January 3rd 2010, Grade Status 6th Kyu, Belt: Green, Grading? Sometime in June 2010. “The List” So first of all I would like to thank everyone who has approached me and told me something positive about the blog. Its nice to hear and it gives me the feeling that perhaps I should continue for a while! So for sometime I have been promising to tell you all why I train Karate. This has been much harder than I thought to get down on virtual paper as it were. This blogging business isn’t as easy as it looks! So here is “The List”: Topping at Number One: “The impossible goal of achieving absolute perfection with what you’ve been given”. The more I started thinking about my list the more I realised that most of my reasons tend to circulate around this one. The more you train Karate the more you want to get better, and perfect something, anything, everything! As soon as I have managed to grade to a particular belt, this never seems to be enough for me, I am always looking forward to improving what I know already, learn a new kata: to perfect something new and in general just keep going! This sort of leads me to the second reason (bare with me it will make sense the more you read) 
Number two: My name is not Mark Knopfler, my name is Savage. Let me try and explain it this way. I think any musician particularly Mr Knopfler has managed to achieve an almost perfection in what they do. If I can get even close to this I must find what exactly it is that I am good at. Because it ain’t playing the guitar! I quite simply found my way to Karate: if I can get close to achieving some sort of perfection with my own body then I will quite simply die a happy man! Training Karate for me is like listening to Mark Knopfler, a poetry in movement and perfection which is absolutely incredible! It seems to me that I can with enough sweat, tears, and work, actually get close to achieving something with Karate, perhaps not perfection, perhaps I won’t have time to even get close but by god I think I can actually get close enough in any case! And this is why I train Karate, because If I can get even slightly close to the perfection of Mark Knopfler or the beauty of any Black Belt that I train with then I truly will be happy! Reason number three: My Head and my Body: I tend to travel and work at particular moments very intensively. If I can for a moment in my life forget all these problems then I am probably doing myself a big favour! So how do I forget? Well I can tell you this, put yourself in front of lets say a 2m high man with a black belt called Harald ;) and try and fight against him, will make you forget in an instant any issue you may have had at home or at work! Sorry to pick on you Harald but you are the perfect example! In reality, any fight is going to of course make you forget! Tied into that the fact that my body seems to be reaping some pretty big benefits as well. I’ve lost about 8kg, any problems I had in my shoulders and neck because of too much work with a PC seems to have pretty much disappeared. So they you have it! This is pretty much the three reasons why I train Karate in any case! Finally I would like to dedicate this list to everyone I train Karate with. Everyone gives me a great inspiration to just want to keep going. 
Thanks!