There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Dr. Frank Rohter
Welcome to. There is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell, I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I'm the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why things work. Why things work.
Speaker 1:Today I'm going to give honor to one of my advisors in graduate school, dr Frank Roeder, who has passed and tells some of his great stories and wisdom that he passed on to me. And before I get to that, let me thank Jonathan and Lynn Gilden of the Gilden Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home sales and they have the reviews to back that up. So why don't you give them a shout and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412. So Dr Frank Roeder, from UCF and that is spelled R-O-H-T-E-R passed on earlier this month. He was 101 years old. I saw this in the Orlando Sentinel. I had lost contact with him over the last couple of years, although I did reach out to him a few years ago and I think I saw him on LinkedIn or something like that. It'd been a long time since I graduated college and he had said he was still swimming, you know, a few times a week or I think I read that somewhere. And then I reached out to him to see if he remembered me and he did. I thought that was pretty cool, but I know that, like he was living a very long life and I saw in the paper he lived to be 101. He was an awesome role model to me when I was in school and then after school, like after graduate school, stayed in touch. I remember that.
Speaker 1:You know, I was going through a phase where I was really trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my career. I had graduated with a degree in psychology and I was working as a counselor, which I really loved to do. I really did. I still love that kind of work and I found it to be extremely good. It was good for me in many, many ways, but I was like my passion, I felt, was slightly elsewhere, where, like I would go to work and a lot of the kids in treatment and they had to be there. It was a facility of you know, a facility they had to go to, court ordered or paid for. It wasn't like they could just go home at night and they'd always talk to me about working out and you know they could tell I worked out. So they'd ask me questions about that and I would spend a lot of time talking about that with the young men. And I found, you know, maybe this is more my passion and so I started looking into what to do with that, you know, as a young, early 20s. So I started doing my research and this was back well before the Internet. So you had to actually make a lot of phone calls and call schools and pick up catalogs Because, you know, if I wanted to work in the fitness industry, I wanted to do it right.
Speaker 1:Something about it told me that, uh, you know, I just wanted to do it right, like it was calling me to do it right. So I wanted to get more formal college education. I mean, you know, you don't have to, unfortunately, in my industry, but I thought it was important. So I found that UCF had a program in exercise, physiology and wellness, a graduate program, a master's degree, and that just sounded perfect to me. I'd already graduated from UCF, so you know it was an easy, safe connection. So I called up and I found out.
Speaker 1:You know, really, the first step was to talk to the two advisors, the two people who led the program, and at that time it was Dr Frank Roeder and Gerald Gergely. So I met with both of them and instantly I was hooked, like they just, you know, talked about how, you know, you have to love fitness. If you're going to get into fitness, you have to love fitness, because it may not be the greatest way to make money in your lifetime, so you have to love it. And that was one of the first messages I got. And then I, you know, went and decided to enroll, went and decided to enroll, and as soon as I enrolled in the program it was right around the same time Dr Roeder actually was putting on a lot of different talks and seminars and things like that. He had written a couple books. He had written a book on cholesterol, and so he was turns out I didn't know them, but turned out he was a pretty well-known guy in the wellness and fitness industry.
Speaker 1:He was, at the time, gosh. What would he have been? He would have been in his late fifties, early sixties. I suppose this was the nineties. He lived to be 101. As I said, he'd look like a fit and trim professor, you know, a little bit of gray and but very fit and trim, not like. He looked like a runner, which essentially that's what he became.
Speaker 1:And so all of these talks were being planned and I saw a flyer for one. Again, this is packed before Internet and all that. But I saw a flyer and I told my friend, I said, hey, you know, dr Roteder, the advisor of the program, is going to be speaking and let's go see what he has to say. So I remember I went and saw him talk and I'm sitting and this was probably the best introduction to the program I could have got. It just happened, like I said, to correspond with about the time I was starting and I remember he was like charming and funny and, you know, obviously intelligent and he and one of the stories I remember him telling is and he told everything, like you know, he just great storyteller.
Speaker 1:And he one of his messages to all the students at the time and all the people that were under him, no matter what program they were in, was to write your eulogy. He said you know, write your eulogy. You know, what do you want people to say about you? Write your eulogy, you know, what do you want people to say about you? Like that was one of his main themes and then from that, work your way back to what you need to do? And I've heard that advice since, but that was the first time I saw it and I thought it was like you know, I found it to be very cool.
Speaker 1:So, as he was speaking and talking about that kind of thing, he told a funny story. He said you know, this is how I want to die. And of course it gets everybody's attention. He says I want to be out on my bicycle and I want to be cruising along at a fast rate, having a good ride, get run over by a giant dump truck. You know we're all going, oh God. And he says and the reason being is because these guys have given me so much trouble over the years. I'm just out riding my bike, they blow me off the road left and right and if it's time for me to go, well, that's the best way to go. And then you know they have to live with it. You know that they did this and you know obviously he was, he was being humorous and that was just the way he told stories, but basically his point of that story was is he wants to go out being super fit Like he wants to go out being. You know who he is, the best he can be.
