Tuesday, July 1, 2008

The first loser is still pretty awesome

I have been busy every weekend for about 2 1/2 months. I have had stuff to do on EVERY day. Most of it was practicing for that world cup stadium show, then after that it was 2 weekends of fun and then right back into practicing and doing so much shit. I was also training for the tournament that I had this past weekend. So basically we were sparring every other day at practice. This tournament was a follow up from the one that was in the video. If you didn't watch the video it was the city championship. Anyone could enter. I ended up getting a medal and all I had to do was lose one fight. I still got robbed in the judging but read the story if you want to know the deal. THIS TOURNAMENT was the follow up to that one. From city championships next is national. Korea is so small so there is no regionals or anything in between. State to national in one jump. You could only get into this one if you won a medal at the city tournaments. It's that or 1-4th place...One or the other. Anywho it was the top people in the country for Hapkido. I was lucky enough to be able to go. I didn't want to have to make weight again, I didn't have as much time to do it in, so I decided to fight SUPER heavy weight. It's 85kg's and up. I was under that but not too far...most of these guys were a lot bigger than the average Korean. All of them were taller then me and they had some weight to them. No little skinny persons in my weight class. I thought that was good because if they are bigger it's a good chance that they are slower.

The Saturday was just the exhibition show and Sunday was going to be the day for fighting. I didn't practice once with the exhibition team that was performing because I was busy, but they told me that I would have one chance to practice with them. He explained it in theory as best he could. It was pretty much the same as the other times so I could get it in one shot i'm sure. The time came to get on the mat and I did what I thought was the routine and pretended like it was the real thing. I got it all right and asked when the actual contest would be. After about 20 mins of trying to clear up what my teammates were saying to me I found out that the 'practice' was actually the contest. Nobody told me. I'm glad that I didn't decide to walk through a part of it like I do in practices instead of actually doing it. That would have sucked.


I was surprised about that little misunderstanding that just happened. I had a killer headache for some reason. I was glad to be done for the day. WRONG. I was then told to get ready for fighting. I thought it was on Sunday...you know...kinda like what they said before. Yeah, right. I started warming up and it was obvious I was in no mood for this. After about 2 hrs of waiting the judges said there wasn't enough time to do the super heavy weight division. They would do it tomorrow and I would get more annoyed at first, and then realize that I was lucky because I would have not done as well as I could.

Next day we went in and I started stretching. Warmed up and had my match. Because I had one a medal at the last tourny I was put ahead of the pack a little bit. I finally had my fight and I won that one 5 to 1 I think. I did kick him in the balls really hard with this fancy spinning back kick after a lovely side kick fake...but I was aiming for his waist and he decided he wanted to try to kick me and my foot went straight into his nads. He was down for about a min. I got 2 points though. A couple of take downs later I was up and the match ended. WINNER. Next good match was the final match. If I won this it's a gold. It was a 2 round fight cause it was the finals. I'm not really sure how it went down but I remember getting kick in the face right away. Then I got angry and scored 2 points somehow. At the end of the first round it was 2-2 so he got another point somehow somewhere. Then the second round started and I went to fake so he would kick and I would catch his leg and knock him down. I faked, he kicked, but I missed the leg but tried to take him down. We fell but I didn't score because it was messy as hell. I knew the round was almost over and he was up a point. I was going to go right after him and try to score if I can. He wasn't going to move in cause it was almost over. If he scored when I tried to get him oh well, he would have still won. The ref separated us and said ready, I got ready to kick as fast as I could, GO! As soon as he said that the judges threw a towel on the mat, out of time. 3-2 I lost. But that means I got second place in the tournament. Some say second place is the first loser which could be true. But it's cool as shit to be a loser when you got the silver medal in the Korean national Hapkido tournament. SWEET.

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