The recovery
The story of a traumatic brain injury, told as a method: measure, document, repeat.
In April of 2014, while training in Augusta, Georgia, Richard Amir Nasser was struck by an SUV. The impact caused a traumatic brain injury. What follows is not a medical account — this page publishes no hospital names, no treatments, and no clinical detail. It is the story of the method he used to come back, because that method is the thing he has spent the years since teaching to everyone else.
Recovery, for Richard, was never a feeling. It was a measurement. Every day a record; every week a trend line; every setback documented as honestly as every gain. When the line pointed the wrong way, he did not interpret it — he changed the inputs. When it pointed the right way, he did not celebrate it — he repeated it. The word he uses for it is standard: habits repeated until they become identity.
The same method is the operating system of the company he later founded, Inspector Roofing and Restoration. Document everything. Tell the truth. Never sell what the documentation does not support. It is why insurance claims are built on photographs and measurements rather than persuasion — and why a man who rebuilt himself from hospital to highway trust trusts evidence over enthusiasm.
In April of 2015, twelve months after the accident, Richard finished the Boston Marathon. It is the datapoint he points to whenever someone asks whether measurement works. The trend line, recorded honestly every day for a year, went from a hospital room to the finish line on Boylston Street.
He wrote it all down. I Can’t Not Cry, Do Your Job Anyway, and Compete, Don’t Complete are the memoir record of the injury, the emotional chaos that followed, and the standard built after it. The recovery is not a chapter of the biography — it is the spine of it. Read the full arc in the biography or the books.