Testosterone Replacement Therapy: The Decision to Dry Dock the Boat

 

For years, I've had a great deal of success at improving myself. Over the last few years, I've roughly followed a personal growth model developed by Scott Barry Kaufman, which he discusses in his excellent book "Transcend." 

Kaufman uses a sailboat to explain how people grow: the hull stands for basic stability, health, safety, belonging, and self-respect... because if it leaks, you spend all your energy not sinking. The sail stands for growth: curiosity, love, creativity, meaning, because when it holds its shape, the same wind (life’s opportunities and stress) turns into forward motion. The sea is the messy world in which we live. 

The point is to capture the complexity of human growth; it’s a living system you maintain while moving. You patch leaks as they appear, trim the sail for conditions, and keep both survival and growth working at the same time. The model’s purpose is practical: diagnose where you’re losing speed, make the next small fix, and keep aiming at horizons that matter.

Decades ago, when I started this journey, the first step I had to take was fixing my boat. In my mid-twenties, I was fat, weak, rarely exercised, ate like crap, and neglected sleep. I had to fix all of that before I could start working on the things I needed to grow as a person. In short, I had to make my boat sea-worthy before I could start exploring the ocean.

Since that time, in my mid-to-late twenties, my boat was relatively easy to maintain. In most cases, the exploration and growth I was doing involved activities, like running, weightlifting, and jiu jitsu, that kept the boat sea-worthy. 

Age, however, takes its toll. We have to spend more and more time maintaining the boat. More things break, too, which requires more time to fix. When I was 22, I could eat a large pepperoni and bacon pizza, and I'd feel mildly uncomfortable for about 30 minutes. Now, at 49, eating an entire pepperoni and bacon pizza will make me feel like garbage for a week. At thirty, I used to be able to do a hard lifting session in the morning, then do a twenty-mile run that afternoon. By the next day, I'd be 90% recovered. By the third day, I'd be completely recovered. Now, I might be able to manage one of these workouts once per week. 

The boat now requires so much maintenance and repair, I spend all of my time keeping it from sinking. I can't actually sail anywhere. Any growth that happens only occurs if I stop maintaining and fixing the boat... which causes the boat to go to shit. 

The Plight of Aging

In my younger years, I was naively-ignorant of the realities of the aging process. I'd see middle-aged people who basically gave up on health and fitness (and growth), and I'd just chalk it up to laziness. I knew aging caused diminishing returns, but I didn't fully understand just how profound of an effect aging had. My twenty-eight-year-old brain couldn't empathize with this profound struggle that comes with aging. 

Until I got there.

It was easy to tell people to just work harder because, in my younger years, I had endless energy and I didn't have all that much maintenance and repairs to do. After all, the boat was still new. Around my mid-thirties, I first noticed that it started taking longer to recover, and progress required more sustained work. I had to lift harder, run farther and faster, and eat better. There was less room for error. I didn't mind, though, it presented an interesting challenge. 

Each year, it took a little bit more effort to keep the boat afloat. I also started experiencing a drop in motivation... it became increasingly difficult to work up the drive and energy to keep the boat afloat. This wasn't a deal-breaker, but I had to borrow the time and energy for this maintenance from the time and energy I normally spent doing cool shit. 

At about the age of 41 or 42, thanks to blood work, I discovered I had exceptionally low testosterone (about 300 ng/dl), which was at the very bottom of normal (average for this age is about 580 ng/dl). Based on the confluence of symptoms, I realized part of the reason my ship was getting so difficult to maintain and repair had to do with low testosterone, which I later learned was due to a testicular issue. 

Basically, for my entire life, I've always made roughly half of the testosterone I should have been producing. So I did what I've always done - I started experimenting to solve the problem. 

After a lot of playing with all the relevant variables, I figured out I could raise my testosterone about 50% (about 450 ng/dl) with a cocktail of supplements (mainly zinc, magnesium, vitamin D3), a specific diet (essentially the Paleo diet), and specific activities (high quality sleep, lifting heavy weights utilizing compound lifts, combat sports, and sex). 

This worked exceptionally well for a few years. Testosterone levels around 400, while still low, allowed me to do everything I wanted to do. Unfortunately, the returns started to diminish by about 50 ng/dl per year starting three years ago. No matter what interventions I tried, or in what doses, my health, fitness, and motivation tanked. 

