How a Catastrophic Accident Created an Unstoppable Man with John Ulsh

MODM - John Ulsh

Hector [00:00:00] John, welcome to the Modern Masculinity Podcast. It’s an honor to have you here.

John [00:00:06] Thank you. It is great to be here.

Hector [00:00:09] The listeners just heard a little bit about your story. You mentioned before we started recording you’ve been speaking four out of the last seven days. You’re this person on stage, and there’s tons of applause. People might say you’ve been through your mess and now you’re on the victory tour.

Hector [00:00:33] But I’m curious—whether it’s as a parent, partner, business owner, speaker, influencer, author—any of these roles you might take on, what are you still dealing with today that you’re still mucking through?

John [00:00:54] What’s interesting about me is my story is based off my whole family being in a horrific car accident 17 years ago. I haven’t gone a year in 17 years without surgery related to the car accident. I’ve had over 45 surgeries. So when you ask what’s still going on, this is a never-ending process.

John [00:01:18] Before we got here today, I spent an hour and a half in a hyperbaric chamber trying to avoid having a surgery this year. Being “F1 45” sounds cooler than “46,” right? But I’d love to go a year without having to go into surgery.

John [00:01:43] Now I’m aging on top of this. The accident happened at 36; I just turned 54 on Sunday. So I’m battling complications and father time. I’m a gym rat, and part of that is because I need to keep my body as healthy as possible to make up for all the other issues we’ll talk about later.

John [00:02:09] I’m a parent, I’m a spouse, I’m a business owner. Speaking has been in my blood since the car accident, but I’m more of a giver—to help people who are overcoming their own setbacks.

John [00:02:30] Mine happened on the way to a swim meet with an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old in the car on a Saturday afternoon. A car crossed the center line at 55 on an undivided highway—no skid marks—125-mile-an-hour impact speed, upside down, just like that.

John [00:03:00] So when you say what I’m working on today, I’ve been working on the same thing for 17 years: trying to be a parent through all that, trying to be a spouse, trying to be a business owner, and constantly getting a setback—being told I’d have surgery again for something.

Hector [00:03:22] What has that been like? There’s the external side—you’ve got to put your body back together. But then you’ve got to manage your family and everything else externally.

Hector [00:03:39] And then there’s John on the inside who went through this tragic event. What was the interaction like between those two worlds—the inner world and the outer world? Were they in step? What was that like?

John [00:04:07] They weren’t in step until really recently—last couple years—when I’ve really worked on the inner part.

John [00:04:35] It was a combination of constant surgeries, constant rehab: make progress, then be told, “This new surgery means you can’t lift more than 10 pounds for the next 10 weeks.” Meanwhile you’re running a business, raising kids, trying to make sure their opportunities aren’t negatively impacted by you.

John [00:05:00] One part of my story is: two and a half years after the accident, my daughter was outside juggling a soccer ball while I’m sitting in the office watching her. I look up, she’s not there, and she comes in crying. I assume she hurt herself.

John [00:05:06] She sits down and says, “I miss my old daddy—the one who had trained with me.” I quit outpatient rehab the next day and started training on my own.

John [00:05:30] A lot of my story is I became known in media for being “the person who was supposed to be broken” and then took over their own therapy and training.

John [00:05:55] But mentally—survivor’s remorse, PTSD from the accident—I kept pushing that down for a long time. I just kept pulling up my bootstraps and doing what I thought I had to do.

John [00:06:00] My last child left for college three years ago. It wasn’t until I was left with an empty nest—no golf tournaments, soccer tournaments—that I felt like I could write the book and work on my mental health.

Hector [00:06:30] In the book, it seems practical—go through something horrible, then make a plan and write it out. Was it just that? Or was there an inner shift that had to happen first?

Hector [00:07:00] I’m playing devil’s advocate for someone who looks at the book and says, “It’s too simple,” or “I’ve heard this before,” or whatever excuse they make.

John [00:08:09] It is simple. Most of the best things we’re supposed to be doing in life are simple. It’s generally not the plan—it’s the execution.

John [00:08:32] Any really successful business plan isn’t secret sauce; it’s execution.

John [00:08:53] For me, there were plenty of setbacks where it would take me months—sometimes a year—to give myself enough grace to say, “It’s okay that you can’t get yourself up right now. You’re not ready.”

John [00:09:00] One of my first pillars is commitment. People think they want to tackle something, but they don’t really have the commitment. Maybe they don’t have the bandwidth right now, the support, the know-how. There’s a lot that goes into commitment besides just saying, “I want this.”

