China

A month has past quickly and I'm still not able to do much as the tear in my adductor seems to heal ever so slowly. I have a continuous ache in the muscle as well as tightness which the physio has treated a couple of times to loosen up. Dry needling through the muscle is not exactly the most pleasant thing you can have done but its effect is instantaneous.

Unable to do anything Taekwondo related, its been difficult for me to get motivated to go to the gym and do any exercise. The few times I have gone, what tends to happen is I will go and attempt to "take it easy" but push to hard ending up sore through the adductor. I have the opinion that if your going to do something you should do it to the best of your ability, something that I try to reflect with my work as well. I also believe that if your not pushing yourself to be faster, stronger and better than before that you will not improve.
Trying to find that happy medium for me seems to be nearly impossible hence I'm just reassigned to taking so more time off until I can train at the level I'm used to.

In the meantime I've watched a little of the world qualification tournament in Baku, Azerbaijan. There is two places you can check it out,
live on : http://www.yildiz.tv/?act=dvr&chan=idmanaz and
replay on: http://www.dartfish.tv/ChannelHome.aspx?CR=p1

The live screening was freezing up for me so I elected to just watch the replays on Dartfish. The good thing about Dartfish is once you subscribe you can watch any of the competitions for the past three years from all around the world and subscription is free!
Watching fights of this caliber is a great educational tool to learn and see the different styles that athletes use to score with. The more you watch you can see that a particular style may be common to a particular country. Its also refreshing to see new techniques which we here in Australia are not familiar with due to lack of foreign exposure. For me personally it gives me new ideas that I may want to try out, broaden my range of attacks and counters hopefully making myself less predictable.

Strangely enough you may notice that the athletes are not wearing the electronic body protectors and complete scoring has been returned to the judges. STA has posted the WTF letter explaining the reasoning behind this on their website. In short LaJust filed a complaint in court for an injuction preventing the use of Daedo, which was upheld.
I like the last paragraph were the WTF mentions the inaccuracy of the LaJust.
"The WTF informs you with regret of the court decision and advises you that the WTF has decided to use traditional non-electronic body protectors at the Baku World Qualification Tournament, as LaJust PSS is not competent enough to be used at this important tournament due to the technical faultiness revealed to this date."

As yet I have not seen their fights but current results have been posted for Saf and Carmen and I've heard Burak lost his second (TBC), with Carolina fighting sometime tonight:

Safwan Khalil M58kg Division
Defeated PLE 9,1
Defeated YEM 4,1
Defeated ESP 1,1 - won Golden Point (the current World Champion)
Lost to KOR 4,5 - KOR placed 3rd overall.

Carmen Marton F67kg Division
Defeated VEN 3,1
Lost to EGY 5,6

Best wishes and good luck for Carolina and condolences for the others.

As for me, I'm finally off to China tomorrow! At long last I'm going to get there. Most people I mention it to think its for a competition but alas this trip is for work. I hope it will be more of a working holiday rather than not what I've been advised, 12 hour days of stress in another country. Must be positive because it will be an amazing experience regardless.

Be back in a few weeks....