health

 by Jon F. Merz

Who Do You Learn From?

2013 has been an interesting year of exploration so far. It marks my 22nd year of training in Togakure-ryu Ninjutsu under Mark Davis at the Boston Martial Arts Center, and my roughly 30th year of training in martial arts in general. In January, I also embarked on a new adventure: CrossFit. To say I am enjoying myself would be a severe understatement. CrossFit – especially for someone like me who has never enjoyed working out in a gym – is a perfect vehicle for challenge. It manages to be both humbling and empowering at the same time. Humbling because the workouts can be intimidating and seriously challenging. Empowering because once you complete the workout, you realize that you’ve gone further than you thought you were capable of going. Fantastic stuff.

In the course of this new exploration, I realized that I really enjoy learning. (This might sound like one of those “Well, duh…” moments until you stop to realize that many people choose to shut off their learning.) And I also realized that I’ve set up my life in such a way that I learn from numerous sources every single day. The benefit, to me at least, is that I go to sleep each night full of new adventures, experiences, questions, answers, and many new things to ponder. As a writer, this is extremely beneficial as it keeps my mind filled with new avenues to explore in my work. But I also have come to more deeply appreciate the life I have and the moments that go into making each day worthwhile and fun.

I am truly fortunate that I have a wonderful role model in my martial arts training. My teacher Mark Davis has always led by example and routinely exposes himself to new ideas and new avenues in life that I think make him a better teacher and practitioner. Mark has never been content to rest on his laurels. His trains with his teachers frequently – having his experiences and skills challenged. He sits down with people from different walks of life – from auto mechanics to physicists – and learns from them over coffee or lunch. He isn’t afraid to go out of his comfort zone and be a beginner again. It’s pretty refreshing to find someone like that, and I’m thankful to have him as an example I can follow.

Each day, I also make sure that I read posts by my friend and fellow Ninjutsu practitioner, Christopher Penn. Chris is, frankly, a near genius in social media, marketing, and all sorts of tech. Each day he posts five key bits of news and information that I always make a point to read, even if I don’t think it will directly benefit me. I’ve been amazed at what he posts and the points he brings up often illuminate things for me in another area. I am very much a beginner in the field of social media and other areas Chris specializes in, but I’m also extremely fortunate to be able to learn from him.

I’ve also made a point lately of visiting my good friend Barry Meklir at Muscular Solutions. Barry has been teaching me a lot about how to take care of my various injuries (and after so many years in martial arts, you can bet I’ve got a slew of ’em…) Barry is brilliant at his work as a healer and I’ve learned a ton from him so far. And he’s helped me extensively with a number of muscular issues – one of which had been plaguing me for about twenty years! Getting regular “tune-ups” is going to be a fixture in my life. At this point, I’m not getting any younger and I need to make sure the ol’ bod can keep up with all the crazy stuff I want to do.

Every Friday night, Mark Davis holds advanced black belt training at the Boston Martial Arts Center. I’ve been going to this class as much as possible for many years. And despite the 22 years I’ve been studying, each class I attend always presents something new – even if it is hidden in the guise of a technique we’ve worked on before. Because Mark is never content to settle for what he learned yesterday, he brings that same attitude into the classes he teaches and ensures that we learn something new every time we train. It’s weird how much more I’ve come to appreciate this after stepping outside of my comfort zone and getting involved with CrossFit. Sometimes you have to get away from something very close to your heart to better appreciate it.

In addition to classes with Mark, we spend a great deal of time talking on the telephone. Some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from him have taken place over the phone as we discuss strategy, combat, mind sciences, and much more.

These days, I’m busy setting up my life to ensure that I always continue to learn. Martial arts, CrossFit, social media, body tune-ups, endurance racing, and many more things besides. Yes, life is busy, but I find myself truly valuing what I learn from others even more now. And I’ve found the best teachers set their lives up this way as well. Other don’t. Others are so keen to be seen as an authority figure that they box themselves into a corner and can never again embrace that “beginner’s mind” that the 34th Grandmaster of Ninjutsu says it so crucial to training.

