Copyright © Geoff Thompson 2004
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'On the long journey from A to Z you learn an awful lot about B to Y, because there is often a lot more merit in what you learn on the journey than what you find at the journey's end.'

'The end matters most in the journey,
But it's the journey that matters most in the end.'

Old proverbs

This chapter is aimed, in the main, at those training (in whatever sphere) for the physical response, though the values and theories herein cover a far wider spectrum. No matter what it is you are trying to achieve in life, whether it is competence to excellence in the martial arts, faster track times in the world of athletics, building up a successful business, selling, even maintaining a healthy relationship with your spouse, you are always going to meet hurdles and pitfalls.

The inner opponent, in your own mind, can and will hinder your chances of success in any field, if not taken to task and controlled. The mind can be like an overbearing parent, frightened to give his child too much control.

As soon as you are starting to gain a little competence and get a little way up the mountain of self-realisation, your mind throws something tangible or intangible in your way to slow you down or stop you completely.

The further you get up that mountain, the more hurdles you climb over and pitfalls you cross, the stronger you become and thus the more control you gain over your own mind.

At the top of the mountain is the ultimate goal of complete self-control.

On the journey you will have developed, because of your overthrow of the hurdles and pitfalls, an iron will and an indomitable spirit. You will also gain enlightenment, because in order to get over some of the more difficult hurdles and pitfalls it is necessary to mentally dissect yourself, admitting and recognising your weaknesses in order to be able to confront and overcome them, and thus get past whatever stumbling block it is that's holding you back. This mental dissection is what develops enlightenment. This is why hurdles and pitfalls are, in essence, a godsend: without their challenge you wouldn't find enlightenment, you wouldn't develop the iron will that is necessary to confront them, nor the indomitable spirit that is developed by never giving in to them when the going gets tough.

The 'journey' is, metaphorically speaking, like a bowl of water, and you are like an inflated bicycle inner tube. You immerse the inner tube (yourself) into the water (the journey) to find out, via the bubbles, where there are any leaks (your own weaknesses).

Once you have found the leaks you can patch them up. Ultimately, you will have no leaks.

Hurdles and pitfalls can be many-splendoured things. They may be tangible or intangible. Sometimes, when there are no hurdles imminent, the mind, wishing to abort the journey, will invent silly ones. Basically speaking, hurdles and pitfalls come in three categories, but are uniform in one element, they are all reasons to give in, and are nearly always thrown in when the recipient is just starting to gain some kind of realisation and competence. Recognising them as hurdles and pitfalls and realising that the real benefits to be had from training are gained only by overcoming them will help immeasurably in your bid to do so.

The three categories of reasons not to continue the metaphoric journey are tangible, intangible and silly reasons.

TANGIBLE REASONS

These are incidental hurdles and pitfalls that are responsible for more 'lay offs' from training than any other reason. Broken bones, torn ligaments, twisted ankles, illnesses (one of my students once missed two months training because, and I quote, 'Me mum's got to 'ave an 'isterectomy') – the list goes on. With a serious injury it is foolish to keep training as the injury may become aggravated as a result. However, minor injuries should not deter you from conscientious practice.

You can quite easily train around such injuries. If your left hand is injured, train your right. I was in and out of hospital, and plaster, for two years, and had two operations in that time for a broken right wrist. I never missed training once and used the time to perfect my left-hand techniques. I have also had broken bones all over my body, but still managed to train around my injuries. Training under such adverse conditions requires and develops real will-power and is a great character builder.

With the more serious injury/illness that does lay you off, the danger lies in whether or not you get back to training after your convalescence. From my experience, most people do not. While you are recovering, try to visit your training establishment to maintain your ties and enthusiasm, as this will greatly help in your re-start program when the obstacle of bad health is removed.

A lot of people use their injuries to opt out because they found the going getting tough anyway, but remember this: if it was easy, everybody and his dog would be walking around with a black belt tied to his waist. If there is no adversity there is no advance.

INTANGIBLE REASONS

These can be as destructive in your advancement as the tangible, and in a psychological sense far more painful. Also, because they are mental as opposed to physical, they can quite often be very difficult to admit or detect. The greatest intangible is 'physical contact' – sparring or getting hit. A great percentage of people leave training because they are frightened of sparring. Even at the boxing club I coached at, it was common knowledge that you lost 85 per cent of your new starters after you put them in the ring for the first time.

The only way to overcome this fear is to confront it again and again until you become desensitised to it, and take heart, it does get better. The more you spar and put yourself in the firing line the better and more confident you will feel. In the world of real fighting, pain is unfortunately the ugly handmaiden, so it is imperative that you develop at least some tolerance for it if you want any chance of surviving a real situation.

