Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - 196 | wild stories pt 5: olympic and NFL life-altering moments, broken bones and marathon tribulations

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

In this episode, we continue our new series where we tell our wildest stories! In part 5 we discuss the life changing moments that led shawn to the olympics, and andrew to his college and NFL career. We also share the moment shawn broke her toe while 9 months pregnant with Drew and all the crazy moments in between. It's crazy to think how many moments can ultimately ripple and change the course of your entire life. We love reflecting back on these and have vlogged so many of these chapters so check out our youtube channel to see more! Leave a comment below if you're enjoying this series and tell us one of your wild stories!! We love hearing from you guys and don't forget to follow along @couplethingspod on Instagram! Love, Shawn & Andrew Follow My Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/ShawnJohnson Follow My Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnjohnson Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/ShawnJohnson Follow Andrew’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/AndrewDEast Andrew’s Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewdeast?lang=en Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/AndrewDEast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. What's up, everybody. Welcome back to a couple things with Sean and Andrew podcast all about couples and the things they go through. I'm getting noticeably more

pregnant. Welcome back to I can't even tell baby yeah I can't even tell I can't I also can't believe we're rolling live right now you just kind of jumped into this yeah you can also tell I'm getting noticeably more pregnant not by size babe but by attitude standard of um dress yes fashion yeah I think you look great my standard just starts plummeting

towards the end what are you going for now if it's not looks it's um just straight comfort that's great the easiest transition into bed well you look beautiful regardless babe thanks babe welcome back to another episode thank you

I appreciate that got the beard going on first time ever excited about it it's been going on it's been going strong here for a while i've been i'm going to go with it i'm going to be santa claus this year welcome back to another episode of wild stories with sean and andrew where we are just on the on the process in the journey in the process and on the journey of documenting some of our weirder experiences in life and a lot of people get giggles or maybe slightly jarred from some of the stories that we've shared

and also the feedback has been actually can I just read some of these comments because a lot of people are like wow these are really just stories about Andrew doing making bad life choices which I mean it kind of sums it up to be honest so first of all

shout out to everyone who's been watching glad you guys are enjoying this if you haven't yet please subscribe follow wherever you live listen to podcast comment um the more comments the better because it gives us more things to talk about first of all a lot of people said that they had the same experience with education as you did uh crystal shimmelman said that she had a similar experience as you which is crazy yeah um let's see mary lew said that she's 65 years old she started college when she was 18 then she went back to school

to take online classes love that um we also mispronounced one check said that we were mispronounced Kaibab. It's Kaibabab. Kibab. Yeah. It just goes to show we had no business being on the Grand Canyon slope side. Yes. Honestly, this is just a random collection of our stories. Sean's going to curate our first story for today.

Drum roll, please. Let's just start with the Boston Marathon because that one was fun. Oh, for who? Both of us. Okay, so we had the opportunity to work with Cliff Bar, which is like a dream come true my dad grew up playing football yeah actually my grandpa was not into sports at all okay he was an academic he was like the dean of iPUI in indianapolis he used to uh didn't we didn't he become a professor at stanford um he went to stanford i don't know if he was a professor i should double check you should double check that but he was also a moderator for like presidential debates the guy was top notch anyway education kind of took him from uh poverty to like

living a, you know, life with kids and they had a healthy family life. It was great. So he thought that was like the only route. So my dad comes along and he's interested in sports. My grandpa was not really excited about it. But my dad played football. After he played football, he was doing Iron Man triathlons and stuff and was like just really into it. So my, my dad set this whole tone for endurance sports. Yeah. Of which I have no jeans. associated with this. I have no endurance. That is the most

blatantly false statement. You and your brothers have a cardiac threshold that I have never seen before. Of course, your oldest brother has like the most insane ability for endurance

because he was a cyclist. I appreciate you saying that, but I don't know if it's true. But what I was going with that is we were always larger people doing endurance sports. My dad even created Team Clydesdale, which if you are in the like marathon triathlon world, you'll show up and there's like a Clydesdale division. It's a legitimate like USA triathlon division now, which is what?

