one, but I have essentially been one for as long as I can remember. I really became one after the doctors told me that I would never walk again with out pain and prescribed me a cane for walking at the age of 25. I figured that I could either take the “experts” word for it and live a crippled life on pain killers; or I could take the responsibility for my health into my own hands and seek the answers I needed. I actually became allergic to anti-inflammatory drugs, which was another reason I had to explore the so called alternative approach. I changed the way I ate and even thought about food. I started walking barefoot on the beach to rebuild the muscles of my inner foot contrary to the doctors advice. I used cleanses, fasting, juicing, herbs, colloidal mineral supplements, THC & CBD, essential oils, message, cryo-theropy, float tanks, and even the ketogenic diet. I’ve even tried a few experimental cognitive enhancing nootropics along with a little 1p-LSD microdosing. These are just a few of the alternative methods I’ve tested on myself. This process involved lots of research and careful planning. I am convinced that I’ve benefited greatly from most of these methods and they have also lead to my wife regaining her health. Through these approaches I’m been able to restore mobility to my shoulder that was once frozen, amaze doctors at how well I can move about given the damage that was done to my foot, and achieve a level of physical strength that surpasses what I had as a college football linebacker. I also have better brain function at age 39 than I ever did at any earlier age. The truths that I’ve learned over the years about what the human body is capable of and how to nurture it with nature has fueled my passion to help others they may be discouraged by a hopeless medical diagnosis.

I hope this introduction to my life was a good read for you? This is a broad brush picture of my life and experiences designed to give you an exclusive look into some of the events that shaped the man that is Anthony Cola, aka Colaman47, aka Coach Cola. I’ll be making more post in the future about health ans fitness tips, life hacks and anything else I think may be of value. I’m an open book so feel free to ask me anything. I’m always up to something new and pushing for the next level.

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