A few weeks ago, blood work revealed my testosterone levels were at about 240 ng/dl, which was officially considered low. The follow-up test was well below 200 ng/dl. For reference, 550 ng/dl is about the norm for a 49 year old male; that first test (240 ng/dl) would be the testosterone level we'd expect in a 105-year-old dude. This explained why it became extremely hard to build muscle, seemingly impossible to lose fat, sleep was getting much more difficult, had low sex drive, and had virtually no motivation to work out. 

Worse, a lot of other health markers started to tank to dangerous levels. My blood pressure and resting heart rate were up, good cholesterol was too low, bad cholesterol was too high, my kidney function was worsening, and I was on the cusp of pre-diabetes. I've managed all of these things with exercise, sleep, and diet, but all of these management strategies were tanking. I was trapped in a vicious circle, and my ship was sinking.

The Decision to Start TRT

TRT had been on my radar since I discovered the low T levels, but I had always been resistant. First, I had "natural" remedies that worked well enough. Second, I never liked how men would use TRT for performance-enhancing for running, jiu jitsu, and wightlifitng (or other recreational endeavors) because it feels like taking shortcuts instead of doing the work. Obviously this was ignorant of me; sometimes no volume of "work" solves the problem. 

I was also concerned about possible side effects, including the possibility that starting exogenous testosterone may prevent your body from producing testosterone when you stop, meaning this becomes a lifelong decision. So I resisted and did my "natural remedy" routine. It worked... until it didn't.

I had a long discussion on this issue with my doctor. She was totally on board, in part because my overall health was starting to go to shit, and I sensed she thought I should have done this sooner. But still, I was at a spot where natural testosterone, even with all of my interventions, was low enough to be functionally useless. The fact that this was also causing other health measures to crater made this a no-brainer. So... I'll be starting TRT!

Even though any hormone replacement requires significant tracking and balancing. I'm excited to finally be in a position where I don't have to expend a ton of time and energy just trying to keep my T levels at a reasonable level. It's become such a focus of my health and fitness efforts over the last few years, I haven't had much opportunity to focus on any other growth.

This phase, as I start and tweak TRT, is like dry-docking the sailboat. I wasn't sailing anywhere before. Hell, the boat was barely afloat. For someone who needs growth, I need this psychological framing to keep me sane. Based on research, it usually takes six months to a year to really tweak hormone levels. While this is happening, I'm going to focus on really fixing my boat... not only the testosterone issue, but also dialing in my exercise, diet, and sleep routines to fix the other problems (blood sugar, cholesterol, kidney issues, etc.). As an added bonus, it will be nice to once again be able to build muscle and cut fat at a rate that's better than a century-old dude. 

What Are Your Experiences?

That’s where I am now... dry-docked, fixing what leaks so the boat can actually sail again. If you’ve walked this path, men on TRT, women on HRT, tell me what it was like in real life. What pushed you to start, what protocol you tried (how you took it and how often), what changed by week four, month three, and month six. How were things like libido, mood, sleep, recovery, body composition changed? What worked and what didn’t. If side effects showed up, how did you handle them (dose, timing, route, add-ons), and which labs actually helped you steer. If you stopped, why? Share as much or as little as you want; I’m reading for patterns, not trophies. 

Also, I'm interested in others who might be experiencing something that might require “dry docking” your boat. Basically, do you have some issue or problem that is fundamentally preventing you from growing? What is the issue, and what is your plan to fix it?

~Jason

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If I Don't Build It...

There’s a certain kind of ache that doesn’t go away.

You distract yourself. You chase other fires. You bury it under jobs, and moves, and the holy grind of keeping your shit together.

But it lingers.

For me, it started a few years ago. I built something that looked like a tribe. A community woven into the jiu jitsu gym Shelly and I ran. It had potential. It even had momentum. But the foundation was flawed.

The gym was a sinking ship, because of COVID and because I'm not really cut out for gym ownership. And I tied the Tribe to it. Foolishly.

Worse, I cast the net too wide. I didn’t define who it was for, because I didn’t trust exclusivity. Didn’t trust myself to lead something real.

So when the gym went under, the Tribe dissolved with it.

