When I was young and learning, and even old and learning—for I was lucky enough to improve my mobility up until the very end, thanks to good legs—one would learn a new skill, inculcate it in training and then still struggle to apply it in sparring and struggle even more deeply to apply it in combat.

Now, I face a different struggle, with my mobility reduced by 50% overnight and my stamina and pace hard to gauge. The reduced mobility is simpler to deal with, for there was a time when I moved at a fractional level compared to my top form and I remember. But I never remember getting tired so easily, have never been this slow, have been able to gauge my stamina and pace very accurately for most of my life. Now, with something as simple as a six-mile walk, I tell my girl [a few weeks past], “I will be there in ninety minutes.”

120-minutes later, even after I cut through a ghetto declivity, the phone rings and she says, “Where the hell are you, superman? I think your odometer is broken.”

I look to my right as I walk down the street through the Dutch Village housing projects and see a 25-year-old hoodlum shadowing me and say, “Bitch, I told you I’d meet you at da liquo sto en I will en it ain’t no never mind a yers dat I stopped of ta trow dice with ma niggas Tyresese en Blinky!”

The Dindu hordesmen made tracks and left me alone as she complained, “You are limping along through the projects—are you fucking retarded nigga! Is dis big mamma gonna have to slap yo ass down?”

…and so it went as we role-played our Dindu counterparts and negotiated a safe place for her to pick me up in her pink minibus…

I will be finishing out The Combat Space with training notes targeted at the injured and aging fighter, based on my sudden catastrophic aging and my three remaining training goals:

1. Being able to type eight hours per day again

2. Remaining able to execute simple sentry-removal techniques, for the darkness in my mind has coalesced into the very simple desire to remain lethal so that I can take an attacker with me—all thoughts of defense and moderation in self-defense situations abandoned with the loss of what was a very high level of mobility.

3. Climbing the Medicine Wheel Mountain with Ishmael next September

My various sparring and training and coaching functions will be covered. Perhaps some of these will mirror your plight or perhaps your distant future or maybe the fate of one of the fighters you train. In the meantime, the thing that must be remembered—that realization that convinced me to give up competition in order to husband my survival-fighting ability—is that the ego must no longer be engaged as a motivating spark, for it prevents realistic evaluation of the deteriorating situation. To achieve at the top level in combat sports you must be able to lie to yourself on a beautiful level to even have a chance of momentarily attaining that state of actionism. But, as your body slows, your muscles rot off the bone and the old injuries turn into adhesions that render your earlier self-assessments inaccurate, you must return to the basics. In many cases, this forced return of an elite fighter or just a cagey veteran like myself—to the bare basics, is what turns him into an effective coach for the fighter who is just beginning his journey.