John [00:09:10] There were plenty of times I knew what to do, and I still chose that I wasn’t ready to do it—especially after doing it five, six, seven times and falling backward into another surgery or setback.

John [00:09:39] But if you don’t love the process you’re going through, you won’t ever be happy with the goal. The beauty is in the process.

John [00:10:00] If I hated going to the gym and didn’t like the people there, I wouldn’t have done it long term.

John [00:10:02] If you hate learning and getting better, you’re never going to be really good at it. Podcasting is a learning process—if you didn’t love it, you wouldn’t keep doing it because it’s a lot of commitment and time.

Hector [00:10:26] I think there’s something inherent about being challenged in this way, at least for masculinity.

Hector [00:10:58] A lot of classic stories begin with tragedy. Men are confronted with what they’re committed to—what they’re willing to die for.

Hector [00:12:00] These events push people up against those realities and force an answer—or not.

John [00:12:40] One of the biggest “ahas” for me is the setbacks and challenges were more learning than any of the real successes.

John [00:13:00] It’s cliche to say you learn more from failures than successes, but it’s 100% true. When you’re succeeding, you want to hold onto the status quo—and the status quo is the hardest thing to hold onto. Generally you’re either going forward or backward. It’s hard to maintain.

John [00:13:22] Every time I thought I was in maintenance mode, something medically or relationship-wise would throw me backwards.

John [00:13:39] Restarting again let me rethink how I’d do it this time. Getting knocked down over and over doesn’t feel great, but at a certain point you get skilled at dealing with adversity.

John [00:14:00] When you almost died and you’re given a 3% chance to survive, everything kind of seems like borrowed time anyway.

Hector [00:14:30] That’s how I feel sometimes. The worst thing to happen to someone is the worst thing that’s happened to them.

Hector [00:15:00] I’m not sure being a man is harder today, but it’s more complicated. There’s more going on. It feels like people want a holistic experience—health, parenting, business, sanity—while the world feels like it’s falling apart. It can feel overwhelming.

John [00:16:31] One takeaway is that as I was recovering—especially the first five or six years—I didn’t have much energy because my body was constantly healing and I was constantly going through surgeries.

John [00:17:00] I had so many hours in a day—sometimes six, sometimes eight—and I had to divide that between work, health and exercise, physical therapy, and my kids.

John [00:17:12] I tried not to take away from the health part because, in the end, taking care of my body would benefit everybody.

John [00:17:12] But sometimes my spouse and kids didn’t get enough because work took too much. They learned: if I was sitting in my chair at 7 or 8 p.m. and not talking, they didn’t talk to me either—because I had reached my max. Anything I gave at that point wouldn’t be quality.

Hector [00:17:59] Looking back, is it just grace—limited energy—or are there things you could have done differently, tactically, to create more space?

John [00:18:45] The first two and a half years, they told me I’d be stuck in a wheelchair forever. Within two years I could walk with a walker. I was defying odds, but I wasn’t pushing as much as I could. I was satisfied I was alive.

John [00:19:00] There was resentment. The accident wasn’t our fault. The other driver wasn’t on drugs or drinking, but was distracted—crossed the center line, no skid marks. He had no insurance. There was no big lawsuit win—just expense, injury, and hurt.

John [00:19:58] I struggled with survivor’s remorse: why was I here? I was given less than a 3% chance. What’s God’s plan? A friend who’s a pastor said, “Maybe you’re just here so your kids have a parent.” That was the first answer I got, and it was more than a year and a half after the accident.

John [00:20:20] My daughter saying she missed her “old daddy” was a catalyst to work harder.

John [00:20:39] Part of my story is my left lung completely collapsed because my diaphragm was ruptured; my right lung was partially collapsed. I was alive for over two hours with just half a lung. But I was a marathon runner. I ran 12 miles that morning.

John [00:21:00] I was 185 pounds, 6'2", probably 9% body fat. It saved my life.

Hector [00:21:14] Do you attribute your survival to being in that good of shape?

John [00:21:21] A hundred percent. I’ve received awards for survival, which is the weirdest thing, because the only thing I can claim I did was be physically fit. Everything else is God and surgeons.

Hector [00:21:50] It’s a reminder: proactive measures matter, and you can’t do them afterward.

John [00:22:48] Today I’m still about 9.5% body fat. I’m 220 pounds and I can throw around a lot of weight. I’m missing half my abdominal muscles. My pelvis was shattered, my back was broken, I have no feeling in my left leg—but I can still do these things.

John [00:23:19] You can’t buy that. You can take steroids, but steroids don’t do anything if you don’t go to the gym. Muscle is earned. There’s no cheat code.

