Inversely Proportional

So I woke up and get to that far-far-away venue with only 3 hours of sleep. Work has been insanely busy before Xmas.

I got into the stadium right on time, but had a bad stomach ache by then, and ended up missing the first part of the group warm-up for Team HK at 8am.

When I joined in, I randomly grabbed a male partner and did waza-keiko with him. He's more junior than me, and can see a lot of my men-uchi coming in. But for kote oji-waza, he completely missed as I was always sharp. This is the best I can do with the injury, so my strategy for the day was to finish the matches as soon as possible, and use de-gote whenever possible.

My teammates are Pik (senpo) and Agnes (chuken) on HK Team B.

As usual, Ladies event started first. 6 teams on 2 pools.

Match 1 vs Macau A
[Leng, my friend in the UK, was on this team and I was a little bit worried - but then I found out she's not the one I fight...]

KK - 0 in 5 seconds.

Match 2 vs Dailin
[The other 2 girls are from Dailin, but taisho is Anna(?) on holiday originally from Australia, and she knows what to do in shiai]

0 - 0

[Progressing to the semi-finals was against another mixed team - Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai]
Match 3 vs Mixed Team

KM - 0 in 12 seconds.

It felt a bit longer than the 1st match because I didn't want to hit kote all the time... Anyway.

On to the Final. Ever sense the lack of visiting kenshi this year?

Match 4 vs HK Team A
Amy 1 - 0 Pik
Jane 0 - 2 Agnes

So we are already one point ahead.

me vs Jay

... To my dojo mate Noyori-san, this was like another rematch of the final from a few months ago.

It did! But then I lost in the middle of the match, when I, very predictably, went in for de-gote, missed, and got a debana-men instead.

The game carried on. We spent a lot of time in tsuba-zeriai. I can't remember what I was thinking (probably nothing then!) when I got this chance of hiki-men.

Flags up. Massive cheering. 1 to 1.

Someone sitting at the other court told me that the hit was so spot on and load. Now I really want to see the rerun of this. Apparently, there was a bit of PR and the local cable channel filmed my last 2 matches. Thing is that I don't remember it being a very difficult cut.

So this made my team the Champion, hurray!!

[ The rest of the day I spent sitting at a corner working, napping, and cheering for the boys - I only stayed there because we need to take medal pics...]

There's also not as many teams as the previous year on the Men's event, and the level difference is obvious. Well of course there are a number of good players, like Yu Ding, the current president of one of the Beijing's clubs, but they didn't fill a ninja team this time.

I went home and worked till 3am.

So you can see that it's not like I don't want to shiai or kendo. But seriously I am overloaded with work, having a broken wrist (feels A LOT better now, thanks everyone), and simply not practicing often enough. It's very odd that the result can be so inversely proportional to the "effort" I put in the past 2 months.

Let's see how the wrist's going later this month. I'm only going to jog and resist the suburi temptation!!

In 5 Days

...I will again fight for Team HK. This time is the annual Chinese Taikai - kenshi from all around Mainland China will travel to grade/ fight in the coming weekend. (They have to be "Chinese" to fight.)

There was this call from my Sensei earlier last week, literally pushed me to be in the team. I was very reluctant because A) I am supposed to rest my wrist; B) I am seriously busy at "work" (with tons of freelance work sucking up all my non-work hours) and C) I haven't been in bogu for the entire Nov. The only thing that kept me "fit" was the 25-min jog along the river twice a week.

Last weekend they had Chiba sensei visiting with I missed. The remaining keiko time will be tonight (Tues) at squad training. So I have to go.

"How's your wrist?" has replaced "hello" as a greeting when I met up with the sensei, coach and fellow team members. Gossips spread really fast!!

We had some light, "normal" warm-up, short kihon and shiai keiko - all done in an hour and I left after the first jikeiko with Eda-sensei.

For the whole time I was just sucking up the pain, and especially in shiai it was very frustrating to fight against my own wrist!! I lost all my shiai 0-2 (or should I blame the ref not focusing on our court?) My cuts are seriously lacking the snap and power all coming from right hand. Totally awful experience.

I found it a bit unfair that all these guys can join the competition on free will, but injured girls had to be on "reserved".

This wrist has traumatized a great part of my spirit already. I am not even sure whether this is just an excuse of escaping responsibility or what. I am already blaming it for failing my driving exam - and that's not a good sign.