At the time, there was too much chaos to grieve. But when the dust settled, the doubt crept in. About my leadership. About the idea itself. About whether anyone would really want what I was building.

The Question That Haunted Me

Was the idea flawed? Or was I just not ready?

Turns out, it was both.

I hadn’t lived enough. I hadn’t broken enough. I hadn’t asked the right questions yet.

Back then, my vision was mostly about masculinity. It had teeth, sure. But it was one-sided. It didn’t account for the full spectrum of what it means to be whole.

It wasn’t until I stumbled into a collision of ideas: Scott Barry Kaufman’s science of growth, Jordan Peterson’s call to archetype, Jack Donovan’s fire and brotherhood, Chip Conley’s midlife alchemy... that the design began to shift.

I realized:
This isn’t about men.
It’s about humans.
Whole ones.
Wounded ones.
Ones trying to remember something we were never taught.

And what we’re remembering… is each other.

The Ache That Drives It

I’ve had glimpses of it before. The tribes I miss had a pulse.

Fight Club, our jiu jitsu crew in San Diego. The Hobby Joggas, our ultrarunning band of misfits from Michigan. Both were different. But both let us be real. No masks. No posturing. Just raw, relentless presence.

Fight Club was chaos with discipline. We trained like animals. We joked like degenerates. And somehow, we held each other up through the worst of it.

The Hobby Joggas? We ran ourselves to the edge of madness for fun. But in that suffering, something sacred formed. On trails, in trucks, around campfires... that was our cathedral.

Neither group asked us to play small. They didn’t just tolerate who Shelly and I were. They amplified it. They made space for our weirdness. Our dark humor. Our refusal to take life too seriously, even when we were dead serious about the work.

They gave us a place to bleed and laugh and fuck around and still matter. And then… they were gone.

We moved. Life moved. And the ache returned.

Right now, I get scraps of it. Moments. Glimmers. But no tribe. And I’m realizing: Without that social container? My soul slowly dies.

Why I Didn’t Give Up

I’ve failed before. Tribe attempts. Gym closures. A blog about manhood and fire that never lit.

But here’s what I know now:

Failure is never the end.
Failure is the whisper that says:
“Try again. Try better. Try truer.”

I didn’t abandon the dream. I sharpened it.

I kept asking questions. What’s missing from my life? Why doesn’t any of this modern shit feel real? How do we live lives of meaning, purpose, and connection in a culture that rewards performance over presence?

And then one day, the answer hit me:

The Tribe isn’t just an idea. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine designed to solve a simple, impossible problem:

How do we become whole again?

The Evolution That Changed Everything

What’s different this time?

Everything.

I finally have a frame that holds it all. Kaufman gave me the roadmap for self-actualization: for individuals and for groups. Peterson gave me myth and structure. Donovan gave me fire and edge. Conley gave me perspective and depth.

I stopped pretending modernity wasn’t breaking us. I stopped pretending polarity didn’t matter. I stopped trying to build a community that everyone could join. I started designing a system for those of us who ache for more. And I let it evolve. This time, I accounted for all of it:

• Masculine and feminine.
• Growth and shadow.
• Myth and memory and movement.
• ... and so on.
  

Not a support group. Not a social club. Not a lifestyle brand.

A Tribe.

Who Is It For?

The disillusioned. The edgewalkers. The gifted-but-adrift. The ones who left.

If you’ve tasted Tribe and lost it,
If your soul’s gone quiet trying to survive “normal” life,
If you’re powerful but untrusted, even by yourself,
If you crave connection but can’t stand disingenuous performance,

Then this is for you.

We’re not healing to be palatable. We’re becoming dangerous and devoted.

Why It Matters Now

Because if I don’t build it… who will?

Not for me. But for us.

It doesn’t matter that I’m the one building it. It matters that it gets built. That this exists in the world. That someone like you reads this and thinks: Yes. That’s it. That’s what I’ve been trying to name."

The Last Flame

This is the myth I’ll leave behind. The culture I never found, but finally decided to create. It’s not about influence. Or validation. Or relevance. It’s about the Fire that won’t go out. It’s about the version of me who knows his time is limited, And wants to build something that outlives him.

Something that can breathe. That can evolve. That can hold all of us, monster and mythmaker alike. So no one else has to ache alone in a world that forgot how to build Fire. I’m not done.

I’m just getting started.

