Hi everyone,
I'm very new to Muay Thai. I've been training it 2-3 times per week for a little over 4 months. I'm 42 years old, and I've never trained any martial art or fighting sport before; when I was younger I did things like tennis, running, and cycling and in recent years I've just been doing general fitness stuff. I'm training at a Muay Thai/Boxing/Jiu Jitsu gym that just opened at the beginning of the year. I like the owners of the gym a lot.
I signed up for Muay Thai after meeting the coach with whom the gym contracted to teach at an open house the gym hosted. He has a very magnetic personality and his emphasis on the technical aspects of the sport really appealed to me. I probably would not have made it through the first couple of weeks if he hadn't been encouraging and tolerant of my slow pace of learning. I would get really anxious before every class, but that's gradually going away.
Unfortunately, the coach recently and suddenly severed his relationship with the gym. I suspect that he may have just been spreading himself too thin, because he has a large family and another coaching gig in another city, but I don't know for sure. The whole thing feels really weird because the suddenness of the separation didn't seem to fit with what I perceived to be the coach's character.
The gym is working on finding a replacement coach, and until then has had people of varying skill levels and backgrounds teaching classes. The classes haven't been very focused on the technical aspects of the sport and are more conditioning-oriented. For the moment I'm willing to wait it out until they come up with something more consistent. As I said above, I really like the owners and I think they are trying hard to figure out something to meet their students' needs, but it takes time.
At this point I'm feeling that if I want to continue to learn Muay Thai, my motivation is going to have to come from myself and not from a coach, and that the coach-student relationship is one that is often fleeting. I have to keep telling myself that teachers will come and go and I'm just going to have to account for that in my learning process.
I guess my question for the group is whether this sort of thing is common, or if anyone else has gone through something like this in their Muay Thai learning experience. If a coach that you like left, how did you deal with that? How did you keep going? If you learn from different people at the same time, how do you keep it all consistent for yourself?