They would bring in coffee at five o’clock in the morning in this round jug. It was quite large—it probably held four gallons, five gallons—and we would wrap the laundry bag through the handles and we would do curls with that.

You played a lot of basketball in prison. Why was that important?

Basketball helped me develop a lot of relationships. In prison, friendship is not "having friends.’ You’re not going in there to meet new people; you’re not there to hang out. You stay by yourself. The only places you really interact are on the card table or on the basketball court. Card tables cause fights—I stayed away from that.

The basketball game there is like street ball. There isn’t any order to it, really. You’ll have different courts—some with guys who can’t play at all, and then you’ll have the courts with the guys who can play. But even with them they’ve never really played organized ball. It’s really rough. You never call fouls unless you get really beat up. It’s almost like White Men Can’t Jump. I actually learned a lot from that movie. You go in and people think you don’t belong on that court; you belong on the other court. But you show them that you can play—block them out, screen them, shoot jump shots—do things that other people can’t do because they’ve never been around that organized environment. It was really good because I could get on the court, and I know that my game is going to impress them and they’re going to respect that.

What was the gym like in the maximum-security facility where you lived?

There was a fifteen- to twenty-foot area where they had all the weights. There were two or three cable machines. They had three Smith machines and generally only one was in working order. The Smith machines were the closest we could get to doing what I consider the good moves—squats, deadlifts, bench press. Then they had the leg extensions, the machine bench press—but you couldn’t change the motion or move the bench around. They have about twenty fid machines that people used. And they had a volleyball court. They had two treadmills; in the wintertime that wasn’t even close to enough.

Is it true that inmates lift weights all the time? Is everybody jacked?

No, no. I used to wonder why guys wouldn’t use the time in there more. There are 300 people in the housing unit, you all go out to the ercise yard. You have fifty guys on the basketball court, fifty guys on the handball court, and a lot of times they’re just messing around. You’ll have a lot of guys who just want to sit there and smoke and talk to each other; they’re just waking around. They’re hustling; they’re selling cigarettes or drugs.

Then out of those 300, you have 100 guys in the gym. A lot them, they’re just talking, telling stories, and out of them who have forty or fifty who really want to get in shape, and they understand that health and fitness can take them somewhere. And out of those people the ones who actually work out the right way and educate themselves and see any gains is so few. It was a lot more when I was in there, because I was like, "Just do this, do these moves, forget that other stuff.’

So you became the de facto trainer at the prison gym. How did that happen?

Once I got to prison and I started getting in better shape than everyone else, people can really respect that. They see that. They know that you have the exact same tools as they have—I don’t have any more weights than you have. I don’t have any more recreation time than you have. I don’t have any more nutrition than you have. But somehow I’m achieving better results. People would start asking, "How do you do that?’ These guys, when you walk in they’re looking at you like prey, a year or two years later, they’re looking up to you. "How do I get there, man?’ They’re respecting you and they want your help. They want to hang out with you. That really helps survive prison.