Expecting too much?

I can't lie to you, I come out of yesterday's competition wanting more. Out of six competitors in the 30-39 weapons form category, I came in second place. Not bad some would say, but I was gunning for first place. I'll have some videos up soon and you will see where I stumbled in the start of the kata. It didn't start pretty and even though I recovered from it, it was always on the back of my mind and I kind of lacked focus from there on. Still, I'm happy with the plaque and will aim to work on what went wrong and on adding strike sequences to the kata for the next competition. I'll also try to keep on working on controlling my nerves.

My traditional kata, called Cat 2, I thought I had it fairly well pegged. After seeing the video, I see that I was so stiff, it wasn't even funny. Came in 5th out of 6, so kind of ugh. Anyway, there again, I come out of the competition with some knowledge of what I need to work on to advance. If only for that, it was a productive day.

Andrew had sort of a frustrating day on the whole. I saw him do his bo kata from afar (getting ready to present mine) and at first I felt he had performed it well. That was confirmed when I saw the video. He did indeed do it the best he probably could have done it although he was competing against two other very good bo artists and he came out of it 3rd out of 3. The good news for him is that this was his last competition with his very heavy bo as we bought him a very light one. It'll probably take him some time to get used to the lightness of his new bo, but I think he'll benefit greatly from it. Darn, he can spin the bo more naturally than I can, with a bo heavier than mine is, I can't wait to see him spin a lightweight one.

Then came his traditional kata. There, I was the one who learned something. Next time we will compete, we will certainly have him take a private class before the competition, but we'll do it earlier than only four days before the competition. As I was saying in a previous post, Andrew changed his competition kata from Statue of the Crane to Circle of the Tiger only last Wednesday. While he did it perfectly on Friday, that was in front of one of his instructor. He had a couple of tiny stumbles yesterday that, coupled with a few erraticly high scores given to another little girl, meant he finished out of the medals. They don't give positions for people out of 4th place, but he was probably in the middle in a group of 10 competitors.

In fighting, more "frustration" ensued. They were only three to enter the 9yo intermediate underbelt fighting category. They gave a bye straight to final to one kid while Andrew and the other one fought to start it off. It's point sparring, two points for a kick and one point for a punch, head or body doesn't matter. Andrew's opponent was a smallish but feisty kid. He got ahead on Andrew 4-2 at one point where I saw that he was keeping his guard in front of his belly to keep Andrew from scoring with a body kick. And told Andrew to go for the head which he did in two consecutive points, but the other kid go the winning point on a jumping kind of punch that only lightly grazed Andrew's head. Andrew lost it 4-5 and was given 3rd place while the winning kid fought again, lost and received 2nd place and the kid with a bye received 1st place, even though he just got lucky to get a bye. Nothing against the kid, just the circumstances... I found that Andrew had a much better fighting stance, especially cutting on one thing he used to do. He used to switch his forward and back foot all the time, often selling his next move. This time, he didn't do it and I thought that was good of him.

Not a bad day all in all, even though it could have been better.

I'll be posting videos soon.

edit: in my whining and self-cetered state, I forgot to mention that one very nice thing happened in that day. I met two very nice fellows in Mat and akarien, both bloggers and martial arts enthusiasts. It was a lot of fun talking with you. Sadly, I don't have pictures to show for it since when we got together for the picture, my wife was gone, with the camera bag, trying to fine a knife to cut Andrew's new mouthguard. In my stupid nervousness of the morning, I had forgotten his mouthguard at home, doh! :)

FM