Shred Letter No. 4.

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

This week we sat down with a man who does nothing halfway — who set out to get fit the same way he built a 20-year company: pick an impossible goal, then engineer your way to it. He also happens to be the glue that keeps our whole crew together. Meet Jeremy Ricks.

Jeremy was born in Durham, North Carolina — his dad an accounting professor at Duke — and moved to the Bay Area at seven. He was a multi-sport kid who gave it all up for tennis, went on to play Division I at Boulder, and took five and a half years to graduate, which tells you he was in no hurry to leave.

After college he did what a lot of us dream about and never do: he became a ski bum in Vail. Waited tables at night, skied every day, lived on the river. And then, at the peak of it, he walked away — because he looked at the forty-five-year-old bartenders still chasing the same weekend and decided that wasn’t going to be him.

THE VAIL DAYS · BEFORE THE REAL WORLD CALLED

He moved home, took a $35,000-a-year job in online advertising, and within six months started his own media-buying company. That was 2006. He’s been at it ever since — twenty years, a team of thirty, and eventually his own health brand, Terra Health Essentials. Today he’s semi-retired, works a few hours a day, and builds his life around his family and his training.

He’s been married to Brontë for eight years — they met at the Bier Garden in Encinitas back when she was in nursing school — and they have three sons, ages two, four, and six.

He found Saturday Shred about three years ago. He was at a playground sandpit with his kids when he saw a dozen guys sprinting down a hill and playing medicine-ball volleyball. “What in the world are these guys doing?” He tracked down Aidan, who — and Jeremy will tell you this himself — was pretty skeptical of a guy with “four Instagram followers.” Aidan agreed to train him privately first, and when he felt Jeremy’s fitness was ready, he finally let Jer join a Shred. He’s been all in ever since.

If you want to understand Jeremy, understand this: he does not do anything halfway.

He approached getting healthy the exact way he built a company — not with a hope, but with a system. Set the goal, make it almost unreasonable, then reverse-engineer the path.

Most of the goals he’s set, other people called unachievable. He’s hit most of them anyway — not by wishing, but by engineering his schedule and his efforts around the outcome until there’s a high probability of success. It’s worked in his business, his investments, and other areas of his life. Now he’s applying it to his training, to see how good he can actually get.

Here’s the part that gets us. Jeremy went basically fifteen years — from twenty-five to forty — without training for his health at all. Then he started, he fell in love with the way it made him feel, and the more he did it, the more he wanted. He got addicted to the one thing worth being addicted to.

A quick one, because it’s too good not to tell. Hunter McIntyre — one of the best Hyrox athletes on the planet — came across a Shred video of Jeremy strolling out of a workout while everyone else ran past him. What Hunter didn’t know was that Jeremy had just emptied the tank anchoring an all-out 250-meter row. He just saw a guy taking it easy.

So Jeremy — being Jeremy — took the elite athlete up on it, trained on his program, and then talked Hunter into joining a Shred this week. Leave it to Jer to find a way to get the best Hyrox athlete in the world over to our garage in Rancho Santa Fe and surprise all the guys with an absolutely unforgettable experience. Hunter called it one of the most exciting and challenging workouts he’d done in years.

▶  WATCH · HUNTER TAKES ON A SHRED

That’s another thing about Jer: he finds a way to create memories with the people he loves — it’s what life is about for him. You could see it afterward. He was on cloud nine, and we all knew why. Not because of his own workout, but because he knew he’d made an impact on the guys, and on Hunter, and created something none of us will forget. It wasn’t for him. It was for us.

There’s a reason health stopped being a hobby for Jeremy and became a mission. About eighteen months ago, a routine first colonoscopy turned up a bulge in his appendix. He went in to have it removed and woke up to news he wasn’t expecting.

Now nearly everything he does points at one thing: be here, healthy, for as long as possible — and hand that down to his boys. Organic vegetable beds in the backyard. Real attention to what the family eats. And a quiet, private goal that has nothing to do with anyone else.

And when Jeremy talks about that second chance, he doesn’t take credit for it. He gives it away.

Nobody shows more gratitude for what Shred is than Jer. It’s exactly why the guys started calling him Jerbear — a big-hearted teddy bear of a man you just can’t help but love.

Ask Jeremy what Saturday Shred is really about and he won’t say the workout. He’ll say the brotherhood — and he means it more than most.

He’s the one who keeps it alive. When the energy dips, when Aidan’s away, when it’s a hundred degrees on a Sunday and nobody wants to move — Jeremy is the guy calling around, dragging everyone out, refusing to let the thing fade.

The days Jeremy takes it upon himself to get the crew together and make it happen, we call those workouts JEROX — a Shred with Jer’s own creative spin on it, and every one of them has been epic.

You saw it when Paul lost his father. It was Jeremy who rallied everyone — who organized a workout in Barry’s honor, to sweat alongside Paul and help carry some of the weight of that week. That’s the instinct. When it matters most, he’s the one who moves first.

And it runs toward joy just as much. Jeremy turns any excuse to celebrate into something you don’t forget. When I turned forty last year, he threw a surprise party for me at his house — catered by his private chef — and gave the most genuine toast. Grief or celebration, he shows up all the way.

Every year he opens his cabin in Lake Arrowhead and gathers the dads up the mountain for what’s become known as “dad camp.” That’s Jeremy in one image: generous in every way there is — with his home, with his time, and most of all with his spirit.

What’s beautiful is where he’s chasing all of this from. He spent his twenties and thirties reaching for more — more wealth, more abundance, the thing that would finally make him feel full. He doesn’t reach from that place anymore.

That’s the whole secret, isn’t it. Not chasing to fill a hole — chasing because your cup is already full.

This week we had a special call with our friend Jules Horn — a somatic healer who teaches that the kingdom of heaven is within.

Jeremy is someone who embodies that belief and puts it into action in every area of his life. From a place of gratitude and appreciation, he knows that everything he could ever want on the outside is already within him. And the charismatic energy that belief gives off has helped him create his own version of heaven on earth.

As we wrap up our conversation, Jeremy has a smile on his face as he envisions what the future holds. Picture it, twenty years from now: a pack of sixty-something-year-old dads — us — lining up against our own twenty-something-year-old sons on the same hill we run today, and holding our own. The boys who once toddled around the sandpit, now grown, hitting a Shred beside the men who built this for them. “What we do today,” Jeremy says, “is just the tip of the iceberg.”

THE NEXT GENERATION · JEREMY & HIS BOYS

Set the goal. Make it lofty. Engineer your way there — and bring your brothers with you. Then turn around and make sure every last one of them makes it too. Nobody does it more fully than Jer.

P.S. Whatever the lofty goal is that you keep talking yourself out of — set it this week. Then work backwards. We’ll see you on the hill.