It's crazy. So because a lot of people that do endurance, you're going to like, you just naturally lose weight or naturally smaller people. So if you're above 200 pounds, there's this whole division called the Clydesdale division for you. We've always been that. Sean is way more of just generally like an athlete than us so we worked with Cliff Bar and that was a big deal because it was always like Cliff Bar was it's it's the brand it is the brand

in this world I feel like it's similar to like a Red Bull in the sense of like they're so heavily involved in so many athletic events that it's it's such an honor to be affiliated with them so he signed a partnership with Cliff Bar and part of this partnership was every year they had charity spots and the Boston Marathon

and the very first year that we signed with them we got to go watch the Boston Marathon and create content and just like talk about it and then the second year they gave us one of their charity spots they gave me a charity spot yeah and it was going to be you know

Sean Johnson runs the Boston Marathon which has been on my bucket list forever Again, if you know, the Boston Marathon is like really hard to qualify for. You have to run, I think, a sub three-hour marathon just around there if you're a male. And up until that point, I had done a lot of partnership work with Nike and I had ran 13 half marathons for Nike. And I loved all of them. But never did I cross the finish line and be like, oh, I can do this again right now. So Sean's into it.

She's good at it. She's trained for it. And here I am in the supportive role, like, you got this, babe. I'm so excited to watch you do this and, you know, accomplish this big goal. And it was three months probably. Before. Three months before the Boston Marathon. Surprise.

I got pregnant. Which was a surprise because if you guys know our story, we were coming off miscarriage. We weren't sure when we were going to start trying again. We thought it would take a long time. It had been taking a long time. So it was a surprise. We were trying, but naively didn't think it would happen before the race. We just thought it would take a while.

So we're in this position where we're working with like this top-notch brand. You want to make sure that they're happy. They've been pushing out all this like marketing material that I'm going to be racing. Articles and everything. And the solution that I think Sean came up with. Thank you so much. Yes, baby. Was.

How about Andrew runs for me? It'll be great. Content, I'll be pregnant. What a great idea. I mean, people usually train for marathons on maybe like a six-month training cycle. So I had three months to get onboarded here. I'm also concurrently playing with the Washington football team. Was it Washington or was it?

Yeah, it was. It was Washington. And so in the NFL, they have these weight thresholds. You're kind of assigned to weight based off your position. So like, O-Lyman usually weigh over 300 pounds, quarterback. they don't really have a weight restriction on but for my position long snapper they said you need to weigh

245 pounds and if you show up which is heavy for you yeah and the heavier the better so and if you show up beneath that weight then they'll fine you the NFL like allows these weight fines it was something like

$500 or $1,000 a pound per pound guys so I naturally probably weigh 230 pounds NFL weren't at me at 245, and with marathons, it's kind of the lighter, the better. And the way the schedule worked out is the Boston Marathon was on April 16th. 16th our anniversary. My first day of training with the Washington football team was April 17th. April 17th, the next day.

So I'm doing these trainings. I'm like pretty disciplined with it. But my strategy was in order to not lose so much weight that I couldn't reggae. gain it the next day, I was not going to do the long run. So usually you'd work up to like a 22-mile run in training and show up and do the marathon. I think your longest run is 10 miles. No, I did, I did, I did the 13.1. I did a half marathon.

And you did all of it on the treadmill. On the treadmill. Yes. Yes. So I'm doing these runs. I'm feeling good. Yep. I'm running 13.1.

Yep. Feeling good. Like, this is going to be. take not an issue my goal was to run a sub four-hour marathon um and i show up that day there'd been a lot of press around this too since sean was out there so there's people on the course with signs like go sean andrew or you got this andrew like every mile there was someone for and so the race starts and you're like you're prepared you're feeling good well you're as prepared it is you know and i because of the position we're in with cliff bar and the boston marathon

we have access to a car in back roads that allows us to go see andra every single mile marker which is wild it was so cool but i also had like all the apps and stuff and i was tracking him and i was like dude is crushing it you were like seven minute mile seven minute mile seven minute mile i would go to the mile marker i'd see him cross it i'd be so excited sean the the group they put me in to run with was all professional runners so scott jurek who wrote a book on running he did the whole appellation trail there was like some of these best athletes in the world that do ultramarathons yeah are in my group running so they're they're trying to help pace me yes but i'm antsy i'm excited i'm also trying to flex a little bit

