How to be Sick

Two days after the tiger challenge, I got sick. I’m just started to get better and starting to get things back on track because my numbers have taken a severe hit during the week (and a bit) I was recovering. 

I always try to include at least one non-physical personal requirement so that if I get sick or injured I can still maintain my kung fu and practice mastery. The trouble is I almost never employ these requirements when I am not doing well physically.

I know I should be using those contingencies I built for scenarios like this, but I also think it is a bit unreasonable to make any meaningful progress when I am feeling well and truly sick. If I can’t even take a break when I am ill can I ever take a break? This thought is scary, because I know Mastery is relentless (and this may just be because it’s coming off the heels of the tiger challenge) but lately it is feeling a bit too relentless i.e I’m feeling a bit burnt out and its making me fear my requirements rather than seeing them as tools to develop my training. 

I don’t know how to be sick and still train, I’m not sure what that looks like for me. “If I can’t rest when I actually need it I’m going to burn myself out and take even longer to get better” but at the same time, in that same voice in my head I hear ‘it’s too early, you still need to rest, don’t rush your recovery, one more day can’t hurt?’

I am torn, on the one hand I know in the past I have held too tightly to my numbers, trying to do regular pushups even when I am very sick has happened to me more than once. Sometimes I am scared of what will happen if I start to let them slip.

On the other hand I overcorrect this idea. ‘Well I do need to rest so I shouldn’t do anything,’ and sometimes this progresses past the point it is actually true, and becomes an excuse ‘I’m still recovering, I don’t want to rush anything so I better take another day off” and another, and another until it has been almost a solid week of almost no progress in any areas of my training, physical or mental. 

All this to say I don’t know how to adapt my training when things are less than optimal, which I recognize is a huge flaw in the way that I approach my training. Sometimes I think it’s a good mindset to have ‘it doesn’t matter how I’m feeling I should always be able to carry on with my training, if Mastery is relentless then I will have to be too. If Mastery doesn’t care then neither should I’ 

But when this inevitably fails, because of course this is not a realistic mindset to have, eventually I will get sick, I will get injured, I will have to stop, but I have no patterns in my brain to adapt to these changes. When I have to slow down, I just stop. It’s an all or nothing mentality. 

I need to get better at pinpointing the turning-point when it goes from a valid reason for taking a bit of a break, to when I start using it as an excuse, and I need to find out what slowing down actually looks like for me, because it’s nice to write out ‘when I can’t train physically, I have mental training I can do in the meantime’ but clearly I don’t actually do that, it’s just a nice idea, rather than an actual plan that works. I need to figure something else out. 

(Apologies if this blog is a bit all over the place, I wrote it over the course of two days with a fairly large stretch between them and I think the central idea for this blog was different on each day. Interesting to read it as a whole now and see my change in perspective even over such a short time.)

Current Total

Push-ups

11917

Sit-Ups

11448

AOK

324

Km

921

Blogs

14

Sparring

31

Hand Form

130

Weapon Form

170

Repair Relationship

0


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