News from Ray
Twenty-Five Pools a Day
By Ray Diaz · August 2026
When I was a teenager in Key West, I got a reputation. Some of it I earned by being a kid with no idea how to handle what was happening to him, and a lot of it was just what a small town decides about you once it decides. People said I was a bad kid.
I was not a bad kid. I was a kid who wanted to fit in so badly that I learned how to talk to everybody. Every group, every type of person, every corner of that island. When you grow up somewhere that small you either learn people or you are alone, and I was not going to be alone. That skill, being able to sit with anybody, turned out to be the most valuable thing I own.
But once you have a reputation, doors close quietly. Nobody announces it.
A man named Ricky Jackson opened one anyway.
I met Ricky Jackson at the boxing gym inside Gold's Gym in Key West. He boxed, and he also owned a pool company. He knew what people were saying about me and he hired me anyway. That is the whole thing right there. He looked at a kid everybody had opinions about and offered him work instead of advice.
The job was twenty five to thirty pools a day. That is not a metaphor for anything, that is just a lot of pools, in Florida heat, at an age when most people are figuring out what to do with a summer. His son Jeremy taught me the trade, every part of how to clean a pool properly and how the business actually ran.
And here is the part I did not understand until decades later.
When you service a pool, you test the water. Every single one. You are checking chemistry, and one of the things you are always reading is alkalinity. That word entered my vocabulary at sixteen years old, standing over somebody's pool with a test kit in my hand, and it never left. It attached itself to something good in me, to being trusted, to having a job when nobody thought I deserved one.
I did some amateur boxing around then too. I was never a real boxer, I was a football player and a track guy, and Key West is not exactly a fight town. But I had fights, and I learned what it costs to stand in front of somebody.
Look at where I ended up. Fitness. Longevity. Training programs. A career built on what the body can do and for how long. And underneath all of it, water. I believe in water the way other people believe in a system, and I have spent years on alkaline water and molecular hydrogen because I am convinced they are part of why I have held up the way I have. That is my own belief and my own experience, not a claim I make for anybody else's body.
But the belief did not come from a lab or a podcast. It came from Ricky Jackson handing a supposedly bad kid a test kit and a route.
That is what one person deciding to trust you can do. He probably never thought about it again. I have thought about it my entire adult life.
So when people ask why water, why longevity, why this direction after acting and fitness and everything else, the honest answer is that it started at sixteen, at twenty five pools a day, with a word I liked the sound of.
Alkalinity.