I'm usually the oldest guy in the room. Some days I'm kicking butt, some days I'm getting my butt kicked. Doesn't really matter if you're the nail or the hammer — you just gotta show up. Either way, I'm on the mat.
No perfect schedule. Full-time job. Kids. Life moves things around. But one thing never moves:
Started it the same year I started karate — Iyengar, back then. Forty years later the practice has changed but the hour hasn't: still the first thing I do, before the world wakes up.
People ask how. The answer's boring: I show up. Win, lose, sore, tired — I show up. Stop showing up and it's over, and you won't even feel it happen. That's the whole thing. There's no second secret.
The will goes first. The body just follows orders. Somewhere in their fifties most people decide the good part of their life is behind them — and the body says fine, and starts packing up. I never gave the order. That's the whole difference between me and the guy my age on the couch.
Four decades on the floor — karate under Nishiyama, jiu-jitsu under Danaher, yoga since the same year I started throwing punches. I'm not telling you that to impress you. I'm telling you it still works at 62.
Lose it and you won't even notice. That's the danger.
I've watched it happen to sharp people. Not the work wearing them down — the coasting. The slow settling. It smooths you out, rewards going along, until the part of you that pushed back just goes quiet. And most people never feel it leave.
That's the real fight — not the guy across from me. The one to stay awake. To keep generating instead of coasting. To still be in the room when everyone my age has left it.
I stopped reading the philosophy two decades ago because I was living in other people's heads. Made my own body and mind the experiment instead. Sensei told me: I give you good food — you must digest it yourself. So I did. Still do. 62, still on the mat, still figuring it out.
Keep your fight. It's not a metaphor — it's what's keeping you alive. Defy the number. Some fight left, baby.
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