Adam’s Cerebral Spillage

Surely going back to the lower grades syllabus should be easy? You’d think so, easier at least at any rate, but no, not for me. Last night I managed to do something nasty to my finger doing the very first set sparring combinations from the old Moo Duk Kwan syllabus. I’m so clever!

It should have been a simple combination; the attacker throws a rear-leg front kick, I block it with an inverted inside-to-out palm and retaliate with a reverse punch and kick of my own. It was going really well until the last kick of the session, when for some reason my brain decided that a much better block would be a straight-fingered spear hand to a moving shin… I had that weird few seconds at first where you aren’t sure what happened, followed by the realisation, pain and the ‘ohmygod, ohmygod, what happened? Did I break anything? Is there blood?’ shock reaction. I’m not sure what I did exactly, but it was incredibly painful.

So today I have a freak finger. It’s about twice the size of the one on the opposite hand, and the middle knuckle is now turning purple and red and all kinds of interesting colours. If I try to make a fist with my left hand now it looks like the same kind of fist you’d make if you were trying to strike pressure points with your middle knuckle, and I also look a bit special trying to type. My first thought when I got home last night was that I’d broken it, because it felt just like when I broke my finger last year, the same throbbing pain followed by a dull ache and not being able to put any pressure on it at all, but I’m not so sure this morning. I’ll just keep an eye on it for the next few days and see what happens, I really want to avoid going to X-ray again because it’s so incredibly boring.

Other than that little episode training’s still going great. Little changes made to the most basic techniques have made it a real task trying to re-learn without losing power or form. Things like floating a foot through the most basic blocks make them feel a lot more powerful, but I know I’m getting sloppy doing them. It’s all too easy to let the forward momentum throw your body forward into a lean, and forget about keeping square shoulders and hips… for now at least.

I started back at Dog Agility last week after a while away thanks to my excursions and those of our teacher, and it was great fun. We’re back to Monday evenings now, but with a 5:30 start, which means it’s a pretty frantic race home, get changed, get Murph ready and get over to the ground. We still both love it, maybe this year will be the one which sees me get him measured and entered in his first competition .

Technorati Tags dog agility, finger, injury, tang soo do

Not only one of my all-time favourite albums by the mighty Fear Factory (I strongly suggest you listen to it if you’re into Metal in any way), but also a word that’s been in my head lately when I think about my Tang Soo Do training.

For me, training seems to go in cycles, ones which have happened enough times now for me to recognise and acknowledge them. I’m at a point now where I’m looking at everything I do and pulling it to pieces, and this is due in no small part to the new teaching changes which see Sunday evenings focusing on the lower gup syllabus. We’ve been taking apart a lot of the stuff I first learned years ago, the building blocks of the art, and it’s really making me think about how I do them, and making me want to greatly improve these parts. I touched on it in my last post here, but introducing Shin Chook (tension and relaxation) into things I do automatically now such as the first few il soo sik dae ryun, makes them feel very different – but at the same time very familiar. A bit like the first time you put your favourite jeans on after washing them.

I do a lot of my best thinking and analysing of what I do in the kitchen these days. While I’m cooking meals I’m constantly working through moves, combinations, forms – anything and everything basically – and since tearing those basics apart and starting to rebuild them into a better, stronger version of what they were I’ve begun to look at everything and question my execution. Am I putting a full amount of hip into high blocks? Nope. Am I STILL not locking my back leg out in a front stance after years of practise? Yep. Are my shoulders and hips square when I perform a simple choong dan kong kyuk? Not on your life.

I’ve also started looking at the various moves and turns in the forms, and trying to decide on what the applications could be. We learn this sort of thing in our lessons, and every man and his (computer-literate) dog can look up ‘bunkai’ on youtube, but personally I feel there’s a lot of value in trying to work it out for myself. I don’t believe for a second that there’s a single intended application for every movement during the hyung, so putting an imaginary opponent(s) around you and deciding how you might use or adapt a sequence is mentally challenging and really interesting; to me at least. I realise just how pretentious this could all sound, but I don’t care .

I imagine this all sounds pretty familiar to a lot of practitioners of classical martial arts, especially those who have an active interest in it and don’t just go through the motions and switch off once they get home. At least I hope so, I’m not that odd am I? It’s one of the cycles I mentioned at the start. Every so often I think ‘Hey, you know what, I’m really beginning to get this now’, only to be made to look at what I’m doing and then think ‘Just how badly have I been doing that??’. I remember a few weeks after I started training in Tang Soo Do thinking ‘I wonder if it gets boring once you get to Dan grade and know how to do everything?’. Oh how wrong could I have been?? I know now that the learning and improving never ends, and in a way it’s a very reassuring thing. It’s nice to know that in 5, 10, or even 50(!) years time I’m still going to be looking at what I’m doing and trying to make it better in some way.

