by Sasha Reddy
Health and fitness is one of those industries where practicing what you preach matters. You must really live and believe in the lifestyle to convince others to do the same. Despite having only become a personal trainer in the last few years, Anthony Brown has developed a deep passion for his work. “I genuinely really love helping people,” he says. “I love watching people get stronger. I love people getting happy about themselves getting stronger.” His appreciation for fitness comes not just from seeing its impact on others but from how it has helped him overcome his own life-altering challenges, leading him to leave behind a long-held career in finance to enter the training field.
On Sunday, June 6th, 2021, Anthony was out for a long bike ride with 11 other cyclists and friends. Toward the end of their trek, he was cruising about 200 yards ahead of the rest of their party at the back of a three-man pace line – a tight grouping of cyclists where the line leader takes the brunt of the wind resistance and creates drag for the riders behind him. When traveling in such a compact group, cyclists must be hyper-communicative. “Every little pebble, rock, pine cone, or anything in the road can be a hazard to a cyclist that’s on a tire that’s 23 millimeters wide,” Anthony explains, and the slightest movement or change in pace can affect everyone else in the line.
That day, Anthony unfortunately learned that lesson the hard way. Feeling drained toward the end of their ride, the cyclist in front of Anthony suddenly sat upright without signaling the others in the pace line. The resistance from sitting up slowed him down just enough for his and Anthony’s wheels to cross.
They’d been traveling at about 26 miles per hour at the time. Crashing at such speed in a car might leave you with a bent bumper at worst, but on a bike with no walls or airbags to protect you, it can be deadly. After a brief fight to regain control of his front wheel, Anthony hit the ground and slid, skidding up the entire right half of his body before pummeling headfirst into the curb.
Anthony lost consciousness for about 15 minutes after that, though his friends later described his attempts to speak and ask questions while blacked out. Of the other eleven cyclists present for that ride, one was a doctor, another an EMT, and a third a firefighter. He credits all three for helping save his life that day. He was promptly taken to the ER, where his wife, mom, and stepfather met him upon arrival.
“It was so weird,” Anthony describes, “the pain didn’t come until maybe 12 hours afterward. I think the adrenaline was just going.” Though he’d received a nasty road rash, he could still feel and move all his fingers and toes, which felt like a good sign. “We were so positive,” he says, “until three white coats came out.”
The doctors initially identified two fractures of his C7 vertebrae – a broken neck. One day, one hospital admittance, and many scans later, the true severity of the injury was revealed, including five C7 fractures plus several more throughout the T1 -T4 vertebrae – a VERY broken neck and back. After consulting with several doctors, including his friend who’d been present at the time of the crash, Anthony was scheduled for spinal fusion surgery to take place that Tuesday morning. The doctors thought Anthony would need another two weeks at the hospital, but he was moving around independently under the watchful eyes of the hospital staff within hours of waking up post-op. On June 9th, just three days after the ordeal, he was discharged.
“It was so weird. The pain didn’t come until maybe 12 hours afterward. I think the adrenaline was just going”
But the road to recovery wasn’t over yet. “I was in a neck brace 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nine weeks,” Anthony says. “Couldn’t lift more than eight pounds.” During those nine weeks, Anthony helped host his son’s first birthday (without even being able to pick him up, no less) and celebrated his first 4th of July as a family of three. And while being bogged down by a broken neck through those milestones was frustrating, Anthony was determined to follow his physician’s orders. “I told myself I was going to be the best patient. That was my new challenge. I’m going to take this as my new sport, and I’m going to be the best patient I could possibly be. I’m going to listen to everything they said; I’m going to do everything they told me to do.”
It wasn’t until his follow-up appointment two weeks after surgery that Anthony and his wife, Kelly, first saw the X-rays from the day of the crash. Trying to lighten the mood, Anthony remarked on how lucky he must have been that day. “And this doctor, who’s the best doctor I’ve ever had to this day – best bedside manner, humble, kind, all these great things – this doctor starts laughing.” The physician put it bluntly: nearly every other similar instance of spinal trauma he’d witnessed in his career had resulted in permanent paralysis or death. Anthony was lucky to be alive, let alone walking.
That was when he finally appreciated the seriousness of what he’d endured. “You could have heard a gnat fart in that room after he said that,” Anthony remembers. “It was deafening quiet.”
Though the crash had nearly killed him, it didn’t deter Anthony from cycling once he was cleared to ride. Since taking up the sport in 2018, cycling has brought him closer to his mom, dad, and wife, who all still ride together most Sundays of the year. Since 2020, he and Kelly have painstakingly organized their own Head-to-Toe ride, an annual 134-mile race from the top of Delaware to the bottom, for themselves and a small group of friends. Heck, when Kelly was pregnant with their first child, even the baby shower was cycling-themed. Suffice it to say, cycling means a lot to the Browns. So, when Anthony was finally done with the neck brace that August, he began using his bike trainer immediately. The first week he took his bike back on the road, he logged 168 miles.
