Around fifteen years old, I was spending damn near all my free time practicing martial arts. It wasn’t a hobby. It was a compulsion. If I had a spare moment — a gap of boredom, an afternoon with nothing in it — I filled it with training. Hundreds of kicks per leg, every day. Deep stances held until my legs shook and burned. Pushups, and then more pushups. Kata and combinations run over and over until my body stopped needing my brain to do them. Round after round on the heavy bag, then the double-ended speed bag.
I kicked and punched trees to toughen my hands. I chopped down a small tree, tied it between two others about five feet off the ground, and made myself a balance beam to train on. That’s not normal fifteen-year-old behavior and I knew it even then. But there was something inside me that had to come out, and the only thing that ever brought me any peace was training. So I trained.
I’m telling you this because it’s where I first learned the one thing that would eventually save my life, decades later, when everything else was gone.
Back then, training was a different animal. The teachers were hard on you. Bruises, bloody noses, split lips — that was just Tuesday. The belt tests were brutal, and most of the time, people quit. That was the point. The whole thing was built around an ancient Japanese Buddhist concept called shu-gyo — the idea that you push yourself physically, far past what you believed your limits were. And when you come out the other side, the euphoria is unreal. You’ve reframed what’s possible for you. You understand the depth of your own commitment in a way you never did before. And you walk away with this reward that no one can hand you and no one can take: real confidence, earned, because you just did something that hard.
My teacher used to say he already knew you had the skills to pass before he ever invited you to test. Getting invited meant you were ready. The test wasn’t for him to find out if you could do it. The test was for you to find out if you knew. Nobody was allowed to watch. It was a private journey of your mind and your spirit, and it stayed private.
Here’s what my first one was like.
A couple of candles lit at the front of the room. The back door cracked open for a thin line of air across a stark, cold dojo floor. No clock anywhere — you had no idea how much time had passed or how much was left. And then we began.
PT, drilled and drilled and drilled. Thousands of punches and kicks in the near-dark, broken up by pushups, crunches, whatever fresh torture he felt like. The instructor walked the aisles screaming at us to stay focused, eyes straight ahead. Your test is your test. Not the person next to you. He carried focus mitts, and he’d come down the line and smack you across the legs and the torso — hard — to see if you’d flinch. The move was to control your breathing to control your mind, stare straight through the wall, and not break when he hit you. Do that, and he’d be satisfied and move on quick. He prowled that dark room like a shark, circling, looking for anyone weak or hurt.
We were sitting deep in a horse stance, throwing punches and elbows, when he came up on me. Stood over me, staring down, barking, waiting for me to give him something. Then he spun and shot his leg out and swept my left ankle.
My leg flew up — but somehow I was ready. I didn’t break. As if by magic, my foot slammed right back down to the mat. No sweep. No trip. No fall. I survived it. I was shocked and stupidly, completely happy.
And the other students caught it out of the corner of their eyes, and you heard this collective gasp go through the room. Which was a mistake. Because that gasp broke everyone’s concentration, and that did not sit well with my teacher. So he threw the sweep again. This time with a little more behind it.
Briefly, I saw both of my own feet up above my head. Then I came down in a heap.
That snapped everybody back into focus real quick.
This went on for hours. People peeled off to run out the back door or to the bathroom to throw up before we moved on to sparring. Because the sparring only came after we were completely emptied out — after the only thing left in the tank was heart. That was the actual question the whole night was asking: when there’s nothing left, do you still have the heart to keep going?
Four hours. Then five. It was dark outside now. No breaks. No water. We were worn down to nothing.
Then the testing stopped, and we knelt for the belt ceremony — joyous and solemn at the same time. Getting promoted is an honor, but it comes with weight. More responsibility. More to live up to.
When he got to my name, I was in a daze. And instead of the orange belt I’d tested for, he gave me a double promotion. Skipped orange entirely and moved me straight to purple.
That didn’t happen. I’d never seen it happen, I’ve never heard of it happening since, and I stood there in total shock.
But that was the moment. That was the first real taste I ever got of the victory of success — and here’s the part that stuck to my bones. It was something I could control. I had no plan. No talent anyone had promised me. No advantages. All I had was a willingness to work harder than the situation asked me to, and it turned out that alone was enough to change my life drastically.
I was fifteen. I didn’t have the words for it yet. But I’d just learned the only formula I’ve ever really trusted since: you don’t need a plan as much as you need to be willing to keep throwing punches in the dark after everyone else has run for the door.
It left a mark on me that’s still there today. Decades later, when I lost everything and had to start from zero — no belt, no dojo, no candles, just the wreckage — that fifteen-year-old kicking trees in the yard is who I went looking for.
He was still in there. He always is.