On Perseverance and the Twenty-Four Hour Workout

Part 2 of the Eight Mental Aims Series: Perseverance

perseverence (/ˌpəːsɪˈvɪərəns/)
(noun) persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.
“The perseverance needed to finish that bottle of Polish vodka was astounding.”

This article is much easier to start with than part 1 of this series. “What does perseverance have to do with the martial arts?” Anyone who’s seen the training montages of 1960s/70s Kung Fu movies or the action movies of the ’80s knows the power of nonstop training while a Dokken album plays in the background.

The Five Finger Death Poke fans will agree with this one too. You train, you get tired - but if you keep training anyway, you get stronger, faster, and more likely to survive a Black Friday Sale at a Walmart in Massachusetts. (If you think that joke doesn’t make sense, check out this link here.)

And, that’s it. End of article.

I mean, in Kajukenbo, we also talk about “mind, body, and spirit”. What it comes down to is that even though we strategize with our mind, we literally do everything with our body, including fight. When your body is tired, you have to rely on your mind to fight efficiently and tell you to keep going. When you’re physically and mentally strained, all you have left is your spirit, your guts, to push you on. That’s perseverance, in training and fighting, and I really can’t add much more to it. Keep training when you’re tired.

Now The Five Pinky Death Punch fans can go back to chugging energy drinks and breaking drywall. For the rest of us, there’s real life to consider.

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Oh Yeah, Real Life…

Life’s hard man. It’s easy to want to start things over, or just turn the game off. Sometimes that’s the best choice, and sometimes it’s the more harmful one.

To some this article is a call to not commit suicide, or to keep fighting to save your relationship with your children. To others it’s a call to keep building your dojo, or not give up on your trouble students making no progress. The sun is brightest after the longest night, and if you can survive a good Kajukenbo workout, you can survive whatever the world throws at you.

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The Twenty-Four-Hour Workout

For those not in the know, every ten years or so, Great Grandmaster James Juarez would teach a workout from 8am to 8am. And it was hell.

Let me back up a second. When I found Kajukenbo through Ron Esteller (Juarez’ student), I loved how difficult his weekly classes were. I had been looking for a class like the one he offered, a class that would push people to their mental limits and let them burn off all their angry aggression. His student Eric Coleman once joked to me about how the school would try to scare people away from coming back. Sifu Ron’s classes were tough.

Anyway, some of those students were afraid to take Juarez’ usual week-to-week classes, the one that only went two hours. And here was Juarez teaching 24 hours of his greatest hits. When I asked Sifu Ron why they only did the twenty-four-hour workout every ten years, he replied “that’s how long it takes people to forget what the last one was like”.

Artist rendition of Great Grandmaster Juarez, training his students to survive in a twenty-four hour workout. The door was, in fact, locked.

I think Sifu Ron was surprised to see that I came to the twenty-four hour workout that day, twenty-some odd years ago. I was still new at his school and working my way through the curriculum. I must have known up to Pinan…eight maybe? Though he always let me wear my usual black belt, a belt with its own odd history in my life, I wasn’t a Kajukenbo black belt yet, so with his permission I wore white pants to express my different training path at that time.

So there I was in white TKD pants, surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves dressed in black and red. At least I had the same red shirt they had. I felt like a sheep wearing a cheap Halloween mask. The sun had just risen a couple hours before, and I found myself wondering if we were gonna spar that day.

Someone came in with some big cardboard boxes full to the brim with apples. Every two hours or so we’d take a short break and snack on the fruit to keep our energy up.

After that, I don’t remember too much. Sigung Juarez let me play my mix tapes throughout the workout, so when we weren’t listening to the radio I remember hearing the same Dokken song a few times. I remember working Pinan 11 to death and getting the footwork and low stances engrained in my inner being.

I remember really connecting with a Kajukenbo brother there, Juan Andres. We had trained together before, but surviving a nightmare like this makes brothers of friends. One of Andres’ dojo mates, a guy who could only speak Spanish if I remember right, was my partner for a particularly grueling part of the night. Sometime around 5 am, this guy and I did a drill you might have seen before. It went something like this:

Each person and their partner had a kicking shield between them, lying on the floor. Both people go to opposite sides of the room and lay down on their backs, so that one person’s feet are touching the mirrored wall at the front and the other person’s feet are touching the back wall.

When Juarez shouted “go”, everyone had to stand up and run to get the bag before their partner could. If you got to it at the same time, you fought over it. Whoever got the kicking shield got to hold it for their partner’s side kicks, for a minute.

We must have done that same drill at least 4 or 5 times, and I lost…every…damn…time. Twenty-one hours in, this was killer, and incredibly discouraging. I think this is when Martín Gomes snagged a picture of me falling asleep on my feet.

The world had faded away by this point. I wasn’t sure how I could survive another few hours of hell like this. That was when we took our final break.

Juarez called us all outside of the dojo. That light purple shade of sky was turning orange as the sun started to rise. I would have felt a chill go up my back but I was too feverish by then. Then Juarez said something I’ll never forget.

“Remember this sunrise. You’ll never see another one like it.”

We had another apple or two, finished our break, went inside and finished the twenty-four hours as a family newly-baptized together in the fires of a test like nothing else. That day forged me anew in Kajukenbo. And it will always be with me.

Training 24 hours is not an efficient way to prepare for a ring fight. You lose too many days recovering, and waste too much time throwing techniques on autopilot, sacrificing technique as you just try to survive.

But as you train for an hour or twenty-four, all of our mental aims are tempered, and it’s your persevering heart that gets reinforced the most with this kind of Kajukenbo training. You learn that the feeling of failure, of not being able to give enough, is often an illusion. There is disappointment, but not the end. The fight goes on.

This one trait, perseverance, will keep you fighting when any lesser person would give up, on the mat or in your personal life, because it reminds you that despite your senses saying “it’s all over”, despite feelings of not fighting hard enough, a quick look around shows that you are, in fact, still here and still fighting.

The sun will rise again, and you’ll never again see another one exactly like it.

Stay tuned for more writing on the other Mental Aims of Gaylord Method Kajukenbo.

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