BOREDOM

'It's getting boring.' If I had a penny for every time I've heard this excuse! Boredom is another major pitfall that loses many people from the martial arts arena and, in my opinion, it is a lazy excuse. Developing a technique into an instinctive reflex, developing power, speed, endurance, footwork or anything else worth having for that matter, requires repetition, and what is repetition if it isn't boring. From revising for a doctorate to perfecting a bayonet attack, both require repetition. Swimmers will practise hours and hours a day perfecting a stroke and jugglers will juggle until their hands bleed, all in pursuit of excellence. As martial artists, we are no different. For one technique to be effective in a 'live' situation we must do a thousand in the gym.

Boredom is the lazy man's excuse not to train. You must treat boredom as another challenge, hurdle or pitfall that must be bettered if advancement is to be attained. When boredom sets in you must use concentration to push it back out again. Sheer concentration on the technique you are practising will erode boredom. You must practice a technique until you are sick to death of it, then you will get good at it.

LACK OF ENJOYMENT

Lack of enjoyment in training is brothers with boredom. Another feeble excuse. Enjoyment in training comes and goes; nobody enjoys it all of the time. The real enjoyment comes from the fruits of training rather than the actual training itself. After all, to become proficient we must push ourselves through the pain of a gruelling training session. Who in their right mind enjoys pain? (My profuse apologies to all you masochists out there!)

If you are going through a bad patch of not enjoying your training, stick with it and try to treat the training as a mundane task that has to be done, the enjoyment will return. It's unrealistic to expect enjoyment all the time out of something so physically and mentally demanding. When the enjoyment is there, make the best of it, when it isn't, cope. It's all part of the character building process.

LACK OF IMPROVEMENT OR SUCCESS

Another favourite excuse for throwing in the towel is, 'I don't seem to be getting any better.' This is one of the mind's best finishing techniques: it kills off the enthusiasm of many students with the suddenness of cyanide tea. After all, what is the point of continuing in training if you're not getting any better? If I may use a metaphor, it's a bit like a propelling spiral that picks up momentum very quickly then, just as it seems to be reaching its pinnacle of speed, it seems to start going backwards.

So it is with training in the martial arts. In the beginning you are learning something new every session and improvement can be as fast as this metaphoric spiral. All of a sudden your advancement seems to be slowing down and in some cases you seem (like the spiral) to be going backward instead of forward, but it is only an illusion. After such a quick advance, even a slight decrease in speed may seem like a backward spiral. Usually it is only the person himself who sees or thinks he sees this supposed decline, and everyone else around him will be seeing his improvement – everyone but him. From my experience and as irony would have it, it is usually the better student who thinks he isn't improving. Every day and every session that you train will bring you some advancement, visible or invisible, large or small. The child that you see everyday will show no visible change or growth, but to the person who only sees the same child every few months the change is so obvious that they sometimes can't believe it's the same child.

And so it is with improvement in training. Sometimes it is so gradual that on a day to day basis it is almost not noticed, but it will be there.

SILLY REASONS

These are the most infuriating and are always employed by people to cover a deeper, underlying reason or problem, probably one of those in the last category. These are the worst (and sometimes the funniest) reasons for missing single sessions or even packing it in all together, because it means that the person employing the 'silly excuse' cannot come to terms with the real reason.

To my mind this puts him right at the bottom of the proverbial mountain with a long way to go. He'll probably never make it.

Here are my favourite 'silly' reasons, all of which have been used to me, by my own Karate students, over the years:

I can't train because:

1. My cat died. (A great excuse because it can be used nine times)
2. My mother is having a hysterectomy. (I think he was getting sympathy pains)
3. My Karate suit is in the wash. (As coincidence would have it, the Cup Final coincided with my training time.
   This was just one of the many excuses used that night)
4. I haven't got any money. (Saw him in the pub drunk later that night)
5. My granddad died. (Third time this year)
6. I had to go to a funeral. (Hope it's not his granddad again)
7. My wife's ill. (My club is on Wednesdays and Sundays. Coincidentally these are the only days
   that she gets ill)
8. It was raining. (He must be made of sugar)
9. My mum's varicose veins are playing her up. (What?)
10. I can't take my grading because my flat's flooded and my daughter fell off her bike. (The grading wasn't for another 6 weeks)

Every reason not to train, with a few exceptions, can be turned into a reason to train. The real strength to be attained is hidden within the hurdles and pitfalls, if you want that strength then you have to overcome and defeat them.