Sick Break

The ni-dan test is only 3 weeks away, and my carefully laid out training and studying routine has been derailed! Of course, it’s hard to plan for things that just come up in life, things you can’t help, things like getting sick a week after you begin serious training.

From experience, colds quickly turn nasty in my body if I try to gamansuru – to continue to push myself despite being sick. I've had bronchitis dog me since childhood, and it doesn’t take much in Japan for a simple cold to go straight to my lungs and cause me all sorts of problems. Last year, after my shodan test, I came down with bronchitis so hard, I was out of practice for almost two months.

With this in mind, when I got sick two weeks ago, I stopped all my training immediately, and spent most of my time in bed. It was frustrating, though, knowing I didn’t have the time to be laying around when I should be training for my test, but what can you do?

Almost immediately after my cold had finished, insomnia came back. Can't a kendo-ka catch a break? I blame the heat, like I do with most grievances in the summer. At least I didn't get worse.

So my training and studying took a two week hit! I was pretty stressed out this week, for sure, but I’m getting back into my training routine with three weeks left to go.

I’m practicing three times a week at the moment, and taking it slow when I feel sick. My nose has a habit of draining back, instead of out, which restricts how much I can breathe. In some ways, it’s a useful breathing exercise, forcing my to breathe slow and deep from my stomach, and not quick and sharp from my chest, but it also tends to make me a little over cautious.

It’s difficult finding the balance sometimes. When I go to practice, I always know that I want to be there, I want to have fun, I want to learn and I want to try, and the times when the body just isn’t feeling it, for whatever reason be it exhaustion or stress, or illness, it’s hard to determine the line between just enough and too much, especially when it’s coupled with the frustration of knowing what I can do when I’m feeling my best.

The important thing though, is to keep trying, little by little, which has been the motto of my time practicing in Japan. The people I’ve met here, the teachers all seem to espouse this. Little by little we’ll succeed together. I think this is what has made me enjoy kendo so much in Japan.