Speaker 1:And you know, let me tell you the guy was an absolute role model. I mean not only academically and what he did. You know, he was the very first athletic director for what was FTE, which was what UCF became, that's Florida Technological University. A lot of people don't realize that's how UCF started out. So he was the very first athletic director that they ever had, which I think is really really cool, considering that UCF is kind of like a big school. Now. You know, athletically especially, you know they're in the highest conferences they can be in. You know, when they started out they were a Division II program and he was the athletic director. He eventually hired the very first basketball coach, torchy Clark, who is in their ring of honor, and did so many amazing things for their program. So from an athletics and university perspective, he was such a role model. And then he walked away from that and started focusing all of his energy into his career graduate degrees of exercise, physiology.
Speaker 1:But another great story he told, which is one that just sits with me because you know, if I didn't get to know dr frank roeder, I don't know that I would be doing what I'm doing. Because he and mr gergely like convinced me that, like, I'm going in the right direction, that people need role models in physical fitness and that if you have the passion you have the passion. Now, that was something Mr Gerglios told me. If you have the passion you can do it, but you have to love exercise. You have to love it. You can't go into it thinking, oh, this might be a cool way to make some money. So, like, I owe so much of what I've done to Dr Roeder and there are so many people that graduated from his program that say the same thing.
Speaker 1:Another story he told all of us very, very early on is the reason why he got into health and fitness Now. He was a athletic director guy, he was a physical education guy, so he knew about the importance of sports and fitness. But he said in his 50s he was not doing it. He tells the story how he climbed the stairs at UCF one day to go to a meeting or go to a class or whatever he was doing, and he said he was huffing and puffing at the very top of the stairs he had, you know, in what he referred to as a gut you know he was a little overweight in his opinion and he got to the top of the stairs and he said you know what, enough is enough, I don't want to be this way anymore. So again, this was in his 50s. He I don't even know what kind of exercise he was doing at the time. He basically said he wasn't doing much of anything in the way of eating or exercising, he was just living the life of a college professor.
Speaker 1:So in his 50s he decided that he was going to just, you know, get into it. He was going to start, you know, get into it. He was gonna start walking. So he started walking and then he started running a little bit and you know, he went from running two to three miles and then he went up to five miles and then he went up to the 10k and then he went up to marathon distances. But he started just a little bit and he just started getting into it. And he talks about his very, very, very first event he ever joined was a two-mile fun run at the old 1977 Tangerine Bowl, and then he was hooked.
Speaker 1:So after just starting out and just running just a little bit. He went on again after starting in his fifties. He went on to complete 350 triathlons, 11 marathons and two Hawaiian Ironman triathlons. Now that was back before it was the end thing to do to go to Hawaii. That was back before it was cool to do the Hawaiian Ironman. You know, only the real fitness fanatics were doing that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:But he started his training in his 50s and went on to do all that. A lot of people start so much earlier or in their 50s they say, oh, I can't. They say oh, I can't do this, I can't do that. And he started it and did two Hawaiian Ironman triathlons and 11 marathons and 350 triathlons. Good lord, I mean, how many 5ks, 10ks and half marathons did he do? I do not know. But that's just amazing to me that he went on to do that.
Speaker 1:And his message was always that it's not too late, that he started as a middle-aged man and became fit and trim, in the best shape he'd ever been in his 50s and 60s and 70s and probably his 80s although I didn't know him then way more fit than he was in his 30s and 40s, and that was like his main message. And then he went on to write books. As I said, he wrote a great cholesterol book that I read, that was big, because he wanted to try to help prevent heart disease. He wrote a triathlon book called Blue Collar Ironman, you know because of his love for triathlons. So he just became an absolute role model to me, as his partner in crime, gerald Gergely. So you know he passed again earlier this month at the age of 101. And again, the last I had heard he was swimming three times a week. This was in his 90s, was not running anymore, but you know he just left such a great legacy for health and fitness. I wanted to honor him today in this podcast.
Speaker 1:He was just a great man. Like I could email him for advice and I could talk to him and he would. I mean, there was just so many things he would talk to me about, about life, like he was just your gentle professor where you can go in and talk to him and he would give you life advice. And you know, I don't know where my career would be without him and I don't know that I would have ever tried to do any endurance sports triathlons, running marathons if it wasn't for him, because he just spoke so much about it.
Speaker 1:In the wellness programs that we were in, I was big into lifting and bodybuilding and things like that and he used to go to his kid with me all the time and say, well, you know you need to build some endurance, why don't you come out and, you know, do one of these triathlons? And I thought, ah, stuff's crazy. You know, I had no concept of that stuff, but again, because of his pushing and it wasn't. That's the thing that was so cool about him. It's like it wasn't just going to school, it was like he got to know you and we would talk training, we literally would train together sometimes.
Speaker 1:And he talked me into doing my very first triathlon and I did it with him. It was the old Bud Light Triathlon Series that they used to do and this one happened to be at Cypress Gardens. He was there that day. You know we all did it, as some of the people in the class that went and him and some of his friends and other professors went and, like I said, it was just like, wow, this is pretty cool. And he was right.
Speaker 1:He said, once you do one, you're going to get hooked because you're going to find out. You're going to feel this great accomplishment when you do it. You're going to feel really, really good about yourself. You're going to like cross training and not just lifting all the time, and you know. He was absolutely right. So I also owe that aspect to him too. So, dr Frank Roeder, I couldn't thank you enough for the role model that you were and are, and you left one hell of a legacy. My professor. Now let me thank Overhead Door of Daytona Beach. Zach and Jeff Hawk are the consummate professionals in the garage door industry. They have the best product, they have the best service. Why don't you give them a shout at overheaddoordaytonacom?
