It really is amazing - after having dealt with my poor knees for so long, it's a tweaked big toe on my right foot and comes the closest to sidelining me. I came to the realization that it's very simple to fake it through training when you have a hinky knee, but for some reason a messed up big toe makes things nearly impossible. I guess it makes sense in a way, it's the part of your foot that gets all the beating, from the beginning of any movement to the landing point for any action. It just has to be the most frustrating thing ever, I can train, and I continue to, but it definitely hurts like a mother f-er.
Regardless of the injury, my training is going on as it was before, but with the days leading up to a nice two week hiatus from the dojo, I've been focusing more on the basics. Ultimately, that's what every martial art really is - basics (or kihon as we karate-ka like to call it). Kihon, kihon and more kihon has been my regimen of late. The dojo has gone through some changes in the past few years, and training partners are few and far between. Far be it for me to say that I'm some badass fighter, I'm not, I'm probably just mediocre at best. I am the most committed, consistent and longest in training in the dojo at the moment, and therein lies the problem. Finding somebody to really push me gets harder and harder. At one point, I was able to take time to travel to local dojos and train during their kumite/team sessions, and get fantastic training sessions, but with school and work piling on, the time available to do this has been significantly less (read: zero).
So what do you do in these situations? Very simple, you go back to the basics. I started worrying more about being efficient rather than being powerful. Efficiency will lead to faster movement, and faster movement will lead to power. For power generation, I rely on my work in the gym. Once I have the opportunity, I combine the two. So efficiency of movement is my first goal. The second is to create cleaner techniques, limit and eliminate all extraneous movements. Competition kumite is, after all, a matter of crispness of technique, as much as it is about spirit and commitment to attack.
Anyway, so for the next two weeks I will be on hiatus from the dojo. I will be traveling in India with my girlfriend, but I realized that two weeks without intense physical exercise, and I might go crazy. So I decided to bring my running shoes along, and see if I can log in some mileage just to keep my body going. On the other hand I also considered the words of a friend of mine from Canada. He was visiting New York at one point, and he told me that he takes his gi with him wherever he goes, whenever he travels. It's easy to find a traditional dojo anywhere you go. So I figured I'd look up shotokan schools in India...turns out there's a JKA dojo barely a kilometer away from where I'm staying.
Here's to hoping that I will have the time available to actually make it to the dojo, it should be interesting to train overseas as a guest. Anyway, time to pack, wish me luck!
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