Albert So Rocks

As a boxer, Albert Liaw was used to fighting, but when he suffered a stroke, he had to face a new kind of fight for both his physical and mental health. Read about his recovery journey and triumphant return to coaching boxing.

So 12 years ago, I suffered a stroke as a result of overtraining for a fight.  I was an amateur boxer and boxing coach. I was training 6 to 8 hours a day, 6 days a week and even on my rest day, I was still shadow boxing so I didn’t get the necessary rest.  One day a blood vessel burst in my head and I suffered a stroke. As a result of my stroke, I have horrible balance and weakness on my left side. My balance is really bad. I need the assistance of a walker to get around.

Fast forward 5 years after the stroke and my wife couldn’t handle living with a cripple so she divorced me.  This put me in a serious depression. That on top of not having a purpose in life and a reason to live resulted in thoughts of suicide.  Then my little brother threw me a lifeline. He approached me to start a noodle business selling our dad’s awesome noodle recipe. The business gave me a reason to live, a reason to wake up.  I was in charge of marketing and accounting.

Fast forward another 5 years and our frozen noodles/farmer’s market business became a restaurant.  The name of our restaurant is Golomein Noodle House.

As part of my stroke recovery, I hired a personal trainer to rehab me.  And then, a great thing happened to me recently. Since one of the things we do in our business is selling noodles at farmer’s markets, we hired a young kid to help us sell at the market.  Well, I discovered this kid has a love of boxing like me. During one of our work sessions, I gave him a boxing lesson and discovered he is a naturally talented boxer. I offered to coach him and we have been working together ever since.  So I resumed coaching and it has been an amazing feeling to be back coaching.

Next, to improve my ability to coach boxing, I asked my personal trainer to teach me to coach better.  To achieve this, I started training my trainer to box. My original goal was to improve my mobility by getting my trainer to help me move better while coaching him.  Well, the owner of the training business saw me doing such a good job of coaching my trainer, he offered me a job teaching boxing to their clients. So this is a new and exciting chapter of my life.

To continue to follow Albert’s  journey follow him at @azn.assasin on Instagram. And connect with more stroke and brain injury survivors on the YouSoRock Facebook Support Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/yousorock.