You were put in that group because they were protecting you. They were pacing you, giving you the professional, like, assistance you needed to get through it. And I shot myself in the foot because we came out too hot, is the moral of story. And sure enough, I'm running a strong pace for the first 13.1 miles. But as soon as the 14th mile comes around, Sean starts checking my splits. and slowly I just start deteriorating. And my time, I'm added like 30 seconds per mile pace. And then, so it was around this time where it got trickier and trickier with the car

to try to hit every mile marker. And no offense, wait, but your pace started becoming like super inconsistent. So we didn't know where I was going to be. Yeah. And I remember we got to mile, what was it, 18? I think it was 18. or 19 and by this time you're running

like a 10 minute pace and so we're standing there waiting and it doesn't like fully track through the Boston like through the Boston Marathon there's little glitches of places where like you lose like the full tracing on your map and we lost your tracing

and it was like 18 minutes thank you so much for reminding me I took a screenshot of the splits and I was like I want to put them on here Is he alive? Is he at a medical tent? What's happened?

Like, we were starting to freak out a little bit. So we start out, I start out on the course. I'm a high-fiving all these people that are out here. They're like, Andrew, you got this. It's so fun. And then by mile 18, I was literally hiding my face from anyone. Try to walk on the other side of the road so they wouldn't recognize me. I saw you coming in and you were walking and like head slung.

And I was like, oh, no. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain. and when I set my mind to something usually I'm able to grind through it and persevere. The marathon, that marathon was one of the only times in my life where I was not sure

that I could physically do. I'm at mile 25 and there's 1.2 miles left. In any other situation, I'm like, oh, that's nothing. Yeah. I can easily do that. And sure not, like the home stretch

of the Boston Marathon is this epic strip. It's so amazing. Is it called Boyle Street? I forget. Anyway, it's iconic and it's packed with people and in my mind, I'm thinking, I'm going to run this last stretch because I was walking quite a bit and I physically couldn't do it. I was just walking the whole time because I was in such physical pain. But we finished.

You finished. I did a kind of a lame cartwheel across the line. I was impressed that you didn't collapse. Well, what happened after that though? So this is where it got even crazier. after he crossed the finish line. So I kind of had all these things planned anyways, but as I saw him throughout the race,

I was like, okay, I need to put all measures in place to help him because he has to report to camp the next day. Thank goodness. And has to do like full workouts and weight room and all these things. So as soon as he crossed the finish line, he had a five-hour window, I think, before you had to be at the airport to catch your flight

to make it to camp on time and literally by the time you cross the finish line it takes probably an hour to like kind of process like get out of all the chaos and the security and everything

so you meet back at the hotel at the hotel in our room I have waiting a doctor someone to administer an IV someone to like look you over make sure you like check your vitals like everything she had hooked up an ice bath for me i had an ice bath ready i had food ready of all varying types and i was like this is perfect this is basically going to be like rehab 101 we're going to come in here we're just going to like throw you in the ice bath set up an IV have the doctor look you over especially going

into camp the next day he was going to have to go through physicals with another doctor so i wanted to make sure you were all set and clear And he gets into the room and he basically, the doctors are like waiting for him. And you basically like fold over onto the bed and pass out. And I was like, baby, you have to get into the ice bath. Like don't, you cannot let your muscles just like,

whatever, you have to get into ice bath. And you were so pissed. You were like, I'm not doing any of this stuff. And I was like, stop being a baby. Get in the freaking ice bath. Sean, you're so sympathetic. Thank you. So I got on the ice path for maybe five seconds, and I had to get out.

I felt worse during the Grand Canyon. If you want to listen to that story, I think it's in part two wild stories. But I felt pretty bad after the marathon. To the point, I just wanted to take a nap and fall asleep. So I did. I just laid on the bed. Sean had an IV in every arm, I think. Yeah.

