Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [22]
It was hard sometimes on a Sunday evening, when everyone else was messing around playing table tennis or watching TV, to drag yourself out into the winter’s darkness and head off to get battered for two hours in the gym by some maniacal martial arts teacher.
But I kept going and kept going, and I guess I did a bit of a Forrest Gump on it: I just stuck at it – and I am so pleased I did.
One summer I got the chance to tour as part of the KUGB (Karate Union of Great Britain) team to Japan. It was a dream come true.
I remember being dropped off at the coach station in London by my mother, and nervously waving her goodbye. I was neatly dressed in a blazer and tie, with my karate team badge neatly sewn in place on my lapel.
The coach was filled with the rest of the karate squad, gathered from all over the UK – none of whom I had met before.
I could instantly see that they were all bigger, tougher and louder than me – and I was pretty scared. Japan felt a frighteningly long way away.
I took a deep breath and sat down in the coach, feeling very small and insignificant.
The team was an eclectic mix of karate experts – from London taxi drivers to full time professional fighters. (The only other Etonian who had been selected as part of the team was Rory Stewart, the MP who went on to become known for his epic walk through Afghanistan, as well as governing a province of occupied Iraq aged only thirty.) This was going to be an interesting trip, I thought.
But I had nothing to fear.
The squad completely took me under their wing as their most junior member, and arriving in Tokyo as a fresh-faced teenager, away from home, was eye-opening for me.
We headed up to the mountains outside of Tokyo and settled into the training camp.
Here we began to study and train under Sensei Yahara, one of the most revered karate grandmasters in the world. Each night we slept on the floor in small wooden Japanese huts, and by day we learnt how to fight – real and hard.
The training was more exacting and demanding than anything I had previously encountered. If our positions or stances weren’t pinpoint accurate, we would receive a firm crack from the bamboo ‘jo’ cane.
We quickly learnt not to be lazy in our stances, even when tired.
In the early evenings when we finished training I would walk the two miles down the mountain to a small roadside hut and buy milk bread, a form of sweet, milk cake, and I would slowly eat it on my way back to the camp.
Then I would bathe in the natural hot volcanic springs and soak my tired muscles. And I loved it all.
On our return to Tokyo, en route back to the UK, we got to witness a private training session of the top twenty karate fighters in the world. It was intense to watch. Fast, brutal at times, yet like poetry in motion.
I was even more hooked than I had been before.
One day I would be that good, I vowed.
I will never forget the day I finally got awarded my black belt, and the pride I felt.
The day of the grading had taken three years to arrive, and for those three years I had given it my all: training at least four or five times a week, religiously.
The final examination came and my mother came down to watch it. She hated watching me fight. (Unlike my school friends, who took a weird pleasure in the fights – and more and more so as I got better.)
But Mum had a bad habit.
Instead of standing on the balcony overlooking the gymnasium where the martial arts grading and fights took place, she would lie down on the ground – amongst everyone else vying to get a good view.
Now don’t ask me why. She will say it is because she couldn’t bear to watch me get hurt. But I could never figure out why she just couldn’t stay outside if that was her reasoning.
I have, though, learnt that there is never much logic to my wonderful mother, but at heart there is great love and concern, and that has always shone through with Mum.
Anyway, it was the big day. I had performed all the routines and katas and it was now time for the kumite or fighting part of