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Went to my mates Karate class tonight, his dad teaches it. The usual antics happened, me being a 7th dan that doesn't speak much English, yada yada.
I got paired up with this white belt at the start and we did this combination ending in a take down. I don't know how it was supposed to go but I was doing something like fore foot irimi mawashi geri shoto ken into the kidneys and then the take down, which was meant to be a sweep I was doing as chudan irimi nage omote but holding the chest.
So me and the white belt went at a pedestrian pace and then we swapped partners. I grabbed my mate, there's no point going to your mates class if you don't train with your mate for a bit. So his dad is explaining things and my mate and I are having this discussion, mainly non-verbal, about how hard he's going to throw jodan tsuki at me. Eventually he shrugs his shoulders and his dad calls "hajime!" and my mate tries to take my head off but I move and batter him into the wooden floor.
What is it about training at full power? He gets up and he has this look on his face that's all "Yeah, good, more" so I batter him four more times and then we swap and there's kiai and everything and he's slamming me into the floor.
So then comes sparring and again, we battered each other. We talking about it afterwards though. For an Aikidoka taking a punch in the gob and a kick to the ribs is meaningless as long as we get into grapple but for a Karateka there's actually a bit of an aversion to gett
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At what point does a situation go from becoming one of those challenges to be faced upto in training to being a problem which just has to be accepted?
I keep writing entries about this and I keep deleting them but basically it boils down to this: I hate being part of a dying dojo. I hate going training; I get nothing out of it and I don't see that anything I put into it will have any result.
I'm not going to talk about how or why this situation has come about because I find that I end up writing ranting diatribes because it is something which provokes immense anger in me.
The fact is though that tonight I will be one of two people on the mat, maybe; there's a reasonable chance that I might be the only person on the mat and its been this way for months and for months I've kinda battled on. Partly I've done this because I'm stubborn and partly because I feel a responsibility as senior student to set an example; I don't want to give anyone else an excuse for not training and so I put my own feelings to one side and I go training and on the mat I bite my tongue, dig deep and carry on. I see it as one of those challenges that has to be trained though.
I've even gone on an instructors course the point of which I do not get. As I said to Sensei, being qualifed to instruct under supervision makes little sense when there are two students on the mat or effectively one instructor, one assistant instructor and a student on the mat.
07-27-2011 08:23 PM 
