Volume Twenty-Seven

VOLUME TWENTY-SEVEN Training journal, current volume. Private record. Entry begun at home, first morning back. ———————————————— In the previous volume I wrote two sentences and recorded the act of writing them together, because I had never been able to put them on the page one beneath the other. I have never held a world championship. In two days I compete for one. There is a third sentence. I have been sitting with a pen over the line for some time, which is not like me, and the delay is the only part of this worth recording. I am the champion of this federation. The sensation is not information. I noted that last time and it remains true, and I am not going to spend a training journal describing what my chest did. But there is a fact underneath the sensation and the fact belongs here, because it is structural and I have learned that I skip the structural ones when they are large. Twenty-three years of work had a thing at the end of it that I had not done. It does not have that any more. ———————————————— WHAT I DID NOT PREPARE FOR I prepared for the match. I prepared for the man. I prepared for the specific grip and the specific hips and I flew eleven hours to have an eighty-one-year-old man correct my trailing foot, and all of it held under load exactly as designed, and I would do every hour of it again. I did not prepare for the morning after. I want to be precise about what I mean, because the imprecise version of this is a man feeling sorry for himself and that is not what is happening. Nothing is wrong. The method delivered. The method has never not delivered. That is the difficulty. For twenty-three years the work has had a direction. The direction was supplied by an absence — the one thing I had not done, sitting out there, organising every cold room and every four hundred repetitions and every morning I did not want to get up. I did not have to think about why. The absence did the thinking. The absence is closed. The work is unchanged. And this week, for the first time since I was nineteen, I went into the room and did the four hundred and could not have told you, if asked at repetition two hundred, what they were in service of. I finished them. Obviously I finished them. But I noticed. I am recording it because it is a limiting factor and this journal exists to record limiting factors. It is not a crisis. It is an unfamiliar variable and I do not yet have a procedure for it. There is an irony in that sentence which I will come to. ———————————————— WONE The thread is unparked. I said it would be unparked when the championship was behind me, and it is behind me, and I am a man who honours what he files. He filed a document. It is public. Everyone in this building has read it and a number of people have asked me how I feel about it, which is not a question I have ever found useful, so I will do here what I do instead, which is take it apart. First, the administrative fact. He wrote that the exchange was open and that I could name the room. I named it. I went to the office the afternoon of the last show and I named it and it is made, and it is two weeks from that night, and it is for the championship. I did not consult anyone. There was nothing to consult about. Second, and this is the part the building has misread. He wrote that he does not want the championship. He wrote it plainly, at length, with no apparent awareness that it might be taken as an insult, and I have been told by three separate people that it is one. It is not an insult. It is the most familiar thing I have ever read. I spent twenty-three years being the man who never said the sentence. I did not say it because in the room where I was made, correct and wanting were not permitted to separate, and so I was correct and assumed the rest was handled. It took an eighty-one-year-old man and a cold floor and the volume before this one to get me to write I want it down once, in private, at forty-two years old, two days before the only chance I was ever likely to get. He has written the opposite sentence with the same total absence of performance. I do not want it. No hedging. No apology. He does not know where a man is expected to keep the thing. Neither do I. It is in a case, in a closet, in this house, and I have not opened the case since I brought it home. I record that here because it is true and because a journal that only contains the flattering facts is a promotional document. ———————————————— WHAT HE DECLINED TO WRITE He acknowledges the second question. He states that he has the answer, that it is short, and that he could have written it in the paragraph where he says he will not. Then he does not write it. The building has decided this is evasion. I want to record, in the only place where my opinion is worth anything, that the building is wrong and that this is the first thing he has ever done that I would call correct in the sense I mean when I use the word about work. I did not ask to be told. I have never in my life learned anything durable from a sentence. I set two conditions — honest, and publicly verifiable — and he met both, at a cost I would not have asked a man to pay and which I have not discussed with anyone and will not. What I asked for after that was not a paragraph. It was a framework I could examine. You do not examine a framework by being handed its conclusion. You put load on it and you watch what it does. He wrote: He is not owed a document. He is owed the reading. That is the sentence. Everything else in the filing is around that sentence. So: he intends to be read, and I intend to read him, and the disagreement between us has quietly stopped being about whether he will account for himself. He has agreed to. The disagreement is now only about the medium, and I have never once in twenty-three years preferred paper. Third, the technical note, which is shorter than the rest and always is. He beat me. Behind Closed Doors 1, the quarter-final, cleanly, and I did not contest it and have not since. This appears to be the shape of my career now — I am building it out of a single repeated correction, going back to men who have already had me and finding out whether the version of me that lost is still the version standing there. The last one worked. I will not treat that as evidence. One result is not a method. I know what he does before the bell. Everyone knows what he does before the bell; he does it in front of eight thousand people. He has told the federation he has an explanation for it and declined to provide it. Good. I will take it under load, where things are true. ———————————————— A SEPARATE NOTE Reyes-Montoya and I have not spoken since. There has been no need. We bowed before it and we inclined our heads after it and nothing said aloud would have improved either gesture. I understand he has been asked to comment on the loss and has been careful about it, which does not surprise me. I will record one thing and then close the thread, because it is his and not mine. He was better on that night than he has ever been. He was correct in every place he has ever been correct and the difference was not desire and it was not age and it was not the room. It was eleven repetitions in Tokyo, on a floor that has been resurfaced twice, performed by a man who did not tell me what he was doing while he did it. That is the whole of it. Anyone who says otherwise about him is being sentimental, and he would like that even less than I would. ———————————————— THE BODY Right knee: quiet. Two mornings of heat since the match, resolved without intervention. The replacement holds. Not the limiting factor. Left shoulder: a strain at the joint capsule from the twenty-first minute, present, improving, not restricting. Right wrist unremarkable. Sleep good, which I did not expect and have not questioned. The trailing foot correction has now survived a championship match against the man it was built for. It is no longer a correction. It is how I stand. The limiting factor is the one in the second section, and I do not have a name for it, and I have decided not to invent one just to have written something in this box. ———————————————— Tomorrow: the hour of stillness. Then the Behind Closed Doors 1 tape, all of it, including the parts I have avoided. Then the entry. Four hundred repetitions. Cold room. I said in the last volume that I had finally written down what the work was for. That was true for two days. It is for something else now, and the something else is on the other side of a man with no trainer, no record, and a private code with four categories in it, one of which has my name in it and only my name. The work remains the work. It has simply stopped being about me. — H.K.