How to Be Old...

I recently turned 47 and, with work rapidly becoming a constant source of anxiety, I've made a real commitment to train whenever I can to assuage the worst excesses of work-related stress. Sadly, my hapkido class schedule has recently changed, which means I'm struggling to make regular classes at that, so I'm throwing myself into my BJJ training.

BJJ is ridiculously hard and, after four and a bit years, it hasn't really got an awful lot easier. The only way to learn how to eventually win is to constantly lose and to figure out how not to lose quite so badly the next time.

It's also by some considerable way the most physically demanding thing I've ever done, and I genuinely understand why wrestling training is considered one of the most brutal things anyone can do. It's very tough. It's designed to make people quit.

But I'm hanging in there and sometimes that's the real wisdom that age and doing another martial art for a long time brings. You know how to hang on in and ride the difficult times, whether it's work or training or anything else. 

Because bad times do pass. It's a just matter of getting through them.