Gareth's something new turned out to be a test.
He did not call it that. He simply arrived at the morning session with three senior warriors I had not sparred against before and arranged them at intervals across the training ground and told me to work through all three in sequence without stopping between rounds.
I looked at the three of them.
They looked back at me with the neutral professional expressions of people who had been asked to do a job and intended to do it properly.
"Now?" I said.
"Now," Gareth said.
I went.
The first warrior was fast and technically precise. He came at me with combinations I had practiced but had not faced at this speed and I had to abandon clean form in the first thirty seconds and work from instinct instead, reading what was coming and responding bef
