Legs

So last Saturday was the first (maybe the second?) proper training session of the year.  We'd done a lot of fitness for a couple of weeks prior but the entire squad turned up for the official beginning.

We played a few different games, aimed at skills and fitness to try and get into the new season at a run.

It was surprisingly cold so I obviously went for short sleeves because I'm a fool.

I think I had my hands crossed for 90% of training to try and keep the extremities warm.

We also played a game of 7's against a local team, I scored 2 but my hamstrings are incredibly sore again - I need to start stretching, massaging and hot/colding once again.  This seems to crop up once every few months, achilles tendinitis perhaps?

A game of 7's right after training isn't exactly a great idea so I scored our only points before I limped off.

The first one was from the kickoff, I handed off a couple and ran as hard as I could, just about making the line ahead of their team.

This is from the kickoff, bad achilles and all.

The training went well, the fitness was okay, I just need to figure out how to buy a new pair of legs and I'll be good to go!

It's an Interesting Thing

Last week I put up some pictures I'd taken of a park.

I thought they were absolutely fantastic, but interestingly enough I didn't get many page views on the particular post, which leads me to believe that they weren't anything special.  It's an interesting thing, taste.

As an aside, I've been given a load of photos from the game against Hino, so here they are!

A few are from training.

It's starting to get really cold so I'm wearing an awful lot of clothes.  It's starting to feel more and more like England.

I've started a few games now so I've got some game fitness, but there's nothing like running some laps to get breathing.

This is the warmup before the Hino game.

As we walked onto the pitch.

The ground was in a park from the 1960 something olympics held in Japan.

You can't see it but the in-goal areas are about 2 metres long, given an extra 2 metres by laying some carpet.  Literally carpet.

The solo effort from a kick our wing and fullback fielded.

You can't really see the carpet from this angle but I made sure to dot down before getting anywhere near it (I was actually tackled and just fell over the line).

The first time I've scored and had such congratulations from the team.  Feels good!

Smiles all round!

This is probably me walking right after the try, attempting to catch my breath.

The Australian guy was playing centre, but switched positions after the try to cover my position.

This is me scoring the second try, pulling a sexy face.

Unfortunately the second try was judged to have a knock on during the build up.

After the game.  Annoyed at the score and extremely tired.  I attempted 12 tackles, the most attempted on our team was 13.  Needless to say it's strange to see a winger trying so many tackles in a game.

This face sums up the game pretty well, I think.

Rikugien

It's Autumn time.  That means the leaves are changing colour and there's a chance you might snap a few reds among the greens.

Before I move onto the pictures; IBM played against Hino this weekend.  We lost, but I scored our only try and made any number of tackles.  I missed one, and in the process broke the vice captains nose.  Not exactly ideal, but we look past the mistake and try to improve.

The try was an absolute beast of a solo effort by the way.  Amazing.  I'm not allowed to upload it for the whole world to see, but it's great.  Honestly!

Anyway, onto the pictures.

As you can see, I took a lot of pictures of the same place.  Apart from the lack of colour elsewhere (it's still a little early for the true Autumn show) this place had a nice combination of light falling through the trees and shades of orange and red.

This one is slightly more contrasty making the reds a little redder.  As a result I think I prefer this one.

This one also looks quite good in black and white, but everyone's had enough of that.  I might go back and deepen the reds a little.

This is the view from the bridge above.

Aha surprise!  Black and white!  I over compensated for the lens I was using, hence why this pillar bends in really awkward ways from the middle third upwards.  It's easy enough to correct if I ever want to come back to this picture; for now it's fine.

This is the view looking back towards the entrance of the place.  It's supposed to look like this all the way around the park at this time of year, but this is the only really pretty stretch at the moment.  I'm sure it'll look good in a couple of weeks, maybe less.  I'm not sure how long it takes for the whole place to change before the leaves start dropping.  If it's like England, you'll only have a relatively short period of time before everything looks drab.

My Biggest Fan

So after the game against Secom I met the sponsors of IBM (besides the company itself) who had turned up for the big game at the national stadium (Chichibunomiya).  Those guys aside, I also met my biggest fan - click here to see.

My second biggest fan was this girl and her parents, along with her friends.

The youngster was practically thrown at me as we were leaving.

The woman on the right is the wife of one of our props, an exceptionally nice guy (as seems to be the case with the tight five in any team) who writes his own blog about food in Japan.  Occasionally he writes about boxing, but seeing as boxing is a dying art and food will never be so, there's a lot more to write about in the world of cakes than the ring.

Purely as an academic exercise as to how often and how much he writes, here is his blog:

http://ameblo.jp/shimoyaman2009/

It's incredible how much he writes.  Of course I can't tell you how good the content is or if his foodie credentials are up to snuff, but I assume through sheer force of volume, he has at least figured a few things out about noodles.

