Shizentai

I've had so many interesting floor memories in my time. For sure there were a lot of gym floors, especially the college clubs. Through a weird turn of events I ended up attending 4 universities in my 4 years of undergraduate schooling. In every one except for at my Japanese university we were on a wooden gym floor. I actually found the tatami in our training facility in Japan much harder to grow accustomed to. It's true! When training in a gym there can be any number of surprises. I once stepped in an unseen blob of PB&J from someone who had used the space before our prescribed time. Just the other week we were in a training camp, and someone got the idea to spread talc around, to make it easier to crescent step. It made for some surprisingly slippery entrances to the room. A common use floor is always like that though. We have what we have. There is a certain amount of variability in it. At one of the American Universities I attended we would get kicked out of the gym during the summertime. Instead we would train in the grass in front of the bell tower. This lead to a number of entertaining interactions with the terrain and passers-by alike. It was custom to have "grass gis" as we would call them: a single gi per person sacrificed to the gods of mud and slime, so that not all of our uniforms would look terrible through the rest of the year.

Unfortunately, I have to present at a conference the week before the Pan American Games, so I don't get that luxury. I am actually already sporting a black eye, funny enough, and not from free sparing either. It happened during a basic sparing drill where we were supposed to do 20 exchanges in a row, then counter. As I did the prescribed counter attack I got a bonus aiuchi punch to the face because my opponent made a mistake counting. Haha! I suppose the lesson learned is to always be aware or something like that. Still, these platitudes I tell myself based on hindsight don't help my current predicament. It wouldn't be so bad if I knew how to put on makeup, but I'm kind of new at this. Yesterday I think I did a better job. Today I am satisfied with making it look a little less dramatic.

Some jobs are understanding with MA cuts and bruises, but sometimes we need to be formal, present at a conference, or guide a lecture. Having visible bruises (especially something like a black eye) looks rather unprofessional in these settings. What do you all do to manage this?

Thank you for your kind words all! 🙏 The first couple weeks of team training was a bit rough. It was an adjustment going from being in the dojo 3 nights a week to now 5 or 6. There's also the added bonus of everyone suddenly hitting faster and harder. Now I think I've settled into a normal routine with it all though. I'm seldom the strongest on the floor, but I do tend to have better endurance than the average person, so it helps me get more training in.

I set two goals for myself this year: 1. get a tenure track position at a university 2. work on getting instructor certification My plan is to ultimately start my own university club once these two stepping stones are in place, especially once my career trajectory is less fluid. So en route to these goals I've been applying for jobs like mad, but I've also been attending a lot of camps and seminars and judging/examiner/instructor trainings the first half of this year. This has been my karate focus lately, transitioning from ranking up and competition to take more of a leadership role. Anyway, one of the camps I attended recently was the JKA WF America camp, which featured guest instruction from Master Ueki, Chief instructor of the JKA, from headquarters in Tokyo. I assumed because I can speak a little bit of Japanese, I got some nice critique and attention from Master Ueki. It is much appreciated! I also did better in the in-camp tournament than I expected. Maybe it was random chance, maybe because it wasn't my focus this time around, and so I had few nerves about it. It's hard to say --but here's the catch-- this camp's in-camp tournament was also the National Championship for the JKA WF America. ... and so at the end of the camp (mind you, this is still less than a month ago), my name gets called and I'm supposed to run up to the front of the gym. I was in a line of others who similarly didn't know why they were summoned. Then the announcement comes in "Give a round of applause for your qualifying US team pool." I think my jaw nearly fell through the floor. I tried and failed to make the US team in the past, when competition was more of a focus. When I spent so much time and effort trying, I was unsuccessful. Is it really possible that I managed to accidentally do it this year??? To make a long story short, yes. I am on the team. We will be competing in the Pan American games next month, and the training in the meantime is fairly intense. I have bruises on every limb. We'll see how this goes. Hopefully they didn't make a mistake. Hopefully I can be of service. More to the point of this thread though, I think there is something I do when I want a specific outcome too badly (i.e. when I want to win). I think I lose sight of the waza, and maybe even the love I have for what I do. I want to take this revelation and bottle it, to carry it forward with me as I mature.

I will do just that! Thank you!

Best of luck on the tenure-track job! I'm not sure what the market looks like in your field of study, but things are pretty flooded for mathematicians. Thanks Singularity! Right now it's seeming like even the small biology tenure track jobs are getting at least 150 applicants each. For that reason when I only made the short list for 1 of 10 jobs I applied to last year, I wasn't super surprised. I'm trying to get some manuscripts out and at least double my number of applications in 2019 to boost my chances. In the past week I've applied to 5 more positions, and I plan to submit two more applications today. Fingers crossed! One day at a time I guess. It would be really great to start my own university club too. Undergrads are my favorite group to train. Unlike little kids, every single one of them wants to be there and is ready to go at the beginning of class. Many students are also looking for the community and friendship that a dojo can offer. It can be an outlet for the stress university or graduate life puts on people. It's nice to have a place to diffuse all of that. I have many fond memories and lasting friendships from my college karate club(s). It'd be great to be able to start that somewhere new. I'd love to give more people a chance to experience this.