I’m doing it again now, thinking too much. I was just re-reading what I’ve written and started thinking about the forms and applications. A lot of what we do is derived from Chinese kung-fu styles, which got me wondering about what their applications for the forms involved. The use of huri (hip) in the movements is a very TSD thing, and when I think about some of the throws and re-directions in the forms (low blocks, high blocks etc), I wonder how practical they’d be without that efficient use of body weight transferral that the hip movement affords us. I can’t imagine it was designed with brute force in mind, so was there a completely different intention for those motions or does it work without the huri?….

*That paragraph above is pretty much a stream of consciousness as it came. That’s what it’s like in my brain most of the day when I’m not concentrating on something else, it’s no wonder it takes me so long to get to sleep*

Technorati Tags application, bunkai, Fear Factory, tang soo do, training

It’s about time I updated I think. I had the week off last week and spend 5 days of it up with the in-laws on holiday in Somerset. It was a nice relaxing time and I got to spend lots of time with my extended family, especially my niece who insisted I went on as many rides as possible at the nearby theme park! I visited Longleat for the first time too which was awesome, there’s so much to see and do and feeding the deer through the car window while we went through the safari area was hysterical.

But now it’s back to normality and back to work. Luckily the unseasonably hot, sunny weather is still with us and I’m loving it. I’ve already managed to get a couple of barbecues under my belt (literally, with the amount of meat I ate), and it’s when I’ve been sat in the back garden in shorts and a t-shirt, relaxing with a beer in the sunshine that I have to remind myself it’s still only April! Long may it continue I say.

I’ve got loads lined up over the next few weeks, starting with a rock night before too long. It’s been AGES since we had a good club night out. I’m looking forward to hopefully having a few(!) beers this time and getting my mosh on! I’m feeling in the need for some excessively loud metal and a lot of leaping around with like-minded folk . With a bit of luck we’ll entice some rock night virgins up too and get them well and truly initiated (and inebriated). After that I’m off up to the bright lights of London for a weekend with my mates. It’s smack-bang in the middle of birthday season, so we’re going up to watch a night of boxing at West Ham’s Upton Park ground, featuring some of our latest Olympic stars such as James DeGale and Frankie Gavin. It’s on the same Saturday as the FA Cup Final, so it’s going to be a great day. Football, boxing, then back to the hotel to watch Amir Khan’s fight in the States on the same night – good times! Finally, the end of May sees our long-awaited holiday. Twelve of us are packing our bags and heading to sunny Spain (volcanoes permitting…) for a week of lounging in the pool and relaxing. Despite the fact that it’s Seni that weekend (noooooo) and the Eurovision Song Contest final on the same day (double-noooooooooo), it’s going to be great. I’ll just have to buy more pointless weapons and awesome Muay Thai shorts another time .

Training’s great at the moment, the change of each class to be focused on a specific grade has meant I’ve revisited a lot of the very basic stuff I take for granted now, and taken them apart only to rebuild them incorporating concepts I wasn’t introduced to the first time I learned. I can already see just how powerful those simple techniques are with proper use of shin chook applied, not to mention just how much better they look when done that way. I’ve always thought you can tell how accomplished a martial artist is by how natural and easy they make things look, and I’m hoping this is just the start of working towards that. I’m still struggling with the recurring hip injury I’ve been carrying for literally years now, and it’s really painful (not to mention annoying) at the moment. I ought to go back to the doctor again but they just seem to shrug it off, the most I’ve ever had done is some simple exercises from the self-referral physio. Ho-hum, maybe I should just take a leaf out of Bill Wallace’s book and only kick left-sided .

Technorati Tags barbecue, boxing, holiday, tang soo do, training

I’m writing this off the back of the most memorable weekend, and one I hope is only going to be repeated in the future. We (as a club) went away to Bedford to compete in the EMTF European Tang Soo Do Championships, and I like to think we did our club and our county proud.

A long trip is kind of expected for us now if we want to compete on anything more than the (rapidly dwindling) local circuit, and we weren’t disappointed by the trip to Bedford. As well as the 300+ miles on the road, this time we were taking ‘Reggie’ with us, the minibus from the university campus where many of our club train. Reggie unfortunately has a speed limiter which means he had trouble getting above 60 miles an hour, which made sections of the motorway feel like a drag at times, but at the same time helped us all feel like a bit more of a team. No-one gets left behind!

I can’t speak for everyone, but I had trouble eating on Friday night as the nerves started to kick in. After not-a-lot of sleep we headed over to the sports centre and basically got on with it. Lining up to start the ceremony was a new experience for me, and it felt very strange to be stood just behind the front row. Being counted as Senior in a hall of a few hundred fellow practitioners is an eye-opener, especially when the Dan grades are asked to turn around and have the rest of the competitors bow to them. Once we got past the opening ceremony, which included a big show from out old Seni friends, Baba Deep Singh Gattka, it was on to business. I thought I’d had a bad omen within 10 minutes of the competition beginning after only just getting changed into my dobok. I was stretching in front of the audience seating and managed to hit a spectator in the glasses as she walked past me…. smooth, Adam.

I was far more under control of my nerves than I thought I’d be when I got called to perform my first form, Chil Sung Sam Roh. That said, I was still absolutely flushed with adrenaline, so much so that I barely remember performing it at all. I remember sitting down afterward though and feeling like I really wanted to fight, or run a mile, or jump around like a lunatic – it was such a massive buzz. To my amazement I did enough to take Bronze which was very satisfying, even moreso when it turns out I was only beaten by two members of my own club. Making a clean sweep of the podium in the Dan grade Chil Sung event felt like vindication for the amount of time and effort we put into them. I had plenty of time to watch our guys on other mats as I helped with some score keeping on the one I was assigned to, a mat which typically hosted two of our junior grades. Better not make any calculation errors in that one then! Luckily I didn’t, and the girls took well-deserved silver and bronze.

Later in the same day I competed in the Chang Bong (bo / staff) forms category and did enough to pick up silver which was also really gratifying. A lot of the people performing Bong were doing very elaborate forms with a lot of spins, whereas myself and another of our Dan grades performed something more akin to a Kicho open hand form (read: very basic). The fact that good technique shone through and we took silver and bronze was nice to see in a discipline which seems to be being influenced by ‘freestyle’ moves more and more.

That night we had a good trip out to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet which helped make up for the lack of eating anything for the day, followed by a failed attempt to find a pub to watch the Haye Vs Ruiz fight. By that point I was so tired that I was quite as annoyed as I would have been otherwise, which was lucky as I’d been waiting a long time to see that fight. A few hours kip later and it was time for Day 2: Sparring.

I spent a lot of the day behind a scoreboard or helping to referee fights, which was both quite an honour to be asked to do, and also a nuisance as I didn’t get to see many of the ISK competitors. Those I could watch though were great, and by and large bossed the mats which, again, was testament to the extra training we all put in.  I personally didn’t like the way a lot of the points were scored, but that may just be my bias of coming from a competition background of freestyle, where blocked shots normally aren’t scored. My own fights went pretty well despite the way the official results went, and I was really pleased to beat one of the Dutch Huk-Tti guys, despite not medaling, as they have a big reputation. All over the hall our team were picking up medals left, right and center, it was a great day.

The Indian banquet which rounded the weekend off was awesome, we all ate far, far too much food, indulged ourselves in Master Uberlander’s delicious beer and danced the night away. I’m really looking forward to the first training session back tonight, getting back on the mat and training while I’m still really enthused. I couldn’t be more proud of our team, and I can’t wait to see how we manage to build on this standard for the upcoming British and World Championships.

Now comes the self-centered, reflective bit. Don’t say you weren’t warned

I’m quite surprised how much the competition, and the weekend as a whole, has affected me. I always knew it was going to be a good time, but I’ve taken so much more from it that I’d ever anticipated. I can’t describe how it felt to be a part of it all, to be stood there with all of those other TSD practitioners who’d traveled from all over the UK and Europe to do the same as me. It was great to be included (as a Dan grade) to help with the adjudicating and keeping the days running smoothly, it all felt very inclusive.

Stand-out moments for me include: bowing in with hundreds of other people for the first time, hearing people from our club cheer and applaud whenever I or anyone else competed and represented ISK, not falling over or forgetting my forms, watching our guys (and girls!) performing better than I could have imagined, and getting drunk with and dancing with everyone on that final night.

I’ve come back to Cornwall feeling completely inspired, and utterly determined to get as good as I possibly can, and hopefully a little bit beyond that! The feeling of being part of something bigger – and as clichéd as it sounds – a family, is something that’s really stayed with me. The strange thing is that even though it was such an amazing time, I’ve come back and feel quite dejected now. When we all stood for the final bow-out it hit me that it was over, and ‘normal life’ had to resume. I realise that it’s the fact that it was such a departure from the norm that made it so special, but I didn’t want it to end.  I just have to keep telling myself that this is just the first of many of these experiences for me, and that it’s only going to get better as we do. It’s safe to say I can’t wait for the next event

And finally, despite it being quite crass and ego-centric, here’s what I won. It’s not as much as some, and there’s no gold there, but these (or what they represent for me)  mean an enormous amount to me.

Bronze for Chil Sung, Silver for Chang Bong

Tang Soo everyone, and thank you all!

Technorati Tags EMTF, Eurpoean Championships, In Sung Kwan, ISK, success!, tang soo do