Embracing the beginner’s mind isn’t easy. It requires the confidence to accept being a nobody again. It requires effort to keep the ego in check and not dismiss the prospect of learning from those who are younger than you or who you might be senior in rank to. But the payoff, for me anyway, is a life far richer than what I had yesterday. For that, I am grateful.

So…who do you learn from?

in common sense / crossfit / health / how I write / life thoughts / martial arts / self protection / ninjutsu / Uncategorized / warriorship 0 comments
 by Jon F. Merz

Badassery

By Jon F. Merz

Over this past weekend at the 15th and final New England Warrior Camp, I had the chance to talk to a lot of folks. Some of them I’ve known for many years and some are recent acquaintances. During one of the conversations with a more recent acquaintance, the subject of me doing the GORUCK Challenge came up. In one breath, this person said to me, “Dude, that’s very badass that you’re doing it.” And in the next breath, he asked, “Why?”

When I pressed him a little further, he said he understood that it was cool and everything, but given that I’ll be 43 years old this month (three days prior to GORUCK), he wanted to know why I am doing the Challenge now.

I get it.

Society has a tendency to condition you if you let it. Each and every day, we’re bombarded by sights, sounds, and ideals of how most people think we ought to live. And at 43, according to society, I should probably be approaching middle age with some degree of slowing down as my body gets older and my hair lightens a bit more. My boys aren’t babies anymore. I should be enjoying the middle stage of my life, with its somewhat relaxed pace, and possibly even start preparing myself for later life.

To hell with that.

My father passed when he was 48 years old. That’s five years from now. His father died at about the same age. To say that doesn’t weigh on my mind would be lying as badly as Romney. I think about it all the time. Now granted, both my father and grandfather were lifelong smokers (my father eventually quit after his first heart attack) and that no doubt played a major role in their deaths. I don’t smoke. And I exercise and try to take care of myself, within reason.

A lot of my contemporaries in the writing industry are within a few years of my age. In recent weeks, one of them has been operated on for an advanced brain tumor; two others have had heart attacks; and several others have pretty much openly stated that their forties are a real drag and added some incessant whining about various life factors that pretty much make me want to puke.

My view on life has always been that it shouldn’t be this bubble you live in, trying your damnedest to get to the end with an immaculate body. You need scars. You need danger. You need adrenaline. Why? Because those things – those instances when you push the envelope and put yourself into the crucible – they make you appreciate the treasures that you do have in your life. It’s in those moments – those spaces of time when you stand at the brink and literally stare down death, or injury, or your own previous preconceptions about what you could and could not do – that you see the flow of life as no one else does. In the blink of an eye, it’s over. But in the wake, you feel that pulse – that genuine flux of life and death twisting together, melting, melding into the vortex where your reality – your life – shines through without any distraction. In that instance, you see your soul naked and exposed in the brilliance of truth.

When my time comes – and there have been many times already when I thought I might be checking out – I don’t want to look back and think, “Well, that was safe.” I want to go out laughing at all the fun I had, all the love I experienced, all the pain, all the sadness, all the risk, all the failure, all the reward – everything. I want to do things – anything that piques my interest – at whatever age of life I happen to come across them. I don’t want to be hampered by what society thinks I should be doing. I want to do what I want to do.

Those who know me well, know that my general philosophy on life is this: train hard, fight hard, party hard.

The notion of “safe” for me is a death sentence. I tried “safe” up until I was about fifteen years old. Safe didn’t work for me. Safe didn’t prepare me for bullies or love or anything else it supposedly promised.

Risky, on the other hand, that was some serious fun. I’m not talking stupid (although I did enough of that as well – turns out Stupid is the delinquent step-brother of Risky – who knew?) but risk undertaken with intelligence.

That’s where I live.

So yes, I’ll be a 43 year old man doing the GORUCK Challenge. I’m sure there will be folks on the team half my age. I hope they have a blast. I did things like GORUCK back then as well and I enjoyed the suck. For me, doing the Challenge isn’t about having some midlife crisis; if I didn’t do the Challenge and resigned myself to some lazy ideal of a gradually slowing down lifestyle, THAT would be a midlife crisis for me.