As another purely academic exercise (although this one involves some pictures) here is the blog I stole the picture of me from:

http://ameblo.jp/emifit/entry-11944727753.html

I include this because it has a number of pictures of the team, and the stadium, and from a neutral perspective it might be interesting to see the scale of the place and some other faces in the team - to gain a context for IBM rugby and the league we play in.

It's also my intention to write a review of the recent books I've finished.  The lack of sleep decimates critical thinking, but does wonders for working through backlogs of books.

To try and trigger a google search, here are the names of the books I've recently gone through:

The Hobbit

(The) Silmarillion

Ancillary Justice

Revelation Space

London Falling

So as per my usual timetable, those reviews will be up this time next year.

IBM vs Secom

So we played a company team called Secom at the weekend.

They were in the same position as us in having lost their previous games, so both teams were battling to keep out of the bottom two.  The last two in the league have to play relegation matches against the top two in the league below us.

We played in the national stadium in Japan with the Secom fans on one side, and our supporters on the other side.  Despite the relative emptiness of the stadium the noise and atmosphere were great.  They don't do the Japanese baseball thing of making up chants for the players (there's SO MUCH downtime in baseball, I guess the fans have to keep themselves amused somehow) but they get behind the action nonetheless.

The game was played at a thousand miles per hour and there were a lot of mistakes, particularly towards the end.

I don't know how far I ran (no fancy GPS units for us) but it felt like I ran gauntlet as I came out somewhat bruised.

Knocked six bells out of a couple of people and won a few turnovers which isn't really a wingers job, but I scored a try which makes up for the lack of attacking I did all game.  Kind of.

Next up is Shane Williams and Mitsubishi.  I think that's another away game?

The Promo

So IBM was once a big player in the Japanese rugby scene and as such, they commissioned promotional videos of their team whenever the new season started.

Along with the photographs and other associated silliness, they've kept that tradition alive and as such, here is this years video.

I can't get the video to embed in this post so you'll have to make do with the above link.  Sorry about that.

IBM vs Secom

Secom are a team in our league.  IBM beat them last year, making them the only victory of the season.

As this year has started with a couple of positive results, we could have been expected to go on and further improve despite the four days of solid, heavy rain prior to the occasion.  Amazingly enough, it wasn't particularly wet underfoot (the field must have immense drainage) and there was no rain in the air - so it ended up being fairly dry.

Unfortunately, a week ago during the game against Fuji Xerox (which we won by forty or fifty) I'd pulled my left hamstring scoring my second try of the day.  I was only on for fifteen minutes.  In that time I made 1 tackle (still 100% for the season) and effected one turnover along with the two scores.

Needless to say I was disappointed not to be playing today - a game in which we won by only two points.  Seemingly neither team could catch a ball, and we were constantly pushed off the ruck meaning we lost momentum all over the place.  Having said that, we won, which considering the backwards and forwards nature of the game is impressive.

Anyway, that aside, I took a few pictures.  

I'm particularly tired today because I hit the gym hard afterwards, so the colour balancing on a lot of these is somewhere between wrong, and completely wacko.  Try not to think about it too much.

More IBM Rugby Stuff!

I had to delete the videos of the game from youtube (don't ask) so here is an edited video I made that introduces some of the team!

It took a few hours to make, including an hour to find the swoosh/ding sound effects (time well spent, in my opinion) but I had a lot of fun making it (as I always do when making things like this) so it was worthwhile.

Enjoy!

IBM Rugby

So I've started playing for IBM.

They're in the first division (under the top league) in Japan, so they're fairly strong in the scheme of things.  Having said that, they only narrowly avoided relegation last year, so it'll be a struggle this year as well most likely.

We had a practice game against Yakult (of the yoghurt fame) this weekend, in which I played a measly 20 minutes.  Infer from the 20 minutes what you will...

Anyway; I scored a try and made three or four runs for a total of probably 40 or 50 metres.  I made one error in throwing a pass to no one after one such break, but my tackling was 100% (1 out of 1).  It is debatable whether I should have gone inside to cover an attack that they ended up scoring from, but in the end it would have been 4 on 1 anyway so there's not much that could have been done.

They won by a try or two - one of theirs was a charge down and one was a kick with an incredibly wicked bounce (the aforementioned decision).

Anyway, if you are interested in watching, here it is.

My 20 minutes:

The whole game:

The Captain

I recently switched rugby teams, meaning having to learn an entirely new about an entirely new group of people, their names and personalities.

Obviously the most important person is the captain, so I took a photograph to remind myself of who he is:

After this picture I ended up walking around, taking pictures and videos (still working on it!) of other places and people.

I managed to get another picture I quite like -

And that's what I've been up to recently.