The quest for the WKC did, of course, start ages ago, in the second half of last year. With only three months to go though, practise, of course, is very different. I’ve limited right down my range of practised techniques, I’m beginning to ramp up the intensity, and generally, trying to live as much kendo as possible, be that watching kendo DVD’s while ironing (I’m dead domesticated, me! I even poop in the toilet!) to doing suburi outside in the freezing cold on days when I can’t go to keiko. I’m also continuing on the head-in-right-place plan given to me by the man with the arrows too. All good.

I’ve also drilled my focus points down to 6 points that I am now going to keep on in my keiko from now until May. They are not anything super secret or special, but actually the result of keeping an analytical keiko diary of most of my regular practises, picking the key and consistent parts, and working that into my practise regime. Get me, actually thinking about my keiko! A far cry away from the days of meat poo and doing kakarigeiko with tree trunks.

Down side? Money and time, as always! I’ve got loads to buy still (shinai, small bits and bobs, some speakers for my iPhone, a plane ticket to Italy….!) and time is killing me too. I’ve got close to bugger all days off left at work too…..ack!

But good news is…..I am totally loving kendo right now. I’m definitely on the up and up in keiko, everything is working very well, and I have some extremely supportive sensei around me at the moment too.

Things is looking mighty rosey. Just got to make sure that the focus points bear fruit in 3 months….

How much do I really want this job at this company? I was fantasizing about it for most of Saturday and Sunday…. I’m STILL thinking about it…
I went to an introductory seminar on Friday after my current job finished, and sat through an hour of the best intro I think I’ve ever had the pleasure to, and left thinking two things:

“Dear god, I really want to work there.”

and

“I’ve got to re-write my Japanese resume, and I haven’t done that in over 4 years…”

So, any how, I’ve applied (and noticed a spelling mistake in my cover letter about 4 seconds after sending it……dam you assuming-that-it’s-underlining-an-American-spelling-when-it’s-actually-just-me! I guess we just sit and wait. Even just the fact that they contacted me, and then the act of applying for the job has me grinning like a little boy, though. After the intro seminar I went home and jabbered to my wife about it for 30 minutes as well, just so that she knew too.

(I can’t believe how much I actually want this. I haven’t wanted a job this much since I was 17…… and I could sleep on Saturday night after I sent my resume off…..I’m so childish!)

I feel young again!

And, as a result of this (because I was still in a flying mood yesterday afternoon) practise at the ‘kan on Sunday afternoon was just awesome! I got an awesome tsuki on a guy who was DUCKING to get out of the way. Figure that one out, it’s as weird as it sounds.

A little radio silence, for the best part of a month, but that’s mostly because work has been a total bugger recently. Not fixed, but sod it, it’ll be sorted soon. I hope….

Anyway, kendo wise, things have been good for the last month. Following on from the last post about grip, I’ve also confirmed to myself that I’m a chubby chaser. That doesn’t mean pulling fat chicks at your local discotheque (unless that’s your sort of thing….) but the size of shinai. I’d been fooling around with a couple of 28mm handles, which ended up just throwing me off. I changed back to full fat, and the gold flowed freely! I’m never going to make that mistake again. Broom handles for the win!

So onward to the new year. First, I’m taking a much needed family week, which just means not doing kendo until saturday. I can live with that.

Forward from that, although the team is still to be announced, I need to get my regime started in the hope that I get picked for the GB team for the World Championships this year in Italy. Thanks to the help from Alistair that I had last year sorting out a number of things about my mental approach, I’ve gone as far as to write up a check list of things to do, and also a time line for my general practise. We start of January consolidating my waza, so purely practising the techniques I want to take to Italy, and nothing else. We also develop my game plans. These are basically set, and revolve around the techniques I’m taking (but I’ve given myself a range of techniques to go for so that I have options that are roughly similar at each stage of my shiai plan).
After this, I begin ramping up the intensity in February, and pushing myself towards generally harder practise, and a focus on controlling the guy in front and taking points.
By April, this will have been going great guns for 2 months, so we keep it going focussing on sharpening up the techniques that are most likely to get points. And of course, keep on getting those points!