And you had gotten all this food. I was not hungry because I felt so weird. You were so depleted. But I'll tell you what, you hooked up those IVs. As soon as those were done, I went. from being a zombie yeah just totally out of it to like I could have ran another marathon dude I was ready to go I don't know what they put in that stuff said you were so depleted I mean it was all it there was no like magic juice in there it was just electrolytes and stuff it was

we had to adhere to the NFL standards and like everything but um the doctors were like he's in rough shape but I landed in DC I took an ice bath took a bunch of Advil I ate like three pizzas that night because you had to get your weight back up pizzas always would just pack on the weight for me artificially before i would do these NFL legs um and then i'll never forget i showed up the next day nobody knew nobody knew what i did which is great that was the plan and i snapped and performed really well that day but didn't you have to squat wasn't the first weight no workout squat that would have been sober at all but they took our body comp too usually i'm like 14% body fat and I was 8 they were like what did you do in the offseason it is like well I just

I just dehydrated myself and how can he be 8% body fat but then also be up to 2.45 this is like the fourth story we've told that is a strong indicator of why I didn't make the NFL in retrospect there's no chance I was ever going to have that as my career I would much rather do these exciting things than than playing the NFL for 15 years you know yeah Okay, so I have two more stories that I want to try to get through with this episode. We've been telling you a lot of like self-deprecating funny ones. Wait, we didn't close out that last story. One second.

I go to my first day of training camp and Sean wanted to celebrate our anniversary in New York City. So we, I go through practice. Well, we had a work thing that we had to do in New York City. We were, uh, the long shot, the movie, we were going to the premiere of, which was awesome. You should watch it if you haven't. So I go to my first day of practice. We get out at maybe one o'clock. jump on a plane back to New York, and we meet up in New York City Times Square. I'll never forget this

clip. She would shot dying laughing as I'm running up to her with peg legs. And you could barely walk. And we had a great anniversary. It was really great. And then we split ways again. Yeah. And we did vlog all that, but that's coming to behind the scenes. Life, the NFL. This episode is brought to you by Defender. With its 626 horsepower twin-turbo V8 engine, the defender, Octa, is taking on the Dakar rally. The ultimate off-road challenge. Learn more at landrover.ca. It's Rona Week. Now until Wednesday, rain or shine, you can always be building yourself a better summer. So head on over to Rona and save 35% on cans of 3.78-liter

Rona interior paint. Give that room you keep saying needs a fresh coat of paint, A fresh coat of paint. Build it right, build it Rona. Conditions apply, details in store, and more offers at rona.ca. We sell buckets, too. Okay, so two stories I wanted to get through, just to kind of give different vibes. Okay, we'll start with Jim flooding.

Wow, okay, let's take you back to 2008. Really? It's a crazy story. It is a crazy story. Okay, 2008. This is going to be very one-sided. Sorry, guys. 2008, I was two weeks out from Olympic trials. So this was like final stretch, getting ready to head to trials.

From trials, the team would be selected. We would fly straight to Beijing, China. I am from Des Moines, Iowa, if you guys didn't know that. And two weeks before these Olympic trials, I'm like grinding in the gym. We're basically trying to finesse like the final. little things headed into trials but the last two weeks are very important

you can't just like coasts you're not just not training or anything you're you're grinding and exactly at that two week marker we had a horrible horrible storm hit Des Moines Iowa where like the whole city

flooded it was it was devastating to a lot of people and in this flood it actually hit our gym overnight our gymnastics gym and it like took our whole gym so it was

five feet of water through the whole gym ruined every piece of equipment shut our gym down and I remember it was in the middle of the night I was like oblivious

again I was living in like this bubble but I was completely oblivious at the time I was dating this guy named Johnny Johnny Johnny and And I remember getting like a text from him late at night.

It was like 9 or 10 p.m. maybe. And I was like, one, it was odd for him to text me that late, especially given my career, we had routines. He knew I went to bed at like eight, whatever. And he was like texting or calling and he's like, I'm headed to your gym or like I'm at your gym. It's a weird text to get. It's a very weird text.

I was like, I don't understand. What, what are you doing? Are you vandalizing my gym or something? Like, what's happening? He's like, no, we're sandbagging it as the storm is coming in really bad. I was like, what? So I ended up driving to the gym with permission from my parents in the middle of the night. And there were hundreds of people from the community.

Hundreds. At our gym. bringing in sandbags from all over the city to try to protect our gym from being flooded so it hadn't flooded yet which was wild it was such a wild thing to see because for context if you think about a gymnastics gym you're talking a floor which is almost a carpet like texture

that shouldn't be wet you got these foam pits that are foam and shouldn't be wet you have all this leather stuff that gets really slippery when it gets wet and it's not a it's not a friendly place for water. But it was it was kind of like this sOS call that my my coach had sent out to our whole gym. He was like if anybody's available please come help like save his gym. And so there are hundreds of people there that night sandbagging and we got to a point where like the storm started to come in so everybody had to leave. I went home, chow was not happy that I was there that

night. He was like you should be in bed. I was like chow. I'm not going to be like a selfish person just sleeping while everybody does this. And I remember waking up early the next morning and it's kind of like that pit in your stomach of like okay what happened and i remember i jumped in my car drove down to the gym couldn't get like within a half mile of it because it the streets were so flooded and you just kind of knew um and i remember talking to my dad and talking my parents and calling chow and the gym was five feet underwater people were taking canoes all the way to the gym trying to like salvage things from the gym memories like framed pictures that chow had trophies trying to salvage like any equipment because gymnastics equipment is also very very expensive

and i remember it being one of those moments where like i didn't know what to think of it at the time it wasn't a huge deal and i i need to paint this picture carefully because there were so many people who lost their homes and lost like their livelihood. There were bigger issues, yeah. Yeah. It was a gymnastics gym. Yes, it was my coach who's like my second dad. It was his livelihood.

It was his career. But we are all still very lucky that we didn't lose our homes, but so many people did. And I remember I had training that day and I was like, what do we do? This is kind of weird. And we ended up driving down to Iowa State. university every single day and we would train there for about a week and in the course of week i'm skipping over a lot of things um the governor of iowa set out he sent out like this kind of sOS request and within 24 hours the water level started to subside they had dammed up

like the river they had kind of gotten a lot of the water out of the city but the governor had sent thousands of people to chow's gymnastics because i use this lightly but like because sean johnson from demoyne i had to make it to olympic trials i was a special place if you think about it there's one just statistically not as many people in iowa as there are other places and also statistically fewer people that go out onto this world stage i mean jack johnson is a golfer ashther dan gable kurt warner dan gable it's a pretty small list and you have sean who's quite literally been like america's sweetheart right there in the west des Moines she's about to accomplish your world champion at that point doing big things and iowa is so

special in the sense of community that it has and it's pretty amazing so continue so for that week i think it was five days i drove down to iowa state and i um would train there in the evening but during the day i would drive down to chows like our our the flooded chows and there would just be like at any given moment probably 500 people there bailing water stripping the gym rebuilding the gym like carpenters from all over the state the governor was there almost every day Coca-Cola was shipping in semi-trucks full of brand new equipment hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and there were these like bright red Coca-Cola semis that would just drive in load up all of like the ruined stuff unload the new stuff

there would be kids that had no affiliation to Chows that were like helping repaint and rebuild and it was out of a movie and I think again I was living in such a bubble that I was trying not to allow myself to like feel that

pressure but there is this sense of like there is no way on earth I could ever repay you for what it is our entire state is doing right now and within five days you guys

they rebuilt our entire gym from the ground up we had all new equipment i was training on day five back in chow's gymnastics you had been going to iowa state so i'd been driving down to iowa state with chow at night and we would train for like three hours wow and then on day five he's like it's good enough like i was i was surrounded i remember there was this one moment where i was practicing my like Olympic bar routine and I wish I had a picture but our bars like backed up to this massive foam pit right

and it like basically the end of the mat touched the beginning of the pit which is usually super safe because it's just filled with foam but at this time on day five when I came back to the gym to train I'm like on these bars and it's nothing but a 10 foot drop of concrete

like there's nothing in there and there's carpenters down on the bottom like rebuilding it and there's firefighters like going through codes and stuff walking through the building as I'm casually doing my Olympic bar routine in the back corner of this gym

but I just will never forget driving up to this gym and seeing the governor the mayor the CEO of Coca-Cola high V semis the president of Hivey, the president of Wells Fargo. They're all standing in the parking lot, like, asking Chow, what do you need from us?

