Something personal

here’s an anecdote about my life.

For many years I trained martial arts and was in top shape. I didn’t train to be the best fighter and beat people up. I trained to be in good shape and because I didn’t like gyms, anyway that’s a tale for another day. I took a break from training, worked, wandered through the wilderness and got fat. I came back(something that is monumentally hard to do) and trained again. Around 2015 I was sparring with a fellow student. We spar with gloves and “shin pads” that do nothing and it’s full contact. The only rule is to pull and exerciser discipline and respect for your opponent who is also a student. Now this mans name was Mr. Maloney. He was and I’m sure still is a nice person. We trained for many years together and I’ll never forget him for two reasons. I want to understate this thought: when we die, all of us, at least 99.9% of us are in the end a series of memories and impressions left on other people in our lives. So this is how he was memorable to me. As I said we were sparring. Things were going good. The back and forth was good and then I made a mistake and ate a punch to the face. See it’s my fault, it was my fault for 2 reasons. 1 I didn’t block and thus was hit. Always block before striking you’ll live longer 2 I was moving in. So I was on an inward trajectory while the fist was outgoing towards my face. I will never forget this feeling. His knuckles pushing through the gloves filling my eye. I blinked and then I felt the pressure of the fist on my eye filled my socket. I’ll never forget that sensation and the person who gave it to me. There is a second time as well, before this sparring. We trained for 6 years at the same time. We took a brown belt test together. The belt tests at the school are the most intense in the world. The test starts at white belt and you do everything you learned in that belt 20 times. So for instance you learn 4 kicks in white belt you do them 20 times with each leg with an expectation of quality and speed to be met. the yellow belt test is about 2 hours long. Brown is about 7 hours long. We did the test together. At this level there is a lot of self defence, counters and knife defence to demonstrate. I’ll never forget this test. It was my worst, after my ego was demolished. I felt awful. Spoiler, we passed but we both knew it was lame. The tests are important milestones but the training will continue no matter the outcome. So we did it but I’ll never forget the pain he went through. He had a bad hip. He trained too hard and pushed a weak hip too much and lived with constant pain. At the end of the test we do 500 punches and 25 push ups and I’ll never forget we did the punches our teacher came out of the office, said do it again, and we had to do it again. To our instructors point our technique was sloppy. So we did them again and Mr.Maloney’s hip gave out. We do the punches in a horse stance, you can look it up. I’ll also never forget his screams of pain fighting through to hold this stance while counting the punches. He tried, we all did and still do, as hard as we can. I’ll never forget his fighting spirit.