Understandably, his mom and Kelly insisted that Anthony not ride alone after the accident. So, in addition to cycling, he began strength training. The gym slowly became his happy place. He worked his way up to three to four trips per week, regularly bringing family members and friends to work out with and offering pointers.
“Probably by June of 2022, I started getting questions: ‘Hey, are you a personal trainer?’” At that point, Anthony had been in the banking industry for over 18 years and had been working in a particularly toxic workplace since late 2021. He began toying with the idea of entering the fitness field, and his wife encouraged him to pursue that path.
So, he did. Anthony obtained “the most basic, almost entry-level, kind of get-your-feet wet certification out there” and began taking clients soon, thereafter, training a few sessions each week in addition to his 9-to-5.
It would take another life-altering event for Anthony to commit to a total career change. On Cyber Monday of 2023, at around four o’clock in the morning, Anthony woke up in utter agony. “I had the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life,” he says. “And remember, I broke my neck.” Anthony sat up and began yelling, frantically trying to describe to Kelly the intense headache he was experiencing, only to realize that “the words that were coming out of my mouth were not the words that were going through my mind.”
Within moments, the pain subsided. Anthony initially wrote off the whole thing and went back to sleep but decided to hop on his patient portal and detail the experience for his doctor later that morning. “By 3 o’clock that afternoon…I had voicemails from the nurses, from my doctor specifically, and an email from both of them saying that I should go to the emergency room immediately.” So, he headed to Christiana and was promptly put on stroke protocol, receiving frequent blood sugar and blood pressure checks, EKGs, and the works.
The hospital team determined that Anthony had had a transient ischemic attack, also known as a mini stroke. A mini stroke is often the precursor to a full-blown stroke, separated by mere days or even hours. Anthony suspects the stress from his grueling finance job is what caused the event. In the aftermath of both his bike accident and the TIA, multiple doctors and nurses commented that, outside of the circumstances that brought him to the hospital, he was in excellent health, even going so far as to attribute his fitness to the rate of his recovery. Exercise had become a genuine source of joy and pride for Anthony and a significant boon for his quality of life, and helping others reap those benefits, too, was gratifying in ways banking had never been. All signs seemed to point him in one direction. Before he’d even been discharged from the hospital, Anthony purchased the curriculum to pursue his personal training certification through the National Academy of Sports Medicine with the intent to switch industries.
It wasn’t until he’d obtained NASM-CPT and began seeking a full-time training gig that Anthony learned about the HAC. “Nobody had a negative thing to say about it,” he remembers. So, he applied. He’d already pre-drafted a resignation letter for his previous job when he was offered a position.
Anthony spent his first few weeks at HAC learning from his new co-workers and shadowing their training sessions before training clients of his own. “I think one of the biggest things that really shocked me is the sharing of information and the sharing of clients,” he remembers. Anthony found the culture of HAC’s personal training team to be uniquely uncompetitive. He was awed by his co-workers who had no problem referring their own clients to fellow trainers when they felt that that trainer’s skillset would best serve that client’s needs. “It was all about the client. The personal of personal training. And that’s what was so cool to watch – that aspect of it.”
“I know that, if I didn’t break my neck and have this mini stroke happen. I likely would not have found any of this.”
“And then the creativity,” Anthony continues. “I realized how much artistry there is.” As a trainer, you might be working with an athlete gearing up for their first marathon one hour and with someone recovering from knee surgery the next; designing workouts for such a wide range of people requires the ability to pivot to the needs of whoever is in front of you.
Though he’d already been training a few clients before coming to HAC, he likens the transition to studying a new language; learning the material is one thing, but putting it into practice is challenging on a whole other level. Still, he knew from the start that this profession was right for him. “I know I love what I do because I don’t hit the snooze button,” he says. “My alarm goes off at 5 AM, and I am up, and my day is started. I’m thinking about what I can do to change a life or to help somebody out, to help them grow. And it feels fantastic every day.”
Though the path to his new career has been bumpy, in that weird, silver-lining, hindsight-is-20/20 kind of way, Anthony is grateful for all he’s endured and the path it led him down. “I know that if I didn’t break my neck and have this mini stroke happen, I likely would not have found any of this,” he says. To him, the defining quality of a good trainer is empathy, and the trials he’s experienced give him the perspective to empathize with clients going through their own struggles, physical or mental. “You’ve got to care. And I think the injury helps me care. The TIA helps me care…”
“Helping people?” Anthony concludes, “Best part about this job, easily.”