I love that story. It gives me chills every time I hear it. It's so wild. I love it for a couple of reasons. One is because it shows the effect that you have on people, which is really cool. And I still almost tear up when I see Sean meet someone on the street and they say, say you're my idol, thank you so much for inspiring me and getting me through the hard times of middle school or whatever, and they'll break down crying. Yeah. And you have this effect of

being able to rally people, which makes me so proud as a husband. But two, the sense of community that was displayed makes me think of the house fire in my situation. And moments like that where it's less than an ideal situation, but there's this glimmer of beauty and unity that you never get to see otherwise. But then three, it shows that whatever success you've had or I've had or any of us have had,

it's built on the shoulders of so many other people putting things in place for us or making sacrifices. And it's, I don't know. I just love that story. It was such a beautiful experience. It was such a hard experience for me because I felt so conflicted. There were so many times where I would come up to the gym during the day.

I had taken off school. It was getting ready for trials, whatever. And I would be like, give me a job. Like, assign me one of these roles. What am I doing? And everybody would be like, go home. You're not supposed to be here. And it was just such this, like, guilt-ridden feeling of,

you're doing this so we can go perform so we can represent Des Moines I'm not just going to go lay in bed and rest I can't do that but then it was also so rewarding to be able to go to Olympic trials and win and be able to say there is no way I would be here if it weren't for

Des Moines, Iowa my community, my home, my people Like I would not have been there Because again, think about the perfection That is required from gymnastics That type of perfection requires so many reps So many fine tunings on the home stretch The weeks before

And it couldn't happen without these people No, it was so cool Anyways Okay, so TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey From startup to growing and managing your business That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to

entrepreneurs no matter the stage of business you're in visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager let me tell you story about how I ended up at Vanderbilt which is ultimately the reason that Sean and I met think about that I'm this high school player out of Indiana my high school team was not good there had been one player that went to play D1 college football in the past like eight years nobody really knew like we were a two and ten team not good and I have this dream that I was going to play D1 football like my dad did he played at Purdue and I grew up putting on his helmet walking around the house

that was all I wanted to do I was going to play at any D1 school that wanted me and so my coaches weren't helping me out my talent wasn't really helping me out I was not this outstanding athlete like Sean and not true and so I had done everything I could think of emailed every single D1 special teams coach

made a list of their email addresses sent out my link to my tape that's what ultimately got me into YouTube actually was uploading my football tape sent them like this you know letter about how much it meant to me. I would go to all these summer camps. And one of the camps I went to is Vanderbilt. And I'll never forget the coach there, Warren Beelin, loved me. Yeah,

no, I, dude, these people change my life. And I go, they couldn't offer me a scholarship because they were fully booked. They had already offered all their scholarships they had available. So signing day comes and goes, my senior year, which is this day we're asking. We're asking. athletes decide like make this big decision you know they'll pull on a hat and say I'm going to Florida or I'm going to Tennessee and it's always on ESPN it's a big deal it's usually the last day that you have to decide you know if you if you're highly recruited athlete that's when you make your decision so I had no offers thus didn't make a decision and I was going to go play D3 football at Wheaton college which is where my brother JD was playing as a walk-on as a

well D3 doesn't do scholarship So, yes. Princeton had also looked at me and had interest, but they had just had a coaching change. The guy's name was Bob something or other. And so, like, they weren't very communicative. I didn't feel like I was wanted there and wasn't excited about it.

So I was kind of discouraged. Until I get a call, while I'm up in my room doing homework, it was the first week of April, which at this point, all these normal students who don't play sports have used. usually already decided where they're going to school, too. And I get a call from Bobby Johnson, who's a head coach at Vanderbilt, who I hadn't heard from in months, like since the last summer.

And he said, Andrew, we got a scholarship spot open, and we want you to take it. And I was like, what? What do you mean? You're already giving them all away. Like, how do you have an extra one? He's like, we don't have an extra one. One of our highest rate of recruits, his name is Ray John Bennett. like one of the best recruits Vanderbilt had ever gotten.

He was running back out of Atlanta, had a handicapped little brother and a mom who was dating someone. And this boyfriend broke into the house with a gun and started shooting around. And Rajan jumped in front of his handicapped little brother to save him and took a bullet for him and died. It was this big headline story.

And because this happened, they had an extra scholarship spot for me that they wanted me to take. And it was this conflict of emotions because... And Bobby Johnson told you this story on the phone call. Yes. Yes. And this had been like a week or two maybe after the story came out.

