Battle Ready with Ciara Morrison
Hello and welcome to Battle Ready. I’m Ciara Morrison.
If you’re new here, I cover four broad areas: HR and operations, psychology, martial arts, and — through absolutely no fault of my own — cancer and cancer recovery. Today’s episode touches on all of them, though it begins somewhere far less heroic: a capsule hotel in Copenhagen that launched a psychological attack on me before training had even started.
The Friday Night From Hell (A Horror Story in Three Flights of Stairs)
The weekend started unusually. Normