On Saturday my wife and I were walking around the last day of the farmers market, buying a couple more pumpkins for our Great Pumpkin party, and noticed that the mobile knife sharpener gentleman had his van there. On a whim, I asked if they sharpened swords, as I am sure that my sword could just a bit of refining before our party next week. The gentleman told me that they did not, (I think in part because I am sure they had bad experiences with people trying to have wall hangers sharpened, or because a mobile shop is hardly the place to work on a 4 foot long sword) but when I told the lady taking orders that I did the Historical European Martial Arts she perked right up. Apparently she is a 6th grade teacher in a public school and they are working on their Middle ages unit in their class and looking for a demonstration on swordsmanship as an end to their unit. I told her that I had done that kind of thing before, and would be willing to do the same again if they wanted it, and gave her my contact information.
The point of the story is this: until I told her what I did for a hobby, she would not have known. For years, that was the case. I loved what I did on Saturdays, but kind of felt nerdy about it, like it was something to be a bit ashamed of, or not to put out there. Now, what I am finding is that it matters less and less. Yes, we do get on the news and the reporters laugh it off some, but to me it is about doing what you do, without pretending it is something else to "Look cool". It is an interesting shift, but one I feel is worth making. Yes, I get laughed at by people who have no concept of what I do, or how hard we work at our art to get good at it. There are plenty of people who think that walking in with no experience they could simply wail on any of us, a misconception that I wish I could change, but knowing that I can't change everyone's mind, doing what I do anyway.
It is not an easy road to hoe. There is a lot to it that seems an easy target for ridicule. Most Martial arts have some respect, ours, at this point still does not, especially when it gets mixed up with dressing in costume, talking in silly accents, and pretending that you are knights. It is not for the weak I suppose, and I have had plenty of times that it frustrated me to a point that I near quit. No one I know likes to be made fun of, no one likes to be told that their hobby is dumb or has no value, especially from those who have not given it a try, or know why you love it so.
So what do I do? Just keep doing it. Every event we hold, I will continue to send out press releases. Sometime in the future, we may stop being on the news when we hold an event, and I have to be ok with that. The key is to talk about it to whomever will listen, because despite the public shaming and being made fun of, it is something that really brings me joy, and something that makes me feel alive. It may also be something that I have to work at to do well, but I feel good when I am doing it, and that makes it worth it to me.
The world is a cruel place sometimes. Even among people who have been picked on for ages for liking comic books, or particular movies or games, if they feel they have the upper hand, they will not hesitate to turn that table and become the attacker, rather than the one being attacked. The bullied becomes the bully if they think they can do it, and the shift is easy when one thinks that one can get away with it. So the Gamer geek who loves their video games, pokes fun at the people who do their gaming differently by playing it out or doing some sort of role playing game and the "Higher" you go up the spectrum, the more people who share your love for something so it becomes more acceptable to do it. With "Geek" culture getting more and more mainstream, if your love is something that is shared by a large group of others, then it becomes ok to do what you love, and sometimes to diminish others at that expense.
Knowing that it is not easy to do what I love, and knowing that it is ridiculed as often as it is seen as something cool has not been an easy thing. But at this point, I am done hiding it because someone may make fun of it. I would rather do what I do and let the the chips fall where they may, than to pretend I do not like something just because my "friends" may insult me or tease me relentlessly because of it. I am done with that. I have found something I love, and someone who though she does not love it the same as I do, loves that I love it, and that is good enough for me.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Post Competition, or how do deal with a bad day fighting.
Before I get started I just want you all to know that this blog may come off as rambling (More so than usual) due to the nature of some major conflicts I am and have had over how well I did at my sword groups competition on Saturday.
Excellent,
That was how I was feeling on Saturday morning as I got to the park, ready to fight, and ready to win. What followed was less than I had hoped, not as awesome as I had wanted. The first round went awesomely. I stepped in to the ring and won my first match by 5 points to nothing. This is the first time I have ever done that, especially against a seasoned opponent. "From here," I thought, "things can only go up." and that they say, is that. I stepped into my second round and my calm mind and restful continence was shattered by several points that went unanswered, shaking me terribly to the core. From there it did not improve by much. What started out as a great day left me placing in the bottom few.
The problem as I see it is that I let things get to me. A hit or two into my second match and I was letting the hits against me get into my head and keep me from focusing. In the weeks headed up to this competition I was on top of my game, there were few people who I fought that I did not match and whom if I lost to, it was not by much, so I felt I had a good chance of doing excellent this time. Where I had faltered, was my head game.
Let me explain something, a few weeks back I read a book that someone I knew had suggested in a podcast. It was about letting your body do what you had trained to do and trusting it. Though I had worked some on it, it was all a lot of principle in my mind. I saw the value in it, but had simply not let some things go once the matches got harder. I had made some minor changes in how I was doing things, and had been for years like bad footwork that helped me do better, but I was not where I needed to be, to walk away any better than I did. Just after the 3rd match, and knowing that I would not be placing this time, I was ready to pack up everything and go home. Maybe sword was not for me? Maybe I was just not as good as I had thought I was, and deserved 14th place out of 21, even for being a 7 or 8 year veteran.
And then it began, side comments of "you did really well in your matches" felt like attacks. I knew I had not done as well as I should have, I knew that I had let my second match get into my head and let my doubt run into my second match. It was not my opponents that had beat me as much as they did, it was me, who let them do it. So where did that put me? Where was I to go from here? Should I sell off all of my gear, and throw in the towel and give it all up after such a bad day? I certainly felt like it. It felt like the hard work I had been doing was wasted. This was not to say that my opponents had not done well, but I knew I could have done better and simply did not do it.
So where does that put me? Things change from moment to moment. Sometimes I am ready to throw in the towel, sometimes not. Mostly it has given me a singular focus. In the next 6 months I am setting my mind and body on overdrive, and pushing myself to do better not just next time but in the future. It is more than about losing so terribly when I know I could do better, it is about applying off time to practice, and training my mind to focus, on this exchange, in this match this time, and regardless of the outcome not get into my head if I do not do well. It is about applying myself.
I see it this way, some people are naturals. Some people, have to work harder to get to the same place, and though we may never be quite as good, we will do our best to do what we can to get there. I am one of the later people. In my life, there are few things that I am truly awesome at naturally. Let's face it, I am and have always been a big fat guy. Sports do not come quickly or easily to me, sometimes I can pick up board games or something like that quickly, but some things that I love, I will never be the best in the world at. I know that. I have made peace with that fact. When I started Highland games this summer, I was the awkward one who did not do as well as any other new person but I showed up and did what I could. I improved some, but I have no delusions that I will ever have a world record, or be the best in state. The same goes for sword.
Depending on how you count it, I have been doing sword for somewhere between 6 and 14 years. I started in January of 1999, took a break for a long time and have been back at it for something like 4 or 5 years. It does not come naturally to me. There is a lot that I still think about in a match and work out what to do when I am facing a particular opponent. The long and short of it is that I am not always the fastest, though sometime I do let myself rest on my strength to get me through more than I should. I also know that to counter strength there are plenty of things that can be done, and I am tired of them being used against me. That being the case as of last week I was still refining some thing I had seen that I did as flaws and was working to improve them. Some of it worked, some of it was so new, I had a hard time doing it because I was simply not comfortable with it yet.
So here I am. Competition went very badly for me. So do I quit? There is a lot of stigma around that question, as if to say that if you quit something you are a bad person or something for it. I am not sure I believe that, but in this case, I am not walking away. What I am doing is taking the next 6 months to refocus, and concentrate on giving my new ideas about what to do some time to blossom. Call it my Rocky 3 moment, call it a rebuilding program, call it a solid 6 month dedication to practicing outside of class so that when I do show up next time I am ready to do as well as I know I am capable of doing. It is not going to be easy, in fact I expect it to be a pain in the rear that I have no idea how I will endure, just that the only way to get there is to go through it. If my story were a Heroes journey tale, last weekend was my death, now comes the transformation so that next time I can prove to myself as much as anyone else just how good I can be, and just how much better I can do if I give myself some time and attention to do it.
Excellent,
That was how I was feeling on Saturday morning as I got to the park, ready to fight, and ready to win. What followed was less than I had hoped, not as awesome as I had wanted. The first round went awesomely. I stepped in to the ring and won my first match by 5 points to nothing. This is the first time I have ever done that, especially against a seasoned opponent. "From here," I thought, "things can only go up." and that they say, is that. I stepped into my second round and my calm mind and restful continence was shattered by several points that went unanswered, shaking me terribly to the core. From there it did not improve by much. What started out as a great day left me placing in the bottom few.
The problem as I see it is that I let things get to me. A hit or two into my second match and I was letting the hits against me get into my head and keep me from focusing. In the weeks headed up to this competition I was on top of my game, there were few people who I fought that I did not match and whom if I lost to, it was not by much, so I felt I had a good chance of doing excellent this time. Where I had faltered, was my head game.
Let me explain something, a few weeks back I read a book that someone I knew had suggested in a podcast. It was about letting your body do what you had trained to do and trusting it. Though I had worked some on it, it was all a lot of principle in my mind. I saw the value in it, but had simply not let some things go once the matches got harder. I had made some minor changes in how I was doing things, and had been for years like bad footwork that helped me do better, but I was not where I needed to be, to walk away any better than I did. Just after the 3rd match, and knowing that I would not be placing this time, I was ready to pack up everything and go home. Maybe sword was not for me? Maybe I was just not as good as I had thought I was, and deserved 14th place out of 21, even for being a 7 or 8 year veteran.
And then it began, side comments of "you did really well in your matches" felt like attacks. I knew I had not done as well as I should have, I knew that I had let my second match get into my head and let my doubt run into my second match. It was not my opponents that had beat me as much as they did, it was me, who let them do it. So where did that put me? Where was I to go from here? Should I sell off all of my gear, and throw in the towel and give it all up after such a bad day? I certainly felt like it. It felt like the hard work I had been doing was wasted. This was not to say that my opponents had not done well, but I knew I could have done better and simply did not do it.
So where does that put me? Things change from moment to moment. Sometimes I am ready to throw in the towel, sometimes not. Mostly it has given me a singular focus. In the next 6 months I am setting my mind and body on overdrive, and pushing myself to do better not just next time but in the future. It is more than about losing so terribly when I know I could do better, it is about applying off time to practice, and training my mind to focus, on this exchange, in this match this time, and regardless of the outcome not get into my head if I do not do well. It is about applying myself.
I see it this way, some people are naturals. Some people, have to work harder to get to the same place, and though we may never be quite as good, we will do our best to do what we can to get there. I am one of the later people. In my life, there are few things that I am truly awesome at naturally. Let's face it, I am and have always been a big fat guy. Sports do not come quickly or easily to me, sometimes I can pick up board games or something like that quickly, but some things that I love, I will never be the best in the world at. I know that. I have made peace with that fact. When I started Highland games this summer, I was the awkward one who did not do as well as any other new person but I showed up and did what I could. I improved some, but I have no delusions that I will ever have a world record, or be the best in state. The same goes for sword.
Depending on how you count it, I have been doing sword for somewhere between 6 and 14 years. I started in January of 1999, took a break for a long time and have been back at it for something like 4 or 5 years. It does not come naturally to me. There is a lot that I still think about in a match and work out what to do when I am facing a particular opponent. The long and short of it is that I am not always the fastest, though sometime I do let myself rest on my strength to get me through more than I should. I also know that to counter strength there are plenty of things that can be done, and I am tired of them being used against me. That being the case as of last week I was still refining some thing I had seen that I did as flaws and was working to improve them. Some of it worked, some of it was so new, I had a hard time doing it because I was simply not comfortable with it yet.
So here I am. Competition went very badly for me. So do I quit? There is a lot of stigma around that question, as if to say that if you quit something you are a bad person or something for it. I am not sure I believe that, but in this case, I am not walking away. What I am doing is taking the next 6 months to refocus, and concentrate on giving my new ideas about what to do some time to blossom. Call it my Rocky 3 moment, call it a rebuilding program, call it a solid 6 month dedication to practicing outside of class so that when I do show up next time I am ready to do as well as I know I am capable of doing. It is not going to be easy, in fact I expect it to be a pain in the rear that I have no idea how I will endure, just that the only way to get there is to go through it. If my story were a Heroes journey tale, last weekend was my death, now comes the transformation so that next time I can prove to myself as much as anyone else just how good I can be, and just how much better I can do if I give myself some time and attention to do it.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Setting goals.
So in talking to one of my fellow students the other day something interesting came up about competitions. It was really a question of setting goals for yourself in competitions. It is easy to say that everyone in a competition is in it to win, hell, we would all like to go home with a big trophy to find a home for, but what really occurred to me is this. In a competition of 16 people, only 18% are going home having placed first second or third. In a competition of 20, only 15 percent. That does not mean that it is not a noble goal, but what it does mean is that if your sole intention going into it, you may be setting yourself up for failure. If 18% are going home winning, that means that 82% are not. In real numbers if a competition has 3 places and you are not the 1st, 2nd or 3rd, you are among the other 13 people who also did not "win".
So how do you work around that?
I spent a lot of time this summer doing Highland Games and not in sword class. While the time away was a good experience one of the largest takeaways I had was one that is shared in both the highland games, as well as running as I understand it, and that is the idea of a Personal Record or PR. It goes something like this, This was my first year doing highland games, and though I feel I made marked improvements, even at my last games I was falling behind the pack in my throws on most things. It would be pretty easy to beat myself up for it, as I was not doing as well as other people, after all, even as hard as I pushed myself, it was not as good as the other people I was competing against. But this is where PR's come in. At the end of the day I could look at my weight for distance score and if it was better than last time, I had improved. Yes, I had not, beat the people I was throwing against but there was a good way numerically to prove that I was doing better, regardless of how others were doing in events.
In sword, it is not always so easy. If you have a set number of matches and you lose them, that means that your opponent did better in that match that day, and that is a biter pill to swallow, but what if we looked at winning in a different way. Last time you only scored a combined point value of a certain number in 3 matches, this time the goal is to do a little better. Maybe you only scored 2 points or 3 a match last time, but this time you look for a score of 3 or 4 instead. Maybe, you only had 1 win last time, this time go for 2. For a goal to be good it has to be manageable, and definite. Did you do it or no? Even if you do not win all of your matches, did you apply yourself and give your opponent as many hits against them as you could? When you were going for that head shot, did you do it? When looking to hit that arm, or leg, did you do what you had intended? 82% are not going to win, how can you win for yourself if not in trophies or medals?
There is a reason it need to be specific. If all you walk in with is the idea that you are going to do your best, how can you objectively define that? How do you know that you did your best at the end of the match or the day? If you set a goal of a certain number of points you scored, then at the end of the match, you made it or you did not, if not, then it can be a goal the next time.
At the end of the season throwing, I had done better on some events, and others I had done worse or not improved, but the places I had improved, it felt awesome to see where I had gotten better, I knew what I need to work on in the off season, and what I want to do next time. Maybe I did not win first place in any event in my "class" but I had improved. Maybe in competition you don't take first or second or third, but how many points did you score, how much was scored against you, and is that better than last time. On the other hand, if it is your first competition, no matter where you place or how well you do, it is the best you have done, and next time work to make it better. We can't all place, but we can make it a lot harder for the people who end up placing, and if you allow yourself to be ok with a loss you are less likely to let that get in your head and let your first round ruin your second match or third.
So how do you work around that?
I spent a lot of time this summer doing Highland Games and not in sword class. While the time away was a good experience one of the largest takeaways I had was one that is shared in both the highland games, as well as running as I understand it, and that is the idea of a Personal Record or PR. It goes something like this, This was my first year doing highland games, and though I feel I made marked improvements, even at my last games I was falling behind the pack in my throws on most things. It would be pretty easy to beat myself up for it, as I was not doing as well as other people, after all, even as hard as I pushed myself, it was not as good as the other people I was competing against. But this is where PR's come in. At the end of the day I could look at my weight for distance score and if it was better than last time, I had improved. Yes, I had not, beat the people I was throwing against but there was a good way numerically to prove that I was doing better, regardless of how others were doing in events.
In sword, it is not always so easy. If you have a set number of matches and you lose them, that means that your opponent did better in that match that day, and that is a biter pill to swallow, but what if we looked at winning in a different way. Last time you only scored a combined point value of a certain number in 3 matches, this time the goal is to do a little better. Maybe you only scored 2 points or 3 a match last time, but this time you look for a score of 3 or 4 instead. Maybe, you only had 1 win last time, this time go for 2. For a goal to be good it has to be manageable, and definite. Did you do it or no? Even if you do not win all of your matches, did you apply yourself and give your opponent as many hits against them as you could? When you were going for that head shot, did you do it? When looking to hit that arm, or leg, did you do what you had intended? 82% are not going to win, how can you win for yourself if not in trophies or medals?
There is a reason it need to be specific. If all you walk in with is the idea that you are going to do your best, how can you objectively define that? How do you know that you did your best at the end of the match or the day? If you set a goal of a certain number of points you scored, then at the end of the match, you made it or you did not, if not, then it can be a goal the next time.
At the end of the season throwing, I had done better on some events, and others I had done worse or not improved, but the places I had improved, it felt awesome to see where I had gotten better, I knew what I need to work on in the off season, and what I want to do next time. Maybe I did not win first place in any event in my "class" but I had improved. Maybe in competition you don't take first or second or third, but how many points did you score, how much was scored against you, and is that better than last time. On the other hand, if it is your first competition, no matter where you place or how well you do, it is the best you have done, and next time work to make it better. We can't all place, but we can make it a lot harder for the people who end up placing, and if you allow yourself to be ok with a loss you are less likely to let that get in your head and let your first round ruin your second match or third.
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