Goodness me, time has flown! I haven’t written anything here since January! No apologies though, this is just something I do for my own amusement and I’m pretty certain nobody reads it anyway.
“So, how have things been going?” I hear nobody at all asking. Fast! Sometimes it feels like I’ve unwittingly strapped myself to a rocket! At the end of February I graded for my 3rd kyu. Not at a seminar this time but at my Sensei’s dojo at the end of our Saturday morning class with all my dojo-mates watching. It was a tough grading, but I passed and was surprised and delighted at the end to be presented with my brown belt. It’s hard to explain what that feels like. The next belt I’ll wear, all going well, will be black!
This time last year I was some guy who might tell you about how he used to do karate “years ago”. I had been a 5th kyu when I was a much younger, leaner, much more flexible man. Karate was firmly in the realm of nostalgia, and daydreams of “what might have been” if I had just stuck with it.
When I started back at the dojo in September last year I was fully prepared to wear a white belt again and even suggested to my now Sensei that I try to get back to a good level of fitness before coming back to karate. Knowing now that I have somehow stumbled into this group of such highly skilled, technical karateka who train so intensely, I am surprised at how warmly I was invited into the fold. This is the rocket I didn’t really understand I was hitching myself to. But it has paid off!
The training is so intense that my karategi is so soaked in sweat that it’s pretty much see-through at the end of the sessions, and I am thriving. I feel ten years younger, and so much stronger and fitter. My body is changing and I can feel it. The everyday feeling now is not an ache or pain really, but almost: it’s hard to describe but it’s a very pleasant feeling knowing that my muscles have been worked and are becoming stronger. It reminds me of when I trained for a marathon years ago. Every night I would go to bed with the feeling that my legs had been working hard and were transforming into better legs for running. I feel that again now, in my legs but also in my back, shoulders, core, even my feet. I haven’t actually lost that much weight, but I’m not as soft and pudgy as I used to be. My face and my body are visibly different than only a short few months ago. I have more energy, and less of the aches and pains that come with a sedentary life.
Flexibility is improving too, albeit slower than other things. I am not a young man anymore, so that’s to be expected. Mind you I can touch my toes easily, and kick to jodan, which is more than many in my age and line of work can say. Stiff hips, weak hip flexors, tight hamstrings, and a tight lower back (the “Four Horsemen of Desk Job Mobility Issues”) plague me but I am slowly seeing improvements. The full split goal is still what I’m aiming for, but it feels a long way off.
I’ve gone back again to Tom Kurz and his book Stretching Scientifically, which is pretty much the book on flexibility as far as I and many other martial artists are concerned. I first encountered this book years ago when I first started karate, and I was amazed at how quickly I was able to achieve high kicks. My first copy of Stretching Scientifically was passed around to my old dojo-mates and maybe even my Sensei and I ended up losing track of who had it. So I bought another copy recently and I am noticing improvements in only a couple of weeks as I put Tom Kurz’ advice into practice even as I’m still working my way through the book.
It’s not all straightforward. My body is older now and that means I have to be more mindful not to overdo things. Recovery takes much longer than when I was younger. So when I get the early warning signs that things might not be all good I have to back off a little. I had to stop trying so hard to achieve the splits after my knee started acting funny, thankfully that’s okay now, but I have had to take a more mindful and more gentle approach while still working towards the full split. In the last couple of days my lower back has given me warning signs too so I must listen and go easy on the leg swings for high kicks. It’s not fun feeling old, but in my younger body I probably would have just pushed through the pain and actually injured myself, which is kind of what happened. These days I find myself more grateful for the body I have and the things that it is able to do, so I am more inclined to be patient with myself. My body and I are old friends at this stage, and in the end it is much faster to work with my body than try to beat it into submission.
Mō Ichido 