“I hope and pray that they will see what I’m trying to say and even if it’s not me, that someone will say … ‘Get help,’” he continued. “Each and every time that I do a push-up, I do it for each and every person that I lost, especially Wesley and a few others that pop in my mind and the ones that are continually struggling right now.” It’s for a cause, it’s for a reason,” he said. “The point about them is not to just do them. One way he does this is by taking the #22PushupChallenge every other day to raise awareness of veteran suicide - only he does 2,222 so that it actually counts as a workout. That experience gave Rush a reason to talk more openly about his own feelings of depression and his post-traumatic stress disorder, which led him to start advocating for military transition-related issues.
After that happened, it was hard,” Rush said.Īnd he often thinks about what would’ve happened if he had answered his phone. “I kind of took it for granted that he was OK, like people took it for granted that I was OK. He wonders if Durden picked up on that and similarly tried to hide his suffering from others. Rush blamed himself in part, for putting on a front when he was feeling depressed and going through hard times. Rush said the hardest part was being able to relate to Durden. “It just tore me apart,” he said, the pain of that moment showing on his face as he talked. phone call from an old pal he served with in Iraq, who gave him the worst news he could’ve imagined: Durden had killed himself. Rush remembers getting a call from Durden as he was in the middle of something and ignoring his phone, thinking he’d have a chance to call the younger man back the next day. Wesley Durden, to suicide, shortly after Rush had trained him to compete on the TLC show “Next Great Baker” in 2011. The worst was after Rush lost his mentee, Sgt. I would cook, and I would cook, and I sometimes would make a six-course meal without even realizing it.” “I would just do it on a normal basis, and when I was feeling down or depressed or off my game sometimes, I would just go in the kitchen, pull out stuff and I would just start cooking. “I didn’t realize cooking was my therapy until I actually realized cooking was my therapy,” said Rush, whose own separation from the military was aided by his time in a unit at Virginia’s Fort Belvoir for transitioning wounded warriors.
He dealt with the raw physical and mental wounds of those experiences the only way he knew how - by cooking. Rush said that while in service, he was part of convoys that came under fire while traveling through combat zones, among other experiences. He was in the Army for 23 years and deployed to Iraq before medically retiring in 2016. And while that part of his internet fame comes with a lot of responsibility, he said, it’s also “pretty cool.” Rush never expected a big public platform, but one month in, he’s taking advantage of it to advocate for causes he’s been passionate about for years: food, exercise and veterans’ issues. He’s a little low on sleep these days trying to respond to everyone. (That’s 25 reps of 315 pounds for each body part and 2,222 push-ups every other day, in case you’re curious.) People want to know what it’s like to cook for President Trump, or Rush’s personal secret to staying so buff. “I get hundreds of emails or texts or pings a day,” he said in a recent interview, hours after receiving a gift from Arnold Schwarzenegger and an invitation to appear on a show with fitness guru Billy Blanks. But after a photo of him cooking outside the White House in a chef’s coat rolled up over 24-inch biceps went viral last month, the 45-year-old retired Army master sergeant is having a hard time staying under the radar - maybe for good.
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