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Just Roll With It
What martial arts has taught me about staying in the game
“I kind of just rolled with it. Adaptability — that’s from the training.” That’s what one of my Ninjutsu training partners said to me last week while we were heading home after a rare training session. We hadn’t seen each other or been in much contact over the past year, due to lockdowns and social distancing and busy with work, etc., so we were catching up on how each of us fared during the upheavals of 2020.
A filmmaker friend of mine is making a short documentary about women being independent, and asked me if she could film a training session. I jumped on this excuse to get back on the mats and contacted a couple of guys I knew I’d be able to go hard with. Everyone jumped on the chance — we’ve all been missing the mats. One guy unfortunately had a work conflict and couldn’t make it, but the other two could.
(Of course we self-isolated and took every hygiene precaution before we met up to train, and only trained one-on-one. It’s five days later and so far no one is showing any symptoms of illness.)
I got to train with my first training partner for 90 minutes, going hard. It felt great to be back on the mats, but different too: I’m 52 years old, I’ve definitely added some weight and lost some muscle tone from hibernating in this pandemic…