May, is a bit of polish, a little bit of an attempt to relax before the big event, and then off we go!

Nice and easy. Well, not easy, and likely not nice, but you know what I mean!

Last year, I went through a lot of suburi to relax my cutting, to great results. It enabled me to stand up straighter, have a light relaxed kamae, and improve the shape of my cuts. Now, what may sound weird, is that I actually went too far in this. I became to relaxed, to the point that it trickled through into my “spirit” and I lost an amount of punch, which I hadn’t really realized.

Yesterday, I was using a slightly thinner shinai than I normally do, a 28mm tsuka width instead of 30mm. It’s funny how the smallest of changes can help. In this case, today I just didn’t feel in control of the shinai, so I made a conscious decision to grip a little stronger. I immediately felt the shinai in a more tactile way in the inner palm of my hands, and BLAM (to use an excellent Batman word!) my men uchi sharpened up considerably…

Hmmm……me thinks, that’s weird. A little extra strength in kamae resulted in a sharper, nicer feeling cut…….ok…..let’s try some stuff out……….

So I switched back to the fatty, and watched my keiko just ramp straight up to awesome, with only the amount of grip I apply to the tsuka as what I have changed (through the last year I’ve managed to learn to relax myself a lot easier, so gripping harder didn’t mean stiffening up completely).

I’m going to experiment a little with this. I’m normally not entirely happy about making changes to things like this when we’re getting close to a big taikai (got the World Championships in May. The team hasn’t been picked yet, but I’m training with it in mind already, and have been for more than a month now. Focus, focus, focus!) but this really struck me as a massive difference, so something that I want to check out.

What also struck me as interesting is how these tiny details (2mm on the tsuka, and, essentially, strength in my FINGERS!) made a big difference to my keiko.

It wasn’t a total disaster. I mean, a tsuki is a tsuki, right? Am I right? You know I’m right. And very strangely, I hit tonnes of degote, a technique which I don’t have any love for. And a couple of gorgeous kaeshi dou, a technique I have endless love for.

But nothing felt right. And at the end of the day, that matters. It might just be the combination of new kote and new shinai that needed a little getting used to, something that hadn’t worked by the end of practised, but it all just felt awkward.

It’s been a while, but I think it might be time to resurrect my evening suburi sessions again….

Regular readers will know that at times I am in the habit of being very hard on myself at times, and I hadn’t figured out that this pressure was killing my enjoyment. A couple of months ago, this began to change. I’m talking with a genius of sorts at the moment, and excellent guy called Alistair, who is opening my head up, helping me pull the shite out, and leaving the sensible stuff in there. I’m not going to go into details, but the net result is that by changing the way I think about kendo on a daily basis, he has helped me find kendo all over again. And I’ll have his baby for it.

This came home to me a couple of weeks ago in a fairly big Tokyo taikai, the Tokyo City Dojo Taikai. Using what he gave me, I managed to keep my head in a nice, calm situation for the whole day, enjoy the taikai, enjoy doing my kendo in the taikai (lord knows that has been a long time coming….) and enjoyed supporting and competing with my mates. I don’t even remember the last time I had that much fun in a competition, it was really a breath of fresh air.

As a result, I feel born again! I can’t wait to get in to the dojo, I’m constantly thinking about my practise, I’m trying to analyse and think of ways to improve it, and I’m actually, finally, at peace with kendo again!

This year has been a tough one for me and the art that I love, but with Alistair’s help and sagely words, I really feel like I have turned a corner with it.

In short, I feel awesome again!

He also gave me a funny little story about this sempai of his who, at a previous hachidan grading (he is still nanadan I believe) got through the first round, a very big achievement in and of itself. He found out that his next opponent was a uni friend from the same year, so he went over to him and said “let me hit you, I want to pass!”. Apparently the friend considered this for a moment then said “No way. You let me hit you, I want to pass.” Obvioulsy, they couldn’t agree to let each other pass, so they decided on the only possible option, shobu. And proceeded to basically ignore the shinsa they were in (the second round of the hachidan exam…….) and knocked seven bells of shit out of each other instead.

