2024 Training Log- Update

Yeah so I’ve been a little slack on the blogging. I have still been hitting the gym and rolling, but it’s been interspersed with a couple of holidays and some family stuff.

A small update on the goals- I’ll be definitely travelling to the UK Nationals in September, and to the Lisbon Open in October. I might try to squeeze in London and possibly Las Vegas at the end of this month, although I won’t be at my best for that as it’ll be a bonus prize if I get to travel. It’s still a maybe.

Either way I plan a busy few month’s competing. I compete for the challenge and to keep myself in shape and motivated. I want to win every match of course, but the broader goal is to keep improving and stave off aging. Once you stop- you rust. You age fast. You become one of those guys. I see those guys all the time now. They have fingers that work normally. But they look like shit. Soft. Like their skin is a size too big for them.

Also, once you’ve experienced competition and the thrill, the excitement, the enjoyment of striving towards those goals, it’s hard to stop. You’ve been handed an Italian coffee and now you can never go back to Nescafe instant. That’s why so many of my mates I trained with are cyclists or triathletes or running marathons now. They couldn’t stop! They can’t stop! They’re insane!

Training Thoughts of the Week

When you’re injured, but still able to train, you fatigue so quickly. Even if you can’t feel the pain acutely, you carry it and protect it. It takes so much energy to not move the way you want to move. I have that with my back at the moment. Every round is exhausting, but I’m not blowing hard, I’m just tired. Savour those days when you’re free and easy and moving well!

Non-Training Thoughts of the Week

I sent my son the famous Frost poem- The Road Not Taken. Here it is.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

A poem so good and so simple that it’s almost become a cliché. Take the road less travelled etc etc. But I sent it to him because of the second last verse. “Knowing how way leads on to way…” The last verse is what everyone knows, but how way leads on to way is something they should teach young guys in school. Mind that decision, because way leads on to way and before you know it, you’re deep in a job you hate, or in a marriage you just did because you thought you should, or in deep shit somewhere, and it’s too late to turn back without great pain and take that other road. There are some decisions you can’t reverse, but at the least, don’t let way lead on to way once you know you’ve cocked up.