He does that too?

The judo season is coming to an end, which means there won't be a lot of judo blogs to write upcoming weeks. Then I thought to myself: wait, this is A Typical Ginger Blog, and gingers can do more stuff than just judo (they really do, even without a soul). That is why I decided I could change my blog a little. Now I will write blogs/upload videos about more personal interests than just judo.

Besides judo, I love to play the piano. I have had an electrical piano for the last two months, and I try to play on it daily (this is not always working out, school is killing me with the amount of homework they give me :s)

For one or another reason I had an entire hour of free time today (I finished my homework because I planned ahead for once :)), so I decided to record myself playing 'River Flows In You' by Yiruma. I hope the sound is how it should be, and I hope you like it :)

If there is anything wrong with the video (the frames are horrible, the sound is hideous, just let me know in the comments, and I will do my best to change it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0IfAUdb_Rc&feature=youtu.be

Little me :)

Sadly I have not planned any tournament for the next weeks, so I had to find something else to write about. When I was going through all my old photos and videos online, I found a lot of old judo videos, and I thought it would be fun to share one of them.

After watching some of the videos I became curious about how long I have actually be doing judo, and after some research I found that I have been doing judo since the age of 6, which is 10 years ago. It is awesome to see that I started at such a young age. If you would ask around you'll find out a lot of kids have actually been doing several sports, and only a few stick to their first sport for years. Apparently I'm one of them, and I don't even regret it a little bit.

The video I wanted to share is quite a short one. It was a tournament here in my home town Culemborg. In the video I still have the orange belt, which indicates it must have been around 6 years ago (don't laugh at my long hair, it would only grow longer in the 2 years after this video).

How I hurt my neck

My previous blogs have raised some questions. There was one question which really stood out: ''How did you hurt your neck?'' I'm going to try and answer this question as complete as a possibly can.

The exact injury in my neck was a twisted vertebra. Actually, I had three twisted vertebrae. It happened in one of my tournaments earlier this year. April, to be exact. I sounds incredibly cliché, but it was a regular tournament in Schiedam. I had done my warming-up, sweat running down my forehead, and was waiting to face my first opponent. The judoka I was placed against was the black-belted Mr. Meijers (I refuse to say his first name because of privacy reasons). Anyway, the match didn't last long. In the first 30 seconds Mr. Meijers tried to throw me on my back using ippon seoi otoshi (judo throw), and I dove head-first into the tatami (the mat). The clip below shows some different techniques of the ippon seoi otoshi, and the one which starts at 1:30 demonstrates the best what it looked like when I hurt my neck.

                           (1:30 - the throw looks a lot like the throw because of which I hurt my neck)

My recovery took approximately 8 months, in which my vertebrae were twisted in reverse four times, of which three ultimately failed (I fell on my neck again those three times, twisting the vertebrae again). After the fourth time I decided to stop my trainings for a couple of weeks, with a successful outcome.

Now I'm fully recovered, and once again I'm training 5-6 times a week (don't ask me where I got the time from, because I don't have that much time. It is really hard to combine sport and school, but I'm trying my best).