The result?

They both failed. Nice.

What is strange, is that, following that and the (thankfully very) minor neck injury, I had two frankly awesome practises, one straight after the other. Friday evening and Saturday morning. Just like that, as Tommy Cooper would say. If he wasn’t dead.

I have an inkling why, let me share it with you. Its appallingly simple, actually. I simply concentrate on attacking seme (ie what I always god dam well preach myself, seme that forces a reaction, and makes them move the way you want) to create better opportunities, and then on the attack, concentrating on getting my legs to the target, bring back some of my speed and distance.

Keiko, in short, felt fantastic.

And then, on the way home, I realised, quite correctly, that, I haven’t gotten better, I’m simply doing the kendo that I was doing half a year ago before the slump I had fallen into gripped me in it’s dirty arms and dragged me down. But then I guess that is the nature of the dreaded kendo slump, you have to get back to where you fell down from in order to try that first step to a higher level again. So, back to that old place I was.

An interesting upside is that I’ve managed to retain a lot of the shape and technique that I had been working on in the absence of success, so I guess it does do well to train your balls of through the slump, and not give up. It’s funny that it all came and (hopefully) fixed itself in a light-bulb-above-the-head esque moment of clarity.

Now all I need to figure out is what I need to do to get moving forwards again…..One step at a time, Gibbo, one step at a time….

Although I have fairly strong opinions about what consitutes seme, it IS a problem at the moment. I’m running over a lot of it in my mind, watching my old videos to see how I used to move before, and generally trying to pick up my activity levels again (though the summer still lingering isn’t helping my fatigue levels…).

I think it’s getting better, but my seme still doesn’t feel as effective as it used to. This came out in spades last night when one guy who I usually enjoy practising with. Maybe he woke up on the wrong side of bed, but he was angry with me pretty much from the get go (a theme with him recently…..I can’t quite figure out why, though I’ve noticed that he’s generally an “angry man” since passing his nanadan recently…..) which ended with him doing a fairly over the top kakarigeiko that resulted in me injuring my neck. It’s ok-ish today, still a bit stiff, but I’m going to try keiko anyway…..(because I want to! Yes, I know I am dumb!!) Anyhow, the net result is that it still illustrates that I have a long way to go……

Just keep at it for now I guess.

Yesterday, I was in the single worst shiai that I have experienced since coming to Japan. Out 2-0 in the first round.

The result I can live with, but everything that caused it I can’t, and it points to a lot of work that I need to do.

First, my mental approach was just rubbish. I ended up thinking too much about the little niggles that I had (eg I knew the guy I was going to fight was pretty good, my legs felt heavy, I felt sleepy, my wrists – which have given me trouble recently – were stiff) and coupled with a longer waiting time than usual, giving me even more time to work myself down, meant that I was not going to win by the time I stepped in.

The technical kendo itself wasn’t bad, I kept my hands down, had fairly good seme, got the reactions I wanted, but all the rubbish at the back of my mind got in the way. Not only that, but I felt quite heavy, immobile, and unable to deal with the very agile opponent that I had to deal with.

So what now? Well, I’ve gone too far down the solid and steady route, and I don’t think that my kendo carries the threatening nature that it used to have. That changes now. I’m going to get back to energetic and dynamic, more moving, more feet, more pressure. This is definitely a kakarigeiko and jigeiko based change, so I need to make sure that I am getting a good balance in my practise (this shouldn’t be difficult).

The other side is the mental aspect, which is going to be a lot harder. I think I need to research some proper stress management techniques (any specialists who want to point me in the right direction will be welcome!) and find out how to control my mental state. It’s all over the place right now….I need to get my old control back!

They say the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging and understanding it. Well, here we go! I’ve got another shiai in 3 weeks, and then another 3 weeks after that, so I’ll have plenty of chances to see how I do.