Thursday February 17th

Yesterday was a pretty difficult day for me as you know.. I feel a lot better in myself today and to be honest it's mainly due to the large amount of responses and messages I received from so many people since yesterday.. So, thank you everybody and I'll get back to you all soon.  You'd be surprised how a short message or a phone call gives you a boost and shows that everybody is behind you even if they are on the other side of the world!  Thanks again.

So... rather than telling you all the factual information about training this evening.. I'm going to tell a slightly different story.  Kagawa Sensei was not in the dojo again tonight for some reason, so it was Yamaguchi Sensei and Matsue Sensei who taught..  To be honest, I've got to the stage where I'm finding it hard to rate how difficult or intense training is..  Admittedly, I always feel wrecked after training but this is a good feeling!  I don't really suffer from muscle soreness the morning after training and my recovery time in between drills in the dojo is pretty quick.. So fitness is not a problem.. my major problem at this stage is the constant dripping of sweat from my chin and nose onto the dojo floor during training and the slippery conditions that this creates..! I still feel that I have a couple of gears to move up in the sharpness side though!

After Yamaguchi Sensei's class tonight from 6-7pm some people stayed on for the next class and there were also a number of "fresh" newcomers.. One guy in particular stood out to me.. It was my first time seeing him at the dojo... a brown belt.. early to mid twenties maybe and I don't mean this in a bad way but... he looked like an "ordinary" to me... probably a college student who by chance could manage to come to the dojo tonight.  So Matsue Sensei started the class and it was tough going alright... constant muscle training drills... pushups, situps, squats, other abdominal exercises with punches and kicks thrown in again... For the guy that I have mentioned this class was probably brutally hard...

As we were going through the drills we all had our turn counting from 1-10 and this guy who was training beside me kept missing his turn to count.. It was obvious at this stage that he was suffering..  Matsue Sensei appeared to make a little bit of light humour about the guy missing the count and finding the going tough..  After around 40 minutes of constant drills without a break we were invited to take a water break.  When I went into the changing room to get my water bottle, the guy that I'm referring to was thrown in a heap on the floor gasping for air... I said "otsu-kara-sama-deshita" to him (which basically means; "well done.. it was hard work") but took no more notice.  After this 1 minute break we went back on to the dojo floor for kumite (fighting).  The guy evenetually came out but it became apparent very quickly that he wasn't able to stand up or even keep his eyes open.  Matsue Sensei and Yamaguchi Sensei spotted this straight away and got him to sit down in the corner.  20 minutes later he was still in a bad way.. looked extremely uncomfortable and couldn't even sit straight.. Yamaguchi Sensei took the last part of the class and we practiced Bassai-Dai but everybody seemed to be concerned for this guy.  When class finsihed up we cleaned the dojo floor but there was a noticeable sense of shock and worry for the guy.  Yamaguchi Sensei eventually put him into a wheelchair and he was taken to the hospital.  Matsue Sensei went with him.  I hope he'll be okay. 

This just brings me to the whole point of the intensity of training at the Hombu Dojo... Okay, I train there everyday for 2-3 hours a day... This is probably extreme for the "ordinary" person but I'm here in Tokyo for this purpose only... It must be difficult for a guy like a referred to in this post, who is obviously an "ordinary" person and has another life outside of the dojo where he is either working in a specific job which he is probably very good at or he is studying in university for his chosen profession.  The profession of the Sensei's in the dojo is full-time karate.. And it is also my full-time "profession" until May...  So you probably realise at this stage that the training at the Hombu Dojo here in Tokyo is extremely intensive...  It's not to be underestimated, especially by the "ordinary" person..

Finally, I can't help but wonder if there was another Sensei teaching.. would he have spotted that this guy was in trouble at an earlier stage and told him to rest... Matsue Sensei is pretty full-on when it comes to this type of intensive training and admirably he does everything with the students and trains as hard as everyone else while he's teaching.. Then again Kanayama Sensei does the same but... he has brought a towel over to me on several occasions when he has seen that I'm training hard but that I need to wipe to wet patch that forms under my feet when I train...  for me this is something special.