Less than 10 years ago I used to teach karate in a small school, I was one of several black belt applicants that worked at the school teaching beginning and amatuer students. Our Sensei had made it a requirement ofd receiving you black belt, and even though in other schools it was not a requirement, the extra work just encouraged us to press on. We were paid on an extremely loose pay schedule that pretty much dwelt on the whim of the sensei, sometimes extremely generous.
Anyway when I was 24ish the problem I have with my back flared up again and I was forced to go under the knife. After a long recovery i never went back to teaching, and sadly never received my black belt. This past weekend my cousin asked me to teach his son. His son used to have lessons in town, but it's too expensive for him to continue, and seeing as how we're family I'll probably go ahead and do it. I'm not in bad shape compared to then though I do have more severe flexibility problems. when I taught almost all my exercise was aerobic, anearobic, whatever, typical gym exercise for fighters, lots of running, jumproping pushups sit ups, now it's all strength and weight training, trying to compensate for the weakness I'll always have in my stomach and lower back from the repeated surgeries.
The last few days I've put myself through some of the exercises I used to do daily and have come to the conclusion that I am way out of shape. It's weird I quit smoking, I lift weights regularly, but i guess neither is enough to battle the weekend beers. So now I thought I'd start running again, after all I used to run a mile at the start of every class i taught which sometime would equal 3-4 miles a day between lessons. Unfortunately yesterday it was 3-5 degrees, today I woke up -5, so I'm missing AZ like mad, mostly because I'm a big fat wus.