PLUM BLOSSOM TIME - PART 1
After attending last year’s Plum Blossom Federation tournament as a spectator, I knew I’d want to return and participate as a competitor. I look forward to the Dragon Cup, and my experiences there have been great, but this tournament is something special. You really get the sense that you’re part of a much larger martial arts community, expanding outward from your own school to the other White Dragon schools and the various other Federation schools, including Grandmaster Wong’s own school in San Francisco.
My goal for this tournament was actually quite simple-I wanted to do the same events/forms I did at the Dragon Cup, only much better. This drove my training plan, and allowed me to train mostly on my own, while continuing my lessons and working toward my fringe. Although I mainly trained on my own, I had a lot of resources to draw on. Instructor comments and corrections from my private lessons and in group classes were applied to my tournament hand form to improve it (you can never work on details too much in Tai Chi). I also found some of the photos we took at the Dragon Cup to be helpful in picking up details on the flute form.
As so often happens when preparing for an event like this, other life events can drain you or pull you away from what you want to do. With the Dragon Cup, it was work stress and minor nagging aches and pains. This time around, I not only had stress and anxiety at work, I faced a family crisis when my mother passed away suddenly in July. I pondered not going to the tournament, but decided to press on and carve out as much personal time as I could to train. The tournament, and preparation for it, became something of a relief valve for me-time just for me, where I could step away from everything else and recharge by focusing on the entire tournament experience. While I still wanted to improve and do well, my main focus shifted to just being there and experiencing it all. (This all influenced my decision to not enter the Push Hands event in this tournament-I was simply running out of training and practice time. I also suspected the level of competition would be higher than what I was capable of; watching the event during the tournament proved me right. Something to work toward for next year.)
In the end, I achieved my goal - my performance in both events was much improved over my Dragon Cup performances. This was validated not only by my numerical scores, but by my own awareness of what I was doing (more on that shortly). I also was fortunate enough to run into a senior instructor who had judged one of my events (weapon form) at the Dragon Cup. He saw my flute form performance and complimented me on my improvement.
Even taking into account variations in consistency, rigor in grading, and simply personal preferences among judges, it was still very gratifying to see my scores in the Plum Blossom tournament. In hand form (24 Step), I got a 6.1, 6.2, and 6.4. In Open Weapon form (flute), I scored 7.2, 7.4, and 7.6. (In this tournament, you get to see your score from each judge and they score you in 10th of a point increments). I was quite excited to tie for third in the weapon form competition-although I did not medal, I was very pleased to do as well as I did in a group of 14 competitors, the great majority of whom were 2 (or more) ranks above me.
Overall, it was a great day, and one I'll remember for a long time.
Scroll down to the next post for Part 2......
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