Friday 24 December 2010
Well it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve blogged to you out there in cyber martial arts world – but there’s been some good reasons for my blogging absence.
Last Saturday my teacher and (your) Grand Master visited Factor10 Martial Arts at Strathpine to grade me to 6th Dan Taekwondo and 5th Dan Hapkido. You can imagine this was a pretty special time for me and, as I came to find out later, was a real highlight for our members. Well, more about that later, but I have some real isights about life and living I would like to share with you.
Many people would not know that about 4 years ago I had a body rebuild, refit, update, or whatever you like to call it. Basically what happened is I wore my hip out. That’s right, at the ripe old age of 44 my right hip had worn down to the bone. The cartilage or gristle as it is commonly referred to just plain old wore out, left to go to another place, disappeared – caput!
Actually this is no real problem unless I wanted to walk!
Sorry, jokes aside, but some things in life you need to adopt a sense of humor. So on with the story.
The short of it is that I had some pretty major surgery and had what is called a “Birmingham Hip” put into my body. The procedure is a more complex procedure than a total hip replacement as it involves machining the leg bone (the femoral head) to fit a cobalt chromium ball on the top and also machining the hip (acetabulum) to fit a new hip socket that is made of the same bionic stuff. The nasty part is they dislocate your hip joint to make al this happen then put it all back together. Despite not being able to drive for weeks, sit on a normal toilet and wearing anti clotting socks it’s not that bad!
When I had the surgery done one of my greatest concerns was weather or not I would be able to do another grading in martial arts, and in particular to be abel to grade to a higher dan levels in Taekwondo and Hapkido.
So in a sense my journey to my recent grading – last Saturday – was one that started even before my hip surgery as if I did not have the surgery there would be no way in the world my body would have been able to cope with doing another grading, and the risk was that because of the surgery I would not be able to grade again. Unless …. and this is a big unless …. I could recover both physically and mentally in such a way that I could cope with another grading of such a high level.
So let the journey begin … and it did … and despite the fact that surgeons said I probably would need to limit all activity in the future to low impact work including not running, I thought I should give it my best shot and not let this obstacle stand in the way of achieving grading excellence and in particular to take another step towards becoming a grand master. One of my life goals has always been to become a 9th Dan grand Master in both Taekwondo and Hapkido.
As part of my recovery I have taken up cycling and swimming as low impact activities to complement the otherwise big impact things I would need to do in order to get my body into shape. These days I regularly swim and cycle and a day does not go by without me doing some kind of training to keep my body fit and strong. The flexibility training has been so important and I have had some great physiotherapists and masseurs to work with to get me there.
Well after this amazing journey over the last few years, and despite some nasty setbacks including an infection post surgery and twelve months of post surgery hip pain that has now largely gone, I did not just one grading last Saturday – but two! I did my 5th Dan Hapkido grading first up from 9am on Saturday 18th December and followed this up with my 6th Dan grading in Taekwondo. Each grading took about an hour with the grading wrapping up around 11am.
I think I owe my success to a few things, namely:
1.Good surgery
2.Great support people
3.My training program that was very intense for a long time but a clever mix of low impact and high impact training
4.My strong genetic mindset
5.My healthful lifestyle
6.My great family
I really believe that my healthful lifestyle has had a huge impact both physically and mentally on my ability to achieve something so enormous. Considering over the years I have suffered from depression in varying degrees, and no medications ever solved this, it was not until I started carefully controlling my food some years ago that I noticed some real life changing gains. Apart from being able to get off the anti depression medications, I was able to manage the ongoing post surgery inflammatory symptoms that no specialists, doctors, masseurs of physiotherapists could really help. Sure they all gave some short term relief but nothing other that diet really delivered real gains in this area.
Can I say that my approach has been to treat food like medicine, replacing the medications I was on with food, carefully selected foods containing certain micro and macro nutrients that helped me to heal from the inside out. Sure, I really did take some pretty serious measure like removing caffeine and alcohol from my diet altogether some years ago now and significantly limiting starchy carbohydrates like break and pasta.
Oh, and by the way, I forgot to tell you the reason for my hip injury. The orthopedic specialists found I had a genetic deformity in my right hip. That is, the hip socket is shallower than it should be, causing significant wear on the reduced hip surface area. This is why my left hip is doing so well – something we could not understand for a long time. I haven’t mentioned before that I used to do water ski jumping at a state and national level and my right leg is the leg that always impacted the ski ramp first. Between this and motocross riding as a younger lad I think my poor ‘ol hip had no chance!
I know we all have challenges from time to time, sometimes they are small mounds to climb, and others are mountains! And sometimes these obstacles are only obstacles to letting us get on with our life if we let them be that. Its how we think of things, how we choose to treat them that makes them a reality in our lives.
What are your apparent obstacles in life?
Mr O
BTW – I am so excited after watching my speed spin kicks where I break 5 timber boards in quick succession on UTube – the leg I am using is the leg that has the replacement hip or “Birmingham Hip”. Have a look and check it out if you like! There’s also some other power breaking – just search by my name – Damien O’Flaherty.
