Being The Athlete/Person You Want To Be

Everybody wants to either: lose 10 lbs, put 10 lbs of muscle on, get stronger, get fitter, be faster, be better etc. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Olympic Athlete or an ordinary Joe Schmo. I made my choice of who I wanted to be when I was around 8 years old and I’m still working at it – the task never stops. I don’t have any special talents and I’m not naturally or athletically gifted - something I discovered aged 19 when I realized despite my hard work and determination, I didn’t have what it took to be a professional Judoka. I also have accrued enough injuries and possible excuses to give up training many, many times over the years. I don’t write this to be congratulated or admired (people’s opinions of us don’t change who we are) but to draw attention to the spirit, enthusiasm and commitment that was shown during Saturdays training.

Saturday was tough, I know that: Gorilla Crawls on sand aren’t easy and sit-ups in the surf are hard. Training for 90 minutes without a break means your head has to be in a certain place. Everyone will have had their private thoughts e.g. “how much longer?” “I don’t think I can push out another rep.” But everyone bought into the concept and idea of keeping going, not giving up and more importantly smiling throughout the process. This is what training is about: hitting the moment when every part of the human condition, mental, physical and emotional comes together and lets you know who you are and who you can be, even if the result is no more than just a glimpse for the briefest moment – that moment should be one of complete satisfaction and that does makes you smile. When you have it, get it you don’t want the training to end.

It doesn’t happen every time you train or step out on to the mats if it did it wouldn’t mean anything. We all have the sessions when we suck (most people have seen me have my off days when lifting etc) and the ones where the end couldn’t have come quickly enough. Maybe these are the times when we question if what we’re doing makes sense or if we’ll ever “get it” or be good. The martial arts are full of the people who listen and take full notice of these doubts. They go from school to school, style to style, searching for the miracle, they stop running and lift weights, give up weights for swimming etc all in their quest for that “something” that is made/perfect for them. They never realize that you don’t make the training, the training makes you.

Saturday was a great reminder for me of this. As an asthmatic 8 year old I was gassed on the mats more times than I got to train but I made a decision to myself, that I would dig in and do my time. I knew everything physically that I tried would be hard and that I couldn’t cheat at either getting fit or being able to defend myself. But with the simple thinking of an 8 year old I knew that the training would make me.

Often we think too much. I used to see this when I was a personal trainer, teaching people how to lift weights in the gym. Lifting is dead simple. You want to get stronger, you have to lift heavier. There isn’t a simpler formula, yet just about everyone I trained wanted to cheat this. They wanted me to come up with cleverly formulated workouts, training different muscle groups one day, using complicated patterns of sets and reps and engaging in the most bizarre and esoteric training routines etc. They would read an article in “Men’s Health” and question me on it – if I told them they just needed to lift heavier weights in order to get stronger, they’d often see me as some form of lifting idiot who wasn’t privy to the secrets of the masters - f anyone wants to borrow my copy of Zatziorky’s classic text on Olympic Lifting, I have one of the few, rare copies BUT for all the words and theories it’ll still tell you to lift heavy if you want to get stronger .If my clients had approached their training with the simple thinking of an 8 year old, their training would be much more effective and productive. Apply the direct simple approach to what you do and you’ll get the results.

Children are often better at surviving wilderness disasters than their adult counterparts. In a child’s world nothing exists beyond the horizon, which means they don’t run/walk further than they can see. Adults think they know what is beyond the skyline, children don’t. If a child is hungry they stop and eat, if they’re tired they sleep. Their world is simple and their solutions are simple. They don’t look for alternatives they do what they need to do according to the situation they are in.

On Saturday, when you ran with a sandbag weighing 50 lbs or so, there were no alternatives (except for giving up), if you had to do push-ups you had to do push-ups etc. At the time you weren’t looking beyond the horizon to see where your efforts might be leading you those are the thoughts you have at the beginning and the end of the training. Everyone who steps out on to our mats to train does so having made a decision: you want to be someone. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an 8 year old or a 32 year old make the decision about who you want to be. In your training be the 8 year old and accept the situation. On Saturday everybody attacked the day as a child both in the dream and the situation. Those are the sessions which are truly amazing.