He's back -- competitor already in the swing of things

I don't know what happened, but it's as if someone flipped on the switch and I'm back in training mode. The competitior within me, which was dormant since I got into tango last year, has awakened once more.

I don't think there was one single reason for this re-awakening, but rather a confluence of events ... the first of which happened last week. And that had a little to do with a woman.

For the 26 years that I've been training in the martial arts, I've had a personal rule not to get involved with anyone I trained with ... especially someone I teach. Despite all the women that I've come across in these past two and a half decades -- many of whom were attractive and some of whom were interested in me -- I pretty much stuck with this rule. There is, however, one woman who trains with me now who has been growing on me for the last few months. I thought it was under control, but a week ago, I realized that I was wrong. I found myself thinking of her quite a lot, such that it had gotten to the point where, for the first time in my martial arts career, I said to hell with my rule! Unfortunately, she wasnt interested in me the same way. Needless to say, it was a blow to my self-confidence, and I think a low-level depression set in.

Then last week, I had no tango classes. My teachers took off to Argentina on a tango trip and took a bunch of students with them. They cancelled their tango classes, which left the poor bastards like me who were left behind to come up with other things to do on class days. Rather than train in martial arts, I chose to wallow in my depression.

Then, on Thursday, I went to Sacramento to visit an aunt and uncle who were in the hospital for strokes. My aunt had a massive stroke on Sunday morning. My cousin Edwin took her to the hospital. The next day, while Edwin was taking his dad to visit his mom, his dad had a minor stroke, too. Poor Edwin. As of this writing, my aunt is still in the hospital, but my uncle has been discharged.

But I think that's when things started to change. While we were in Sacramento, we visited our other relatives. They put on a video of the Pacquiao-Morales boxing match. There's nothing like a good boxing match to get you pumped. And this match was damn good. Both Pacquiao and Morales were true warriors out there. Incredible and inspirational.

Anyway, I think it was the combination of the boxing match as well as the knowledge that I traditionally ride out my depressions by training, that got me to pick up the skipping rope and weights on Saturday night. Between rope skipping, weight lifting, shadow boxing, an kata, I got a pretty good 1.5-hour workout. And at the end of the session, I wanted more...but decided not to push it too far too early. i retired for the night.

The next day, on Sunday, I marched with the naginata group in the San Francisco Cherry Blossom parade. It was kind of fun to be marching and showing off to crowds of non-martial artists. When I was fighting Curt in the streets, I heard kids saying: "Oh! look at him! He's just like Musashi!" And at another point, after Curt and I stopped fighting for a while, a group of people in the crowd started chanting: "fight! fight! fight!" of course, Curt and i did!

It was all in good fun. And I swear, it felt good. Curt and I started making arrangements to become training partners again in preparation for the naginata world championship qualifiers.

When I got home, I rested for a few hours, then did another 1.5-hour workout before I popped online to chat with Stuart. Stuart is an old karate buddy of mine, and a longtime training partner when we were kids up until we went our separate ways in college. He hadnt been training for maybe 6 or 7 years now, but said he'll start again in a couple of weeks. I hope he does. It would be good to train with him again. I feel the old me coming back.

Would be good to have the old him right there by my side again.

Looking forward to hard training, hard hits, and hard drinking.

Life's good.