But on the one hand, it's my dream come true, right? And it was everything I ever wanted, but under such terrible circumstances. So I accept the offer. It's a dream come true. And show up to campus. And really didn't feel like I ever belonged because, one, I felt like I got there on a fluke, two, everyone else in my class and I already met each other. Three, when I got there, the coach who had just offered me a scholarship, Bobby Johnson retired. So we had this other coach.

I tore my hamstring. And there was like this whole weird, it was like rocky start at Vanderbilt. But I would always refer back to Rajan and how I got there. and I felt like I owed him something that I needed to apply to my experience. But he wrote this essay that always provided inspiration for me. And he said this. He said, my drive cannot be stopped or even slowed down because every obstacle has a way around it. Every day I become stronger from the weights physically, from the books mentally, and from life emotionally.

There is no limit to my strength. And at the end of the day, I want to be known as the strongest. He talks about God in this essay, and that's just a short paragraph, but that really helped me through this rocky time at a place that he should have been at. And we walked out of there ultimately as a winningest class in Vanderbilt history. I did have four coaches in five years.

You were one of the captains two years in a row as a long snapper. Yeah. Which is unheard of. I think about the parallels too. I feel like in my faith, there's something there. I haven't been able to fully dial in, but it's like I only had this opportunity or access to this good life experience because someone made a huge sacrifice.

Lost their life, right? I don't know. I just think about that. And I wanted to tell the story because it means a lot to me. and I always like to pay Rejean homage. I never got to meet the guy. I've met his mom, but I just feel like... She does meet his mom?

Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah. They would do like memorial services. Anyway, so it's like, as special to me. And I think about everything that that changed, we're in Nashville now because of Vanderbilt.

I met you because of Vanderbilt. And it's just wild, these ripple effects that life has. I remember coming in to Vandy, to football, your whole story early on when we were starting dating and I remember thinking I knew enough about football to know like I don't want to say reputations or expectations on different positions and different like teams but to see the impact you had on your team as a long snapper

was so cool and even talking to coach Franklin these days he still makes a little he still makes it back for weddings and it's this group of you there's like five of you who just led this team for so many years and we're such amazing role models and it's just really cool to see like you felt like you had this debt hanging over your head your whole college career but like you stepped up to it and it was really really special to witness i appreciate that bet yeah uh so we've logged this if you guys haven't seen the vlog story go watch it i was pregnant with drew i was two weeks out of our c-section our induction date and our neighbor next door had just had her baby we were a couple weeks apart and they also had just gotten a new puppy and she invited us over to come meet

the puppy come meet the baby come hang out we walked over we're hanging out on the back patio We were holding the baby for a while, all these things. She had made chili. Her and Andrew go in to get chili. I'm super pregnant. And as they're like walking inside to get chili, I walk out onto the patio,

which has like this stone wall that's probably three feet tall. Yeah. And it's like on top of the stone wall is their yard. So it's kind of like built up in the puppies out there and I'm like calling Bo. And I'm like, Bo, come here.

And he comes running. He's a door. horrible mind you at the moment i currently don't have shoes on i'm just walking around barefoot which is my mo the puppy comes sprinting he stops like hard on the wall which is made of like cinder blocks basically he dislodges a cinder block on the top level and it falls directly on my big toe like square and it was just immediate shock because i was like my toe is attached from my body. I have never been so scared in my life just to look down because I really didn't think

my toe was attached anymore. I thought it was gone. I thought I was going to see just bloody mess everywhere. And I take a couple deep breaths. The first thought was like, don't send yourself into labor because I was so close. You think about the physiological response. You know when you get hurt and your whole body like breaks out in the sweat and you feel like peeing that goes everywhere?

but it was just immediate shock and I was like calm down and I was like talking to myself I was just taking deep breath I was like do not send yourself into labor keep breathing keep breathing and then I was like I don't know what to do I don't know how to move I don't know how to walk because at this point I had looked down my toe was still connected but I was like my foot is shattered in my mind it wasn't just my toe but like my foot there was so much pain that I was like my foot so there's like halfway in between where we were sitting and where I was there was a table and I kind of like hobbled back and I sat down for a second I was like okay what do I do and I remember sitting there and I was like Andrew just trying to like stay calm but like get