You?

~Jason

 

 

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Midlife Crisis

 

For years, I've enjoyed writing about the stuff I'm experiencing. Blogging, for me, has essentially been my diary. Publicly shared, of course, because I've found great value in expressing vulnerability. It keeps me humble because, as Shelly often reminds me, I'm prone to grandiosity-fueled over-confidence. 

But a weird thing has happened over the last five years or so. I've experienced a strange form of writer's block. I've started countless blog posts on a wide variety of topics, but could never seem to finish them. Or if I did, I couldn't quite bring myself to hit the "publish" button. 

I couldn't explain this hesitancy. I'm not one to hold back my thoughts or opinions. This writer's block, though, seemed to be fueled by a vague-but-deep sense of... incompleteness. Every thought, idea, and opinion I had felt worthy of being expressed, but there was an unseen force that created a wall. It was a mystery I couldn't solve. 

Until I did.

It turns out the culprit was my midlife crisis.

Weird, right?

The stereotype of a midlife crisis involves ditching your family, buying a gaudy sports car, dating 20-year-olds, and wearing skinny jeans. Mine was suddenly becoming an indecisive writer. 

Anyway, I digress.

Enter Tim Ferriss

Many years ago, I had a stereotypically-normal life. I had a good career as a high school psychology teacher, a wife, three small children, a dog, pretty good cars, and a fledgling hobby as a barefoot ultrarunner. Totally normal stuff. American dram-type stuff.

Then I read Timothy Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Work Week." The book was a revelation because it framed all the emotional and psychological turmoil and angst percolating beneath the surface of my "normal" life. The book caused me to realize my life was deeply unfulfilling, and I had trapped myself in a life of silent desperation that would lead to a slow march toward death. 

That revelation led to a radical embracing of adventure. If you know me, you know the story well. Shelly and I quit our teaching jobs and went on a decade-long adventure. And man, it was soooo worth it. The stuff we experienced was nothing short of amazing. 

Eventually, though, we craved some stability and moved to Colorado. We more or less fell into new careers in law enforcement and went about raising our kids. We've managed to create a pretty great, stable life with enough adventure and excitement to scratch a lot of the itches we escaped from back in our teaching days. In the process of experiencing our adventures and return to stability, I discovered a lot of ideas that turned out to be pretty damn important, which are reflected in the post immediately before this one. 

But there was this nagging writer's block weighing on my soul.

Enter Tim Ferriss 2.0

As a patrol officer in law enforcement, we do shift work, including the night shift. At 3:30 am, things in our small town are typically quiet (yeah, I said the "Q" word, fellow cops). During those boring AF times, I indulge in dorkiness and drive around and listen to podcasts. One of my favorites is Scott Barry Kaufman's "The Psychology Podcast." One episode really stood out. Scott was having a conversation with Chip Conley, the author of the book "Learning to Love Midlife." It was compelling enough to lead me to buy the book. Here's the episode:

I just finished it this morning. 

Holy shit.

The impact was analogous to the impact Ferriss' book had on me years ago. This book framed all the emotional and psychological turmoil and angst percolating beneath the surface of my "normal" life... but in a much different way than "The 4-Hour Work Week." 

Conley basically ditches the "one-and-done" notion of adulthood by saying we’ve got a “first adulthood” that’s all about collecting achievements, like careers, status, family, mortgages, and so on. Then we transition into a “second adulthood,” when we shift from accumulating stuff to distilling wisdom, nurturing deeper connections, and finding meaning beyond the external accolades we once chased. 

Instead of hitting midlife and thinking, “Well, guess I’m over the hill,” Conley frames it as a legit second chapter of grown-up life. You’ve done your time building a foundation, and now you get to pivot toward a more introspective, enriching experience. It’s not a crisis, he says, but a bridge to a richer, more purposeful life where we stop trying to impress the world and start connecting the dots of our own story, discovering that the real magic happens when we realize adulthood actually comes in two acts.

It's absolutely brilliant. 

Ferriss's book gave me permission to live my first adulthood on my own terms. Conley's book gave me the permission to stop clinging to my beloved first adulthood and embrace the second. I'll likely write a lot more about this in the near future, but the relevant point for this blog post is the epiphany that my writer's block caused by my failure to really understand myself. I was in that transitional phase between my first and second adulthood.

Clinging to Youth Sucks

We've all heard aging people piss and moan about how much aging sucks. I call bullshit. Aging is pretty damn awesome. It's clinging to youth that sucks. So many of the things we could do with ease, and usually take for granted, get exponentially more difficult as we age. We fight it, but it's a fight we're always going to lose.

The older we get, the more time and energy it takes to cling to the trappings of youth. For example, based on my data, it takes me about three times the caloric expenditure and at least double the time to stay fit as it did 15 years ago. That's time and energy we could be spending doing something better. This doesn't mean I need to give up staying healthy, but it does mean I need to readjust my expectations. Conley's book perfectly explains this dilemma. And it explains my writer's block. 

I write about my own experiences. The influence of the arrow of time was the variable that I failed to consider, which is the reason I have so many unpublished blog posts. I've had a vague sense of my own experiences with the futility of clinging to youth and my growth to a new, different stage of life, but I couldn't articulate what I was thinking or feeling. Everything I wrote about was written from the perspective of the young version of me... and it lacked the authenticity of my earlier writings when I was actually young. 

So What?

My soul craves excitement and adventure. That's not changing with age. However, Conley's book caused a pretty radical reframing. For the last few years, I've experienced some pretty strong negative thoughts and feelings about my diminishing capacity to engage in the kinds of exciting and adventurous things I was able to do over the last two decades. 

All of that negativity, though, disappeared immediately when I had the epiphany that all I needed to do was change my perspective. Instead of desperately clinging to the excitement and adventure of my first adulthood, all I needed to do was shift my focus to the excitement and adventure of my second adulthood. 

Poof!

Suddenly, I'm no longer mourning the fact that I can't read without glasses, or I can't dominate the skilled, athletic kids on the jiu jitsu mats anymore. Instead, I'm excitedly looking forward to being on the brink of having a lot more free time (yay, empty nest!) and being able to enjoy life without caring about external validation from people who don't matter. 

So What is this Midlife Crisis?

I've realized my midlife crisis was nothing more than what Conley called "middlescence", which is a play on adolescence. Adolescent is the life phase where we transition from childhood to adulthood. Middlesence is the life phase where we transition from first adulthood to second adulthood. Basically, we're learning to navigate a new phase of life that's radically different from the previous phase. 

Of course, I'm almost certain I'm at the end of middescence, which is why I feel like I'm fully prepared to ditch the clinging to my youth and embrace the excitement and adventure of my second adulthood. In reality, I've been silently battling though middlesence for years. 

I really wish this book would have been published five years ago, even though it probably would have robbed me of the opportunity to struggle with this transition. I feel like I could have helped some folks by writing about my struggles. 

Which brings me to the real point of this post. I know a lot of my readers are in my cohort... in part because you're still reading a freakin' blog, which you saw on Facebook. For y'all who are about 35-60, I'm motivated to start writing about this shit. Or, more specifically, writing about the shit I've always written about, but framed from the perspective of the life stage when we can really have fun. 

Don't get me wrong; being young can be hella fun. But youth comes with a lot of baggage. There a whole lotta insecurities and anxieties, usually tied to a sense that we need to "keep up", that make youth kinda shitty. We chase status and approval, we never feel like we have enough, or we're somehow missing out. No matter how hard we try to live in the present and just enjoy life, we continually get sucked into living our lives on other people's terms. Aging makes that increasingly difficult to the point where it becomes impossible. 

Middle age, though, brings the opportunity to free ourselves of that shit. We're more self-aware, more emotionally-intelligent, and we have a deeper sense of purpose. We're more confident, authentic, and we start to develop real wisdom. We accept who we truly are, which allows us to develop real connection with others. There's an undeniable beauty that comes with middle age, which I want to fully explore.

If this post has piqued some interest, stick around. I'm going to be exploring this topic in a lot more detail in the near future, and I really want to connect (or re-connect) with readers who are also excited about the adventures of this next stage of life. 

Normally, I'd tell my readers to share the post if they liked it, but quite honestly, I don't want the attention. I don't care how many people read this. I care that the right people read this. I want to curate a tribe of folks who get this post. If you really want to share this with someone you know personally, share it with them and only them. 

If this does resonate with you, leave a comment! I'm interested to hear your story. 

~Jason

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