56. in training

I am in training.

Coming back from my trip I'm going through the all too familiar drop in stamina that I've experienced a couple times this year whenever I step away from the kwoon for a while. I had every intention of keeping up with my forms on this trip, but with little space and even less time and energy than I was expecting (curse you planning fallacy!) it slipped, despite those good intentions (did manage to keep up with my pushups and sit-ups though so it wasn't a complete bust!)

Now with less than a month until The Day That Must Not Be Named I get a slow and persistent creep of fear up my neck anytime I think about where I am in my training. 

"You've wasted so much time, you should have never gone on that trip, you're back to where you were in the beginning, you're not going to make it, you're wasting time your time doing this right now," the voice in my head whispers. 

I feel like coming back from this trip has left me in a very odd place in my training, with half of my brain arguing that I need to live my life, there will always be things like this that disrupt your training, and often times they're unplanned so I need to accept that things like this are part of the ups and downs of the journey, while the other half of my brain argues that I should have never gone on that trip in the first place. 

It was a choice I made and now I need to live with the consequences. I know I don't have an undo button, I don't have a time machine, I have to live with my decision and try to reconcile with the sad fact that time only moves forward. (In these confusing times I am comforted as I remember the words of wisdom: you cannot unMountainDew what has already been MountainDone.)

But in searching for some sort of counter-argument to that mean voice I had a tiny lightbulb moment. I realized that this training isn't any less real than any other training I've done this year. Just because my numbers are nowhere near where I want them to be doesn't meant this training is pointless. 

At this point my logic finally caught up to back me up insisting, "doing this training is the only way you can get to where you want to be, so of course it's not pointless! In fact, this is probably the best type of training I can do right now because the strength and stamina will come back every time you do kung fu, but the mental strength, you get much fewer opportunities to exercise." Right now when I feel at my weakest, when my chest hurts from ragged breaths, and my muscles stop listening to me, but I keep trying to push myself anyway, that's what's going to be important, because that's exactly how I'm going to feel on grading day. No matter what I start off that day with in terms of stamina, I'm going to be exhausted, so practicing pushing myself when it feels like things are pointless is exactly the type of practice I should be doing. 

14/30

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