Last week I celebrated five years of martial arts training at hapkido and with it came a bit of a breakthrough as far as my mental approach was concerned. For much of this year I've had no grading to prepare for so I've been watching other people spar during class and paying attention to what they were doing and working out how I could counter it. In fact in my head I'd turned sparring into something of a competition and worked out how I could get inside and utilise my slowly evolving boxing skills.
Then the penny finally dropped on Thursday and I realised if I want to pass my next grading then I should really be focusing on myself and polishing my skills and not worrying about any other bugger's.
On the plus side, however, I have nicked a couple of nifty fighting techniques from other martial arts to act as defences/weapons in sparring so it's not been a total waste of time. One is a Muay Thai kick called a 'teep' which involves kicking the thigh of an opponent's kicking leg, while the other is a double elbow strike borrowed from a Cambodian martial art called Bogatar.
But I now need to stop worrying about that and get my arse into gear as it's eight weeks and counting until I grade for my black stripe, which is the belt before black. And it could be a tough few months to get up to speed...
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