his attention and nobody's responding he's still inside with our neighbor getting food up we're laughing having a good time watching football or something so then i i remember like trying to yell out to you a couple times but again i didn't want to like if i yelled it would have sounded like panic so i just had to like stay calm like hey andrew finally i was like okay i need to make it back up onto the the porch so i like hobble my way onto the porch and sit down and i finally get your attention and you come out before our neighbor who's like newly postpartum and I was like babe and I think by this time you could tell I had like panic on my face a little bit and you're thinking I'm like going into labor or whatever I was like I think I broke my foot

and I literally didn't know how to communicate whenever Sean's in a pinch she is way under communicative she smiles this like meek little smile and it disorients me to be honest because she's like she's looking at me with a smile on her face saying just chilling on this back porch saying she thinks she broke her foot so I'm like all right what do you want to do and honestly I didn't fully buy it I know I know he didn't buy it it's hard to I couldn't I didn't want to like cause panic I also was trying to keep myself so calm because I was 39 weeks pregnant and I was just like I need to not lose it because I was on the verge of like losing it I could have I could have done better and understandably I wasn't giving any signs anything was wrong was wrong I was thinking let's just hang out for another hour so we just got here kind of yeah let's hang out with the neighbors and I'll never forget this like you looking at me shaking your heads and no we should go to the emergency room right now I'm like okay I guess it's pretty serious let's go we went to the hospital yeah we went to the hospital I Andrew wheels me in on a wheel chair because by this time I can't walk like I literally had the shakes from like pain and we

walked to the front desk ER and they see me and you can just tell they're like oh no and I was like I'm not in labor I'm not in labor I think I broke my foot and I just kept repeating that because that pregnant people get really concerned and so they're like calling OB down because we have to be monitored we get into our room and finally the ER doc comes in the triage doc remember yeah we we We got a triage and then back to the lobby and then to the doctor. We go to the triage, like, initial scan. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And the doctor confirmed what I had been thinking and pretty much said, oh, it looks like you kind of just stubbed your toe. He's like, wiggling my toe. He was aggressive with it. He was just thinking she stubbed her toe, and I was like, yeah. He thought it was like a bone bruise or something.

There's no way that you broke your toe. And he's like, let's get x-rays regardless. So get x-rays. then we get carded to the room we get carded to the room waiting for the specialist and stuff to come back and he finally comes back in

and he's like giggling he's like smirking he's like well you must have pretty high pain tolerance and I was like what and he finally like pulls out the x-ray and he's like your toe is snapped in half

like there's nothing hanging on like it's it just went and it took you a second to even register like what was happening and you were like wait what like it's broken well the contrast of what I thought was happening I literally thought Sean heard her toe like a rock fell on it and I thought that she had low pain tolerance and was making a big deal of something come to find out that she had super high pain tolerance was making a very small deal of something and she did break it it was also around this time we were going to

getting a text from our neighbor's husband, a picture of this, quote, rock that I said fell on it. It was kind of like a rectangle piece, this big, probably. It was probably two feet long, six inches. Like square? Yeah. Yeah, big. It was huge.

But anyways, now I start panicking because I was like, I can't have surgery, I can't go under anesthesia, I can't take pain medication. like I'm so close and we're calling like the orthos and like everything and they're just like you know what there's really nothing we can do here

they kind of like tape me up and they're like good luck and I remember fast forward two weeks later to the induction I was in labor for 27 hours we then went into a C-section and the whole time I was like just don't touch my toe please

just don't touch my toe That was such a bummer because we had this big plan I'm going on walks every day and I was really worried about postpartner impression so I was thinking we were going to take a walk, watch comedies, and the toe kind of reduced your mobility. So you did a great job.

That sucker hurt. Lesson learned on my part to never doubt. But also you just got to communicate. You know, like make a little bit of a bigger deal. I know. I also, it was one of those where I was either I had to stay calm or I was going to go into full-fledged

panic hysterics That was fun Those are good stories At least I thought so Yeah Let us know if you want Another one of these episodes Thank you for watching all the way

Through Let us know what your favorite story was So we can pull up more We have a whole list Just a whole list of stories here Whole list I can scroll through them Some are

Yeah I think they're all pretty good actually But if you haven't yet Hit the subscribe button Hit the thumbs up and stay tuned for next week. That's all we got. I'm Andrew. I'm Sean.

We're the East fan. Out.