You can either laugh or cry
You can either laugh or cry
I spent almost five hours in A&E on Monday due to a toe. That’s right, I went to A&E because of my big toe. It’s quite embarassing, really. As a martial artist you’re always secretly hoping to come out of A&E with some badly scraped knuckles, perhaps a broken rib or two, at the very least a bad-ass cut above the eye. The stuff you see in the movies, basically. It’s cool, sort of bad-ass, and it says “I ain’t going down without a fight.”
There’s also a massive amount of injuries which are not movie-cool, but serious enough to warrant massive kudos: concussions, a broken jaw or some fractured ocular bones, to name a few.
Then there’s the everyday injuries which are more like routine A&E visits to simply get the thing patched up: broken nose, broken finger, swollen ankles, torn muscles, and the like.
You’ll see that a toe does not appear in any of these three categories. That’s because a toe injury is about as cool as watching snails (unless you’re David Attenborough, in which case it’s about as cool as watching humans). Incidentally, it’s also one of the worst frickin’ things to hurt cause everything gets screwed up: you can’t kick properly, you’re movement is fecked, you’re constantly off-balance, and you’re mind is in overdrive trying to compensate for all this shit while it’s also trying to keep you alive long enough to counter and keep you in the fight.
Something’s gotta give at some point, it’s just inevitable. You’re fighting is shit, your motivation is dropping, you become unresponsive, and even the greenest rookie can easily bypass your guard. At least that’s how you feel, and all thanks to that toe which is now throbbing in pain and making your life hell.
So, now you have two choices: You can either laugh or cry. Laugh, smile, let the good drugs you’re body is pumping out do their job and force yourself onwards. Or cry, give up, stop pushing yourself and give in.
We all have bad days. Days we roll out of bed and nothing goes right. Days we just feel like the world is stacked against you. Those are the days you’ve really got to keep smiling, fine the good in the bad and simply persevere.
My toe threw off my fighting today, and it was a bad day for me. Nothing came together like it used to, and that was it. By the end of practice I was giggling like a fourteen year old girl. I was in pain because of a pathetic little bony joint, nothing felt right, and it was just too stupid to be upset about. So laugh, find the good parts of today (turn kick that found its target 😀 ), ignore the rest, and do better tomorrow.
HBS Fitness test Push-ups:
36/54 —- Sit-ups: 41/70 —- Pull-ups: 5/14 —- 3k run: 17:00/12:00
Goal for this week: 39/46/6+16:40