Hector [00:24:12] You talked a lot about setbacks. I think identity plays a role—how we see ourselves.

Hector [00:25:00] You had a mental image of yourself as fit and strong, and you did things aligned with that identity. Many people are redefining their identity. What would you say to someone struggling with self-worth who doesn’t see themselves as their ideal?

John [00:26:33] For a long time, all I wanted was to get back to where I was. It wasn’t until I let go of that concept—that I wasn’t ever going to be myself again—that I could move forward.

John [00:27:00] My options were to be a new version of myself. I liked who I was at 36 when the accident happened.

John [00:27:06] But the more I pushed toward that goal, the more I realized it was unobtainable, and it would only lead to disappointment. Running again at the level I was at was never going to happen. At best I went from a 6–6.5 minute mile to about 12.5—and it was painful and not a good idea.

John [00:27:29] I needed a new vision.

John [00:28:00] What drove me wasn’t disappointing other people: not letting my kids down, not letting my spouse down, not letting down business partners. I didn’t want to be a burden to anyone.

John [00:29:00] I could have gone on Social Security dependency. Nobody would have said I could go back to work. I could have stayed in a wheelchair. I didn’t want to be that burden.

John [00:29:08] Another thing: I could control the pain I caused myself versus the pain from the accident that I couldn’t control.

John [00:29:32] What drove me in the gym wasn’t lifting a certain amount of weight. It was: can I push myself harder? So when I go to bed, instead of thinking about my back and pelvis, I’m thinking about my shoulders—because I did that to myself and I have control over that.

Hector [00:30:08] Talk to me about habits. Do they play a role in going from “broken” to thriving?

John [00:30:32] Forming a habit is repetitive first steps. It’s taking a first step and doing it every day. Habits become lifestyle changes, and lifestyle changes bring change.

John [00:31:00] Some habits stick and some don’t. The ones that stay usually give you satisfaction—runner’s high, post-workout feeling, success from writing a chapter.

John [00:31:29] If you hate the process, you won’t develop the skill or the permanent change. People lose weight fast, but if they hate exercise and tracking food, they put it back on because it was about the finish line, not loving the process.

Hector [00:32:21] We’re in a time where drugs like GLP-1s can make people skinnier without hard work. AI can reduce cognitive work. There are tools to avoid effort. How do you look at that phenomenon?

John [00:33:27] Instant success has little value in your quality of life. It’s like lottery winners who go bankrupt—they didn’t do anything to get wealth, didn’t learn how to manage it.

John [00:34:00] I think there’s a place for weight loss drugs in true obesity—where health is at stake. But if you want to lose 20 pounds just to look better in jeans, it feels like you’re messing with your health when you should make real lifestyle changes.

John [00:34:54] I can understand not being able to give something up. I was on narcotics and addicted physically. I had to go through withdrawal. I knew I could have taken the medicine and felt better, but I went through it anyway.

John [00:35:36] When people can’t lose weight or get off drugs, I don’t look at them and say they’re weak. I think: you’re not ready, and you need to put yourself in an environment where you’re willing to explore getting better—listen to a podcast, find people who align with what you want, and move slowly.

John [00:36:00] There isn’t a pill or shot that makes us better. There shouldn’t be—you should want to work for what you want.

John [00:36:26] My kids watched me go through surgery after surgery and go to the gym over and over. If anything, I’ve shown them success isn’t measured by a dollar sign. It’s measured by saying I want to do something, going after it, and when I fall backward, I keep going.

John [00:37:56] I believe in falling in love with the process more than the outcome. There’s no great athlete who hates practice.

Hector [00:39:00] One thing that has helped me is lengthening the finish line—seeing challenges as part of a bigger process. Otherwise things can feel heavy, and people can wonder what the point is.

John [00:41:54] I think you and I are messengers at this point. Our messages aren’t the same because our experiences aren’t the same.

John [00:42:12] If you’re called to share your experiences, you’re acknowledging failures and successes. If we only talked about successes, people would call bullshit.

John [00:43:00] I’ve had dark periods where I didn’t feel like doing anything because I was sick of being knocked down.

John [00:44:09] I think in a society that pushes men to succeed and wear five or six hats, you can’t be all those things. I’m terrible at multitasking.

John [00:44:32] A sign of success is being able to outsource what you’re not good at—like your editor. Or trusting experts—like doctors—once you’ve done your research.

John [00:45:11] Sometimes it’s building the team that compensates for what you’re not good at.

Hector [00:46:00] Are there any stories you were surprised made it in, or that you went back and forth on including?

John [00:46:05] There’s one that’s not in my book. There’s a gap in my life since the accident speaking.

