I drank a bottle of wine a night for six to eight years.
Boxed wine, mostly. Quietly. After dinner. The way a guy convinces himself it's part of unwinding, part of being a grownup, part of the deal.
I won four CrossFit Games Masters titles during that stretch.
That's the part that makes this hard to talk about, because for a long time it gave me cover. If I was still winning, how bad could it be? If I was still recovering enough to train at the level I trained, then surely it wasn't a problem. I had the proof on the podium. I had the medals. I had the standings.
What I didn't have was the version of myself my family deserved.
The math I refused to do
A bottle of wine a night, year after year, isn't a flourish on the side of an athletic life. It's a load. It compounds. It taxes recovery, it taxes mood, it taxes presence. It taxes patience with the people who live in your house.
I told myself the workouts would balance it out. They didn't.
I told myself I was a happy drinker. Mostly true, until I wasn't.
I told myself my recovery was fine because the lifts were going up. The lifts were going up because I'm stubborn and my training is precise. They were going up despite the wine, not because of anything balanced.
I knew the math. I just refused to do it.
January 1, 2024
I quit on January 1, 2024.
I didn't make a public statement. I didn't post about it. I didn't tell most people for a long time. I just stopped, and I committed to staying stopped, and I built my evenings around something other than a glass.
The first month I felt like I was missing a limb. The second month I started sleeping like I was twenty-five again. By month three, my wife told me I seemed like a different person. By month six, my sons noticed the difference even if they couldn't name it.
I'm now over fifteen months in. I have no plans to go back.
What my family got back
This is the part I actually want to write about. Not the drinking. Not the willpower. Not the discipline angle.
What my family got back.
They got a husband and a father who isn't moody at 9 p.m. They got someone who isn't checked out on the couch with a glass in his hand while everyone else is still living their evening. They got someone who is fully here during the hour before the kids go to bed, the hour that actually matters.
They got a calmer house. I am nicer when I'm sober. That's not a virtue. That's a fact about me. The wine made me sharper at the edges. The absence of it makes me softer in the way you want a father to be soft.
They got better mornings. I'm not dragging into the day. I'm not negotiating with myself about whether I have it in me to be present. I just have it.
They got a guy who recovers faster, sleeps deeper, trains harder, and finishes the day with the same energy he started it. The training is better. The business is sharper. But more than any of that, the man who comes home is the same man who left.
That is the thing I couldn't see for almost a decade.
The lesson I keep coming back to
You can be winning and still be hiding something from yourself.
You can be on the podium and still be operating at a fraction of what you actually have.
You can love your family deeply and still be quietly stealing from them every night.
I'm not telling you to stop drinking. I'm not preaching. I'm telling you what I found on the other side of the thing I told myself wasn't a problem. I expected to give something up. I didn't expect to get this much back.
If something in your life feels untouchable because the results are still good, that's exactly the thing to look at.
That was the long game I wasn't playing.
I'm playing it now.
— Jason Grubb
6-time CrossFit Games Masters Champion
Founder, Bolder Athlete
1:1 Coaching → jasongrubb.com