I have a different go-to menu depending on what my opponent is like. Factors such as their and my relative reach, speed, and taste for their own waza are all important. If I'm against someone who initiates with the same combos all the time, that makes my life easier. For people who tend to start out by throwing round techniques (hook punches, ridge hand strikes, back-fists, roundhouse kicks, etc.), I tend to either blitz up the midline with very linear strikes, or play it safe and use my right hand blocking their right attack (or left on left) to pull them too far into their own spin. For people who tend to lead by blitzing up the midline with more linear strikes, I take a 45deg angle of whichever side the strike is on to get to the back of their shoulder and I do something circular. If I get the timing and distance just right, I'll give a roundhouse or a sweep or a ridge hand at the same time as I step. Most importantly, I'm out of danger, and I can play that game all day. When it's my turn to initiate, I ask myself "what does my opponent expect me to do?" The answer to that question can have to do with previous experience the opponent has had fighting me, or perhaps what they are just used to seeing in general, or, if I'm lucky, some rash assumptions they'll make about me based on my appearance. I set up a trap, then give them something different. Sometimes it's rather elaborately planned. I'll practice a bunch of one technique in front of everyone when warming up, just so they'll think that is my tokui, but I'll use something different when the right moment comes. Sometimes I just let an idea come to me on the fly. So I guess you could say I don't have a tokui waza, but that's not really true either. It's just more like a choose your own adventure game.

This year I'm shooting pretty high 1. Get certified as a d-level instructor & d-level judge 2. Get a tenure-track faculty appointment 3. Start a university karate club I fully expect this to be a major challenge to do in my first year of trying, but here goes nothing!

Yes, I did it! I had four unexpected curve-balls: 1. I tore my rotator cuff in a sumo tournament about 4 months before the test so I had to do some quick physio to get back into shape. 2. The testing facility was actually at a really high elevation, which made everything super interesting with my asthma, but no attack, so all was well. 3. I had to spar my male senpai testing for 5-dan in the kumite section of the exam. 4. Only Ueki himself (head of the JKA) administered my test. Somehow it all worked out. Now I am just working on looking consistently like a sandan, not lapsing into nidan-level training when I'm tired. haha!

Lol, I was being open and honest when I said that I took a compliment about "being naturally fast" and let it go to my head. Then I explained that this compliment had absolutely no foundation in reality, as I found out this weekend. This was part of a 23andme wellness report that I did mostly to learn more about my ancestry. It's nothing weird. I also have not be dwelling on it. I just learned like two days ago, and basically only talked about it here. How is this dwelling? Paint me up to be a creepy obsessed person who can't take a compliment if you want, but that doesn't make it true. I'm not going to sit here and tell you all of the uncomplimentary things I've been called, because the list is very long and it doesn't much have anything to do with this topic. So you can't really infer whether I am someone who gets complimented more often than insulted. I think it's fair to say that I hear other people's judgements of me (kind or ill) pretty often. I'm small, love to laugh, and enjoy talking to everyone, so people tend to speak freely with me about whatever they are thinking. I think this is a pretty great privilege, even if I have to suffer some cruel words from time to time (again, I haven't mentioned any of said "cruel words anywhere in this post, this post is about compliments).

As a below-average weight female living in the USA, I get the unhealthy-body-image version of this "good genes" write off a fair amount, as if my genes are enviable because I look sickly thin. I hope it's not too horrible that when this happens I laugh and ask if they'd like to trade me for a kidney (since another super awesome card in my genetic deck is for autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease). I guess the grass is always greener on... someone else's body?

Oh no! It sounds like you'e had some bad experiences. Word.

Any time there's a new world record broken, or another Olympic games, the presses love a story about an athlete that goes something along the lines of: "Mike was always an active kid. From the time he could walk he was swimming, it's like he was born for it." etc... I suspect that a large part of the appeal of these stories is to make the masses feel OK with their lesser abilities relative to the person they are watching. We like to quietly tell ourselves that the only reason people get farther at a skill is because they've had a "head start" or a "special talent." We sometimes forget that every athlete we watch compete has spent a ridiculous amount of time practicing. When I was about 4 or so years into training karate, I started to hear the words "You're fast." Not "you've gotten faster" or "you've learned to be fast," but a phrase suggesting that speed was an inherent quality that I just possessed. Nevermind that I would get KO'd in dodge-ball in elementary school. Nevermind that every year during the 50-yard dash I would be in last place. I gobbled up the suggestion that I was just "fast" naturally, maybe because it made me feel special. 1.5 decades later I tend to be one of the quickest people among I'd say pretty much any dojo I visit. Fast reaction time, fast striking, turning on a dime, this kind of thing. Well ladies and gentlemen. Today I found out that I actually have no fast twitch muscle. That's right, none. I have two variant copies of a gene that blocks its production in my body. I am, by all accounts, physiologically non-ideal for sports that require sudden bursts of quick movement. That not only puts me in the bottom percentile among power athletes and sprinters, but also puts me in the bottom 20% of regular people in terms of predicted natural ability at these types of sudden-speed movements. While this discovery is somewhat funny, it does make a fair bit of sense when I think about my childhood experiences prior to starting karate. It also has made me even more proud of my training. Here I've been, for years, going into a formula 1 race while driving a Ford Fiesta... and I didn't even know! The difference between what is described on my genetics report and what I am like today, I suspect, can be attributed to one factor above all the others: training Perhaps this just makes me one more piece of paper in the file of "karate is for everyone" but I thought it was worth mentioning. It stacks up nicely with my old ankle braces and notes to skip PE. Hello, My name is Shizentai, and I am not a natural-born martial artist. Are you?

I've been training for 18 years. I know for sure that (at least after I've passed 30) if I want to have a good class, I need to stretch my legs But seriously, like good science is not just a collection of facts, I think good karate is more than just what you know, it's about how to interact with the unknown. It's a form of problem solving, a way of increasing productivity of reactions in a crisis.