John [00:46:28] About 15 years ago, when I started going back to the gym, I got picked up by local media. I was working out at a YMCA with young adults with Down syndrome who became my workout partners. That story got into People Magazine, Men’s Fitness, and had me traveling around to speak.

John [00:47:00] This was during the recession—stock market and housing market crashed. I was the “feel good” keynote breakfast speaker at big conferences.

John [00:47:54] Twelve years ago in August, my best friend—who was super involved in taking care of my family when I was hurt—died by suicide. That shook my world.

John [00:48:21] I cleared my slate. I canceled all speaking. I was too angry. I needed to make sure his kids were okay. And I couldn’t tell my story without telling what happened to him.

John [00:49:12] His kids are adults now—one graduated college, the other is about to graduate. It wasn’t until I could have an adult conversation with them that I could go back out and talk again.

John [00:49:36] I didn’t understand the mental health side. I had to put myself in therapy a couple years ago to learn to process it, and be okay with mental health.

John [00:50:03] I didn’t do the work when the accident happened. It’s been two and a half years in therapy with someone who specializes in soldiers with PTSD and drug addicts. I needed someone I could be blunt with.

John [00:50:30] Right now I don’t have a very big emotional range. I haven’t cried in 15 years. I don’t think it’s healthy, but it’s where I am.

John [00:51:00] I had to learn to block pain out—physical and mental. When you learn to block physical pain, you block mental pain too.

Hector [00:51:44] Have you pursued somatic work, breathwork, bodywork?

John [00:52:00] If you want to talk about how I got off narcotics: this was before the narcotics epidemic. Nobody was pushing me to get off them—they were like, “You need them.” But I could see where it was going: 30 mg became 60, 60 became 90, fentanyl patches stopped working. Tolerance builds.

John [00:52:30] I was losing my ability to remember things. We tapered gradually—from 90 to 60 over six months.

John [00:52:30] I worked through biofeedback, breathwork, acupuncture. My acupuncturist has been with me for 16 years.

John [00:53:00] Insurance didn’t want to pay for alternative pain management, but they would pay for narcotics. The alternative stuff was on my own dime. I live in a rural part of Pennsylvania, so finding practitioners was a challenge.

John [00:53:23] Meditation—I'm still not good at it. Prayer works better for me than breath-quiet work, partly because I have nerve damage. My left leg feels asleep all the time, so it’s hard to focus. It took years to tune out the white noise.

Hector [00:54:21] I’ve found breathwork helpful for releasing stored emotional pain. I’ve heard of deep bodywork like Rolfing—people have big releases.

John [00:54:43] I love Eastern medicine. The best is a good hybrid of Western and Eastern. I’ve been fortunate to find that.

John [00:55:14] I’m a unique case, so doctors are often interested. When they see my files and then see me walk in, they say, “You look really good, but you look like shit on paper.”

Hector [00:55:28] Better to have it that way. That’s where we’ll wrap.

Hector [00:55:56] If people want to find out about you and the book, where’s the best place to go?

John [00:56:00] My website is johnulsh.com. You can find pre-orders for the book there. It releases October 7 and is on pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the usual online sites.

John [00:56:18] My social is @johnulsh on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

John [00:56:41] I have a great team—we’re constantly creating and sharing stories. You’ll see fun stuff too. I take good care of my health, but I build into my diet four ounces of bourbon a day—I'm not giving it up. I smoke a cigar about once a week in the summer. I’m not perfect, but that’s life.

Hector [00:57:19] We’ll link all that in the show notes.

Hector [00:57:19] Last question: in your opinion, what’s the definition of modern masculinity?

John [00:57:30] Self-aware men. I don’t think you have to be put into a mold of what “successful” should look like.

John [00:58:00] If you want to be successful in business and don’t want family life, that should be an option. If you want to be a stay-at-home dad and your spouse brings in income, that should be an option too.

John [00:58:25] I don’t think you have to wear five hats, but I also don’t think you should corner yourself into “this is what it looks like” because it’s what your parent did or what someone you look up to did.

John [00:59:00] Own your vision for what you want, find your big why, then figure out how to get it. It’s going to be hard, but that’s part of it.

John [00:59:07] I think there’s feminine and masculine energy, but I don’t think roles need to be rigid. I love to cook; my spouse rolls the trash cans out.

John [00:59:34] But I do think there’s a part of being a man that’s built into most of us—to be protectors. I think women are built to be nurturers. Those can vary, but as a whole it’s what drives me.

John [00:59:34] I didn’t want to be a burden to my family. No matter how broken I was, I felt it was my responsibility to repair myself—to protect and take care of my family.