Shred Letter No. 3.

Same three things: a member spotlight, a story, and something from the heart. No fluff.

This week we sat down with a Marine — a man who walked every street of Ramadi, helped evacuate a wounded Marine under fire, and now demonstrates to his family, friends, and all of us on Saturdays what it truly means to show up. Meet Ken Chin.

Ken grew up in San Francisco. Half Chinese, half white — a kid raised between two worlds. He was on the smaller side until he found the football field, where size stopped mattering and showing up started.

He was a senior in high school when the towers fell on 9/11. Not long after, a physics teacher looked out at a room full of teenagers talking a big game and asked a simple question: you’re about to turn eighteen — what are you actually going to do about it? Ken didn’t hear a challenge. He heard a call. About six months later he was standing on the yellow footprints at Marine Corps boot camp.

Infantry. Two tours in Iraq. Fallujah in 2004 — one of the war’s seminal battles, forty-some days without a shower, behind a machine gun on the quick reaction force. Ramadi in 2005 — a city of 400,000, cleared house by house. Ken ran the radio for his platoon and, as he puts it, “walked on every single street in our sector.” He got blown up by roadside bombs more times than he cares to count.

He came home decorated — the Navy & Marine Corps Commendation Medal with a “V” for valor, for helping evacuate a wounded Marine — out on his truck and to a hospital. He doesn’t lead with that. You have to pull it out of him.

The Navy & Marine Corps Commendation Medal · “V” for valor

Then a whole second life: UC Berkeley, Bleacher Report (where he met his wife, Chelsea), GoPro, Facebook. When COVID hit, he walked away from the tech career to become a stay-at-home dad — “the best job I’ve ever had.” A stop in Indiana, then Carlsbad in 2022.

He found Saturday Shred the way most good things find you — sideways. A Friday night out, his buddy Paul turning down a second beer because of “this workout in the morning.” Ken got curious. He showed up. The first one nearly broke him. He came back anyway.

Ask Ken what he believes in and he’ll tell you plainly: showing up. It’s his whole language for friendship. The Marines drilled it into him until it was bone-deep — it’s not about you. It’s about the man to your left and the man to your right.

That ethic is exactly why the Shred grabbed him. There’s nowhere to hide in our workouts. You either show up or you don’t, and everyone sees which one you are.

And when it counts, showing up stops being a metaphor. When Paul lost his father, the guys didn’t send a text and move on. They showed up on Saturday and put Paul through the workout — the pain he asked for, the pain that helped. Some people show up with a tray of food. These men showed up with a sled.

He shows up the same way for Chelsea and the kids, and for the friends who’ve become brothers. Every Saturday. No questions.

What war left Ken with isn’t what you’d guess. It isn’t hardness. It’s perspective.

Days from coming home, after a firefight, a fellow Marine said something Ken has carried ever since:

He’s quick to say he’s not bulletproof. He still gets stressed. He still gets overwhelmed. But underneath all of it there’s a floor that doesn’t move — a quiet certainty that whatever it is, it’s going to be alright.

That holds even for the hardest things. Ken has buried a parent. Tragedy doesn’t get easier, he says — but you carry the knowledge that you’ve survived things just as hard, or harder, and you’ll survive this too.

It’s why, when the hill gets steep — the literal one on Saturday, and the ones life hands you — Ken is the calm in the group. Deliberate. Steady. The man whose energy tells you, without a word, that we’re going to be okay. That’s exactly who you want to your left and your right.

When Ken moved to Carlsbad, he had a family, a house, and no friends of his own. All of them were Chelsea’s. The first few months were lonely in a way men don’t often admit out loud.

Here’s the part worth sitting with. At this stage of life, most of what we do is for someone else — the kids, the wife, the job. Saturday Shred is the rare thing Ken does that’s for him. And what he got back wasn’t just a workout. It was a brotherhood with real depth — the kind that’s almost impossible to find as a grown man.

It doesn’t stay in the gym, either. It’s Cabo trips and birthday dinners and Friendsgiving, the wives becoming friends, the whole thing spilling out into a real life together. The kind of friendship where you show up for each other no matter what — no questions asked.

Ken says he feels sorry for the men who don’t have this. He’s right. And he’s right about the fix, too.

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. You build it, you show up, and one day you look around and realize the man to your left would carry you off any hill you fell on. No questions asked.

P.S. If you’ve been meaning to show up — consider this your sign. Saturday. The hill isn’t going anywhere, and neither are we.