Let others allow the onslaught of time to wear them down and pigeonhole them into some lackadaisical shuffleboard experience. For me, the future isn’t about scaling back – it’s about warp speed toward more challenges, more excitement, more fun.

Is that badassery? It might be. I don’t really care.

To me, it’s life.

in common sense / goodlivin' / goruck / health / life thoughts / martial arts / self protection / ninjutsu / Uncategorized / warriorship 0 comments
 by Jon F. Merz

Pity Parties

By Jon F. Merz

Ever been to one of these? It’s where something doesn’t go right and someone decides that the universe is against them and gets all “woe-is-me, my life totally sucks.” Usually, this is accompanied by a post on Facebook or Twitter; sometimes, it’s a blog post or a magazine column. Sometimes those posts on Facebook get a bunch of “likes,” or comments expressing sympathy. This is the party aspect of it. Misery loves company, apparently, and pity parties certainly seem to spring up more often than not. (Personally, I think we need more positivity parties…)

I’ve been seeing them happen a lot lately – especially with midlist traditionally published authors. As the indie publishing revolution has made it easier than ever before to become published, a lot of traditionally-published authors who never achieved serious bestseller status are pissed off. They see new unknown writers selling thousands or tens of thousands of ebooks and pocketing the 70% royalty that Amazon offers and they get seriously annoyed. Some of them bitch publicly about it. I read a column recently where the author was upset that one of these newer writers had the gall to state that he had “fun” when he was writing, whereas the column’s author found writing to be a painful and grueling experience. The remainder of the column was very much more a commentary on what a sad life the column author had, rather than what she was doing to make her life better.

Maybe you’ve even thrown a pity party from time-to-time. Things in your own life have been seemingly bad or you haven’t achieved everything you set out to accomplish. You start feeling a sense of hopelessness or maybe experience a crisis of faith. I certainly know – I’ve been there. Around this time last year, I was about to face a whole lot of very potentially serious issues. And in my present life, I still have yet to accomplish some of my larger goals. I understand how easy it is to focus on all the bad stuff and ignore the good that always exists in a life.

But the thing about a pity party is that while they seem to help momentarily, the party should never go on for too long. Otherwise, like any real party, the neighbors get annoyed and call the cops to complain. And then cops show up and shut it down. Meanwhile, you’ve been partying too hard and you still have to get up the next morning and go to work. And when you wake up, your head is pounding and you feel like total garbage.

Likewise, if you allow your pity party to go on for too long, you run the risk of trapping yourself even deeper in the mire of your own doubt. It becomes harder and harder to pull yourself out of the swamp and get back on the path toward kicking all sorts of ass.

I’m not saying that it’s not okay to allow yourself a brief bit of self-pity from time-to-time. A change of perspective can sometimes illuminate a path or tactic that you may not have previously considered. The key, though, is to acknowledge that things aren’t where you want them to be and then actually DO something about it. Instead of wallowing in the swamp and moaning about your predicament, haul yourself out of it and take positive action toward changing your life for the better. The action doesn’t have to be huge; it just has to be action in the right direction.

Each and every step will bring you closer to eventual success. Don’t sabotage your progress by wasting energy on a pity party.

One step. One action. One vision.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the new digital series THE CONTAINED yet, be sure to check it out here – we need your help to make it a reality! Thank you!

in authorpreneur / common sense / general / health / life thoughts / martial arts / self protection / ninjutsu 0 comments
 by Jon F. Merz

GORUCK Challenge

By Jon F. Merz

Yesterday, I registered for something I’ve had my eye on for a while: the GORUCK Challenge. This is something different from races like Tough Mudder and others. According to the GORUCK website, “The GORUCK Challenge is a team event, never a race. Think of it as a slice of reality found in the most elite schools in Special Operations. Leadership is taught, teamwork is demanded.”

