I dread tomorrow morning, afternoon, evening...

Good day to all of my (silently counting in his head) four readers! :)

I'm back, after a slow karate summer. Thanks to many other family activities, and sort of a lack of will, I took it easy on my karate training this Summer. Among other things, I have put on a few pounds, pounds that I will hopefully be able to shed in the next few weeks as I resume my training toward this coveted black belt.

If you've read some posts in here, you already know that my son Andrew's commitment to two other sports, namely football and soccer, kind of forced me to try and catch an hour here and there, sometimes doing three in a week, at other times, going a couple weeks without a class. Yeah, I could have practiced harder by myself, but after a pretty intense spring season, I felt like taking it easy and I mean, I never stopped completely. At least not until the last couple of weeks, after our annual subscription ran out. I then decided that we would indeed sign up for another full year, but only starting during the week of the labord day Monday because Andrew had his last soccer game on that day. Well, that day has come and gone and tonight will be my session back.

Yeah, I dread waking up tomorrow morning and taking that first walk out of bed... In a good way though. :) I need to sweat a bit, work those muscles, get back in the karate groove...

No confirmed date for it, but the first competition of our group of schools (Studios Unis d'Auto-Défense) is usually in early October, so this could be coming quite fast. Andrew has been competing for quite a few years now, but he's never done any of the Fall competitions. In the past he would always start competing in a season after Christmas. Me, I only started last February, so no need to say I've also never done one this early in a season. There are 6 local competitions in the season, culminating with the prestigious Quebec Open. I intend for us to do as many as we can, at least 5, maybe all 6 of them. The Lévis one in February and the Quebec Open are two that I want us to go to for sure.

Many things will have to be worked on in the coming weeks, months, (heck years!), on top of my overal fitness. In the last few weeks of Summer, I felt less and less at ease with most of my kata, especially the last two, Cat 1 and Cat 2. This was possibly from a lack of practice so I'd expect this to come back on its own. I also know that all my self-defense techniques against club attacks need work. I need to work closer to my attacker with those. Can't wait to pick up my bo again and seriously with it. I did some work with it in the backyard (will even have a video of Matthew, our 2.5 year old martial artists to show you) but it seemed like weather was never good enough to work on my competition form. It was always either too windy, or too hot, or rainy, or... Also needed will be some work on the one tradition bo form needed for the black belt, Sushi no kon sho. And on top of it all, become more fluid on most my movements. And to top it all, the main reason why I started this blog in the first place, I need to work on my horse stance.... sigh...

Darn it, there's still a lot of work left. It's true when they say it's a journey...

FM