The Road to Nidan

So I am ecstatic - my unlikely champions - the NY Giants, beat all odds and shocked the world when they became World Champions last night and made the 'perfect' patriots, just one bit less perfect. (By the way, while the Patriots have won 3 championships in the last 7 years, they have also lost 2 as well). Of course, I always hoped my Giants would win, even while acknowledging that the Patriots would be a difficult team to beat. In every discussion and interview and news blurb regarding the Superbowl, one important factor stood out in my mind. Whenever any of the Giants were asked about the Patriots being 18 and 0, they simply brushed it off as those games don't count anywhere as nearly as much as the one we are going to play. They knew they were the underdog, they new that the Pats were favorites and had a perfect season on the line - but they didn't let it get to them! This, in my opinion was why they won, why their defense persevered and shut down Brady and Moss, a...

So I walked into practice last night (about 20 minutes late, as I needed to calm the baby down before leaving), and my Sensei's first question is 'so? how did you do? Where's my trophy?'. I will admit I was actually thinking of bringing the trophy with me, I decided against bringing it. I started to talk about everyone else's wins. 'No', said Sensei, 'I want to know about you.' When I told him I finished third he was pleased, but then I told him there were only three people in my division. He jokingly said that I was dragging his name down. But I explained that I knew that I played well but still have some work to do. I jumped into practice, acting as uke for someone's Sankyu test. This kid is actually one of the people who is from Sensei's credit class (all of the 'club' classes are non-credit, but then matriculating students at the college can take his for credit class as well), and when he passed sensei mentioned how Judo took him...

There is an old Talmudic adage that goes something like this: He who learns in order to teach will be able to learn and teach, but he who learns in order to do will be able to learn, to teach, to preserve, and to do. (Avot 4:6, in case you're wondering) I've always applied this to my learning of anything, and especially Judo. The idea here is that the study of Judo isn't just academic, but part of our lives in more ways than one. I once commented on the JudoForum , that Judo creeps into my life in the strangest of ways - for example, I sometimes find myself using foot-sweeps to open doors when I don't have a free hand. As I get more senior, and as I help out in the kids class, I am seeing this more and more with my own eyes. The techniques that I had the hardest time with as a beginner, and the ones that I spent the most time learning and working on, are the techniques that I enjoy teaching the most. All of the advice that I never took until I learned the hard way ...

So I went back to practice last night after taking a couple of weeks off with the baby. For some odd reason, there were only four of us and the two senseis (and one of the four sat on the sidelines, as he was feeling sick after the warmups). Since some of my dojo mates will be taking the Kata test shortly, the two Senseis (both former Kata examiners) reviewed our Kata and gave a lot of helpful hints. I also managed to practice some new moves that I want to incorporate into my competition repetoire and sensei gave me a lot of good pointers. Of course, since I hadn't practiced in a couple of weeks, I was sore as anything all over this morning. I got on the scale last week and realized that it was time to lose weight again, and so I started ramping up in my exercises - this way I am not as sore as I might be right now. Hopefully I will shed a few pounds, but I highly doubt I will drop enough to get down to 198 by the end of the month for the tourney I want to compete in, but it will ...

As I posted earlier, my old dojo, Oishi's just moved to a new space a couple of weeks ago. I refer to Oishi's as my old dojo, because I haven't been there in a while. I used to go to their afternoon classes, during my lunch break, but ultimately, after getting a lot more responsibility at work, taking two hours off in the middle of the day twice a week became less of an option. While Oishi's dojo was close to my office, it was not close enough from home for me to attend his evening classes. Thankfully I have found that Sensei Watanabe's classes fit my schedule and are 5 minutes from home. But I still miss my lunchtime Oishi Crowd. So I went down to the new dojo today to say hi and check it out. As it turns out, the new dojo is even closer to my office and I also discovered that I have a handful of classes left on my account (you can pay per class or pay per year at Oishi's). So I think that I will have to go work out there once a week! Lurking on the Judoforum, ...

I just played with the layout a bit and I noticed something very interesting. In the months that I was playing hard and making real progress, I tended to post a lot more entries. I guess I need to start playing a little bit harder and a lot more frequently.