It’s Not Too Late

Comparing what you did with your life to someone else doesn’t help you advance. We can’t change what we did (or didn’t do), but we can change what we do today and tomorrow.

Keep going.

It was the night before Dominating the Entangled Fight. We hosted the instructors: Cecil Burch, Larry Lindenman, and Paul Sharp.

These gents have known each other for a long time. They shared stories of training and working — both separately and together.

The longer I listened to them talk, the more I realized I had lost a lot of time.

We are roughly the same age, generationally. We were interested in martial arts at about the same times in our lives, and when the UFC started we discovered that whatever we were doing had a high percentage of “bullshido” that was never pressure tested against an unwilling participant.

It was nearly 25 years before I got over the “betrayal” I felt from Kenpo karate. I spent three of my most formative years for essentially nothing, and became tool fixated the majority of my adult life.

Larry, Paul, and Cecil took the opposite route. They found other martial pursuits and kept at them, in one form or another.

I’m in my 40s, and trying to play catch up to decades of missed opportunities is physically and emotionally difficult. Those guys built strength that I wouldn’t be able to match, even if they stopped training today and I kept training for another 25 years. I’m not dead by any stretch, but 9 months of 5-3-1 training has demonstrated that I am definitely not how I used to be.

“You’re only in competition with yourself” is something that gets said or written with some regularity. I think this is due to a social change, where we don’t want to point out to other people that they’re losers — especially if that loser is ourselves. “Just” being in competition with yourself is hard to reconcile when you train against others, especially when the context is serious injury or death.

Getting wrecked in class rarely feels good, and it’s normal to wonder WTF we’re doing, and if we’re a lost cause.

The hard truth is that we aren’t going to get any better unless we keep going at it. Lamenting that I didn’t do something won’t make me better. Training and practicing will. Sometime we’ll do well, some (most) times we’ll falter, but I’ll take that instead of sitting in front of a computer 10 years from now wishing I’d done something.

No matter how old you are, or where you’re at in your life, it isn’t too late. You can still be better than you were yesterday.

And that just might be enough.

About the Author: Short Barrel Shepherd

Short Barrel Shepherd is a regular guy and works to make Web sites and mobile apps easier for people to use. He spends his free time attending fight-focused firearm, knife, and combatives training, motorcycling, writing, and playing games. His daily carry is a Glock 19 pistol and an AR15 .300 Blackout pistol in a backpack.