Crossing the Rubicon

What I am about to post soon almost contradicts what was written in my last post. I previously railed against the training-more-training mentality and argued for a saner schedule. But what did I do today? I trained literally in the morning, afternoon and night.

Yes, my faithful less than a handful of readers out there, I spent the morning in Brickfields doing Judo, then boxing and BJJ in the afternoon. To cap it off, five very hard randori sessions in the evening. I literally lived martial arts today. It was insane, something probably never to be repeated normally, but it was fantastic.

Why? Because every now and then, you have to cross the Rubicon of your training. The body, mind and spirit imposes limits way before it crosses the line. I think it's partly a survival mechanism, but recently, I think it's a product of environment. We seek comfort on our own terms. Thus, we apply the same to workouts similarly - it's got to be 'hard' but we define it as such and we reserve to right to walk away from it if it is too hard

But in real life, sometimes you can't walk away from whatever annoys, pisses you off or is trying to hurt you. It probably means that the only option is to stand and face it head on. This is what the martial arts is all about. It cares less about your self esteem than tearing it down and making you see that you are a whinging, soft, out of shape marshmallow who can't walk the talk. Yes, it's painful. But it does that

Today, I had a crummy session in the morning but the patience of my Judo sensei was almost Nelson Mandela like. He knew that I sucked, but he tried to make me suck less, even though I did at the end. I wanted to leave early, but I didn't and vowed that the best thing for me to do was to bugger this rest of the day and forget open mats; sleep in and feel sorry for myself

A few hours later, I was sparring with some pretty handy boxers at KDTA. You can't think about what a crappy day you have when something is jabbing at your head with GPS like precision. All you can do is react. This went on for couple of hours, by then I was physically and mentally spent. All I could think off was a hot, relaxing bath and a good meal. In the end,I found myself wearing my morning-soaked judogi eating a yoghurt to carbo load for one session of hard Judo randori

Or make that five. Everytime I slammed into the mat, the impulse was to stay down, or get up, sulk and make an excuse to leave. My timing was off, I was beat, and I was sucking more than what I was in the morning. But then suddenly, I started making some throws. Big ones. Not all the time, I was still the group whipping boy..but slowly enough...it was all coming together.

I had crossed the Rubicon.

At the end, I nearly passed out on the floor and the sound of me dry retching definitely was not my finest moment. But I didn't cop out. I stood face to face with the Bear, and God willing, I'll do it again.

You don't cross it once. It's got to be done again and again, until someday, you cross it for the last time. But that's another story