TRAINING JOURNAL — SESSION 4,847

TRAINING JOURNAL — SESSION 4,847 Hideo Kuramoto ———————————————— This morning the dojo was empty. I arrived at the usual time. There were no other students. There were no junior fighters stretching in the corner, asking me questions I could answer slowly. There was only the mat, and the heating, and the quiet. I am writing this down because I want to remember it. I have been a fighter for twenty-three years and I have not, in that time, been alone in a dojo before a match. There has always been someone. A young fighter trying to be noticed. A senior fighter I did not want to disappoint. A coach. A janitor. A man on a phone. Today, no one. I trained alone. ———————————————— My opponent tomorrow is a man who calls himself "Simply" Shawn Cortez. I have watched his matches. He is a competent technician. He is younger than I am, which is, at this stage in my career, true of every opponent I face. He is also, in my judgment, not as good as he believes himself to be. I want to be careful about that observation. I have, in twenty-three years, encountered many fighters who believed they were better than they were. Most of them were correct, eventually. They became the fighters they had imagined themselves to be. The ones who did not become those fighters were the ones whose belief in themselves did not survive the first match in which they were proven wrong. The belief, in my experience, is the test. The fighters who lose it after one loss were never going to keep it. The fighters who keep it after one loss are the fighters who become great. Tomorrow I will provide Cortez with that test. I do not know whether he will keep his belief. I will not, in his case, root for one outcome over the other. I will simply provide the test and see what he does with it. ———————————————— I want to write down two things and then I will stop writing. The first is that I am not the fighter I was twenty-three years ago. I have known this for some time. The dojo this morning made me know it again. There is a way the body holds itself when it knows the work. The body knew the work this morning. The body did not, in the way it once did, want to do the work. There is a difference. I am noting it. The second is that the federation has produced a room — a hexagonal cage, with structure I did not learn to fight in — that has, over my time in it, become a place I am beginning to understand. I will not say I have learned it. To say I have learned it would be disrespectful to the room and to the fighters who arrived in it before I did. I will say only that I understand it better than I did, and that I expect, by the time of my last match in it, to understand it still better. The room is a teacher. I have been a student many times before. I am being a student again. There is no shame in this. ———————————————— Tomorrow I will fight Shawn Cortez. I will fight him at my full capability. I will not go easy. I will also not go cruel. He is a young fighter, and the federation has, in placing him against me, indicated that it considers him worthy of a serious match. I will give him a serious match. If I lose, I will write about it here. If I win, I will write about it here. The federation does not need me to predict outcomes. The match will produce its own. I am, as I have always been, only the work. — Hideo Kuramoto 道は遠い ———————————————— End of session 4,847.