Just Curious
About four years ago, I began feeling middle-aged. I felt like my energy had dropped. I got winded in Kung Fu practice more often. I gained a little weight, including in places where I never carried weight before, like my back. (For some reason, I found the back-fat particularly offensive and unacceptable.) Probably nothing about any of this should have been surprising, since I was cresting into my mid-forties. I was middle-aged and so I was feeling middle-aged, big duh. Part of me said, “Well, this is just what it is.” But another part of me asked, “Does it have to be this way?”
The part of me that questioned eventually asked another question, “What would happen if I tried to train as close to the level of a professional athlete as my body and schedule will allow?” I got curious about this question, flipping it around my mind for several months. To be sure, I was not very clear then, and am still not all that clear now, what it means to train like a professional athlete, having never been one, or even hung out with any. Still, it represented a kind of ideal or mind-set, if nothing else a level of seriousness and attention, something to move toward. Why not see what can be done?
My first concrete step toward this rather nebulous goal was to begin going to my Sifu’s early Kung Fu class. Previously, I went to his 7:30 am class three mornings per week, but could only stay for an hour in order to get to work relatively on-time. My Sifu’s early class, however, started at 5:30 am and ran until 7:30 am three mornings per week, which immediately doubled my class time. At first, it was pretty hard, dragging out of bed, trying to coax sore legs into action. In truth, it never got all that much easier, but I improved so much with extra lesson-time that stopping never seemed like an option. Besides, how would an athlete train?
But still, I felt like I could and should be doing more, especially on the conditioning front. As I have explained elsewhere on this site, I consider conditioning for Kung Fu to be my responsibility. There is a huge amount that my Sifu can teach me, and it is a waste of time with him if I am not sufficiently conditioned to execute at the best of my abilities.
The search for conditioning led me to Crossfit. And it was hard. For the first six months, I could barely walk the next day after class. Picking up Crossfit immediately added three more hours of training to my week, not an easy adjustment for my body. But it was so worth it, as I saw such immediate gains in strength and overall performance. Not long after, I added aerials as a way to challenge myself more. Then, I increased Kung Fu practice time outside of class. More recently, I have added more yoga practice. And so it goes. Incrementally adding more and more training. Struggling with increased demands initially, adapting, and then adding a bit more.
So this is now my middle-age. A “get it while you can” mind-set has sunk in. I was curious, and I am still curious - how far can I go? Often, I still feel tired, but for a very different reason than before. If I am winded, it is because I just did a work-out that would knock a lot of twenty-somethings on their asses. And, as an added benefit, the dreaded back-fat is gone (replaced by muscles that I previously did not know existed). Do I train at the level of a professional athlete? Probably not, but I do train to the greatest extent that my body and schedule will allow. And it’s real sweet.