How do they accomplish this? Simple. You give yourself over to the Cadre – all of whom are drawn from the ranks of US Special Operations units – for “8-10 hours, 15-20 miles, Good Livin'” Spread out over this fun little jaunt, you are required to wear a ruck filled with six bricks (four if you’re under 150 pounds) that weigh about 24 pounds, along with a hydration bladder, a bit of food and other gear. Your ruck ends up weighing probably around 40-45 pounds when all is said and done. Additionally, you have a “team weight” of at least 25 pounds that gets handed around throughout the night.

Oh, and then there’s a log. A big log. And not a Robert Plant Big Log, either.

Push-ups, flutter kicks, buddy carries, bear crawls, crab crawls, and much more fun are to be found as you progress through the event. Rucksacks are never taken off unless the Cadre tells you. They also can’t touch the ground at any time unless permitted by Cadre. Both times and distances have been known to exceed the advertised length.

I signed up for the event happening on October 27th in Salem, MA. Start time: 0100 hours.

And I can’t freakin’ wait. Here’s a slight preview of what I can expect:

When I posted that I’d registered yesterday, I got several emails from folks asking: “Why?”

My simple answer is: “Why not?”

I’ll be doing the Challenge a few days past my 43rd birthday. At the time of the Challenge, it will have been about a year since I started dealing with a bunch of medical issues that fortunately turned out to be nothing serious. But at the time, I thought they were. Being 42 and forced to go through a battery of tests is not fun when every thought happens to be of the fact that your father passed when he was 48. Fortunately, I don’t smoke and don’t seem to have the cardiac issues my late father did. But it still made me think. A lot.

If you read my previous post on Complacency, then you’ll also understand why I want to do this. And if you know about the various aspects of my life – including martial arts – then you know that I take very seriously this concept of warriorship. Herein lies the longer answer to why I’m doing GORUCK. For me, walking the warrior path means that I set challenges for myself – big challenges that force me well out of my comfort zone. GORUCK type training is not something I’ve done in nearly twenty years. I want to see if I can still hack it, quite frankly. It’s not ego, but a genuine curiosity to see whether I can endure a situation like what GORUCK offers and emerge in decent shape on the other side.

On the GORUCK website, they urge participants not to attempt to “overgame” the event through intense training or running themselves into the ground. I happen to dig that attitude since it falls in line with my own thinking and brings up another point about warriorship: you can’t pick the time and place of an emergency situation. They happen whenever, wherever, to whomever. Therefore, you need a general baseline of physical aptitude to work with. The rest, as they say, is all mental.

With that in mind, I’ll be ramping my own physical baseline up but I’m not going crazy-go-nuts trying to ingest all sorts of supplements (which I don’t usually handle well anyway) or somehow turn myself into a superhuman specimen. I’ll be doing my usual walk-runs, mixing in Crossfit WODs, and some endurance marches of my own with the fully-weighted ruck to get myself ready. For those who are interested and want to follow my training, each new blog post out here will feature a rundown of what I’ve been doing. Then on October 27th, we’ll see if the preparation was enough.

I hope it is, because GORUCK also offers some other very cool events. But you’ve got to get through the Challenge first in order to qualify.

So, we’ll see. I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my GORUCK GR1 gear bag, and I’m starting to see a few of the other folks signed up for the event. I’m hoping it’s an absolute blast. If you’ve done the GORUCK Challenge before, I hope you’ll say hi!

GORUCK TRAINING TO-DATE:

Note: I’ve been doing walk-runs for about a month now – focusing mainly on time and not distance. Even still, I feel they’ve given me a decent base to build from.

24 July 2012: Registered for GORUCK Challenge. Crossfit Workout for time: 3 sets x 20 reps each push-ups, flutter kicks, overhead press, back-ups, medicine ball throw & catch (20#), flyes (10# & 25# kettlebells) Total time: 18:39

25 July 2012: 44 minute walk-run for 3.75 miles (average pace was 4.7mph)

Nothing too elaborate or particularly challenging yet, but we’ll see how things progress.

in goodlivin' / goruck / health / life thoughts / martial arts / self protection / ninjutsu / Uncategorized / warriorship 0 comments