You may have noticed that I’ve been slacking off a bit last week, and the reason to be honest was a bit of apathy on my part. Training wasn’t going very well and I couldn’t draw inspiration to post.
I love training, I always have, but over the last week or so it was getting me down a bit. Looking back on it now I can see that a lot of the problems were probably due to not letting my cold clear up properly and trying to train half-fit, but I’m a stubborn sod at times. My kicks were terrible, the ongoing problem I’ve got with the top of my thigh was flaring up, I forgot forms (this was the one which annoyed me most – I had always told myself I’d never let myself forget one), had to sit out sparring because I simply didn’t have the strength and was coughing up my lungs. It was really disheartening to get worse at something I invest so much time and effort in. I guess that’s the Yang to go with the usual Um I get from it.
Friday had an interesting little twist for me. It was the annual staff conference (and for me, the last thanks to my contract not being extended past the end of this March), and for the afternoon sessions we had a motivation/NLP guy in, who in fairness was actually really good and engaging. One of the concurrent themes was ‘you can’, and at one point he held a large piece of pine up and asked if anyone could break it with their hand. My heart jumped into my mouth a bit, as I knew I could but for some reason had some real apprehension. I started looking around furtively and caught the eye of someone else from my office who knew I did martial arts, but I kept my hand down. I think it was a mix of a bit of panic, but also knowing that I could do it easily and not wanting to take it away from someone else. No-one volunteered so he went on to another exercise where people were lifting people with their fingers or something, but then he came back to the wood. This time I put my hand up.
He got me up and made me put a gi/dobok top on and tie a black belt, which I felt a bit weird about, knowing what it means and that I clearly didn’t deserve to be wearing it. He had me do some air strikes first, and tried to talk me through doing a kihap/kiai – I think he was a bit surprised at how loud I did mine ;). Then he lined me up to do a palm-heel strike through it. It went through easily – I knew it would – but I’ll confess it was quite nice to hear people clapping and cheering. I got a free copy of his book for my troubles, make of that what you will.
On my way to training that evening I managed to rub my car door against a wooden barrier which has broken the mounting for my wing mirror and put a big dent in my passenger door. It wasn’t exactly the best way for the evening to start, especially when coupled with my dismal performance in training that night, but with it being the first Friday of the month it was also my monthly rock/metal night, which was an absolute blast and exactly what I needed!
The rest of the weekend was nice and quiet, just some dog running on the beach, seeing friends for a meal and a few drinks in the evening and then going to see my niece and nephew yesterday. I really enjoy the Sunday evening chill-outs now, just relaxing on the sofa with the lights off and the fire lit. The impending week at work makes it feel all that much sweeter.