What’s the purpose of this site?

The main purpose of this site is to serve as a way to document my ‘athletic’ pursuits, whether they are related to hiking, weight training, dieting or something else. It is not meant to serve as advice for anyone.

Where does the name come from?
The exact details of this are a little sketchy as the story happened more than 20 years ago. They may be (read: are likely) altered, adjusted, doctored, and/or modified, but this is what I’m going with.

As a kid, I often played sports with the other kids in my neighborhood. One day we were playing football. Some kids from a different neighborhood were visiting the public swimming pool next to the field where we were playing. Wanting to play too, they challenged us to a game. A few minutes into the game one of my teammates heard one of them say ‘Don’t worry about anyone else, they’re just going to give it to that scrawny n#$%@r!’
First of all, the kid was too ignorant to realize that I was Filipino and not black. Believe it or not, it also wasn’t the first time I had been called ‘n#$%@r.’ I did not take any offense to being mistaken for being black, I just figured the kid was ignorant (probably due to his parents).
I did take offense to ‘scrawny,’ even though looking back, I definitely was. I knew that I was skinny (a few years earlier, I had been questioned by the school nurse because she thought I wasn’t being fed at home), but I had never been called scrawny. In some ways, I really think this experience fueled me to lift over the next few years. Although it was never said at this time, the moniker ‘Scrawny Filipino’ stuck with me (internally) for years.

I don’t remember exactly how the rest of that day went, but I do remember running straight at that kid, instead of around him, for the rest of the day. He was bigger than me (even though he was younger), but I made sure he took more of a beating than I did.