Stubborn But Not Stupid...

With work continuing to be an utter nightmare, I am struggling to make hapkido classes with any form of regularity. And with me moving to work on the other side of London next year, it's unlikely the situation will get any easier. 

This is a pisser. I have a 14-year relationship with the school and its teacher and seeing that slip away is quite sad.

On the plus side, my BJJ studies remain pretty consistent because I can train in the mornings and I can make classes before the corporate carnage of work begins. But there are times when sensible decisions have to be made, so if it's BJJ for a while and hapkido becomes a thing I do very rarely – or maybe even no longer do – then that's OK. It's better to train at something rather than at nothing.

It's important to persevere, but it's more important to survive and that latter attitude is one that permeates a lot of my current thinking. Because of work pressures, I am in survival and consolidation mode.

In a related story, I was sparring at BJJ a few weeks ago and an old war wound got caught and it hurt for a while. But I brushed it off and carried on. My partner smiled and said, 'Wolverine's tough!' My teacher walked by and replied, 'He's not tough. He's stubborn.'

My teacher's nearly right. For the record, I've never pretended to be tough, though I will begrudgingly accept stubborn. Put more simply, its just resilience. But I'm not stubborn or resilient to the point of stupidity and damaging myself. 

I generally know when to let a thing go... and that includes resistance to clamped-on armbars and any relationship I can no longer sustain. 

But we'll see how things go. There's no need to make any big decision just yet about what gives. I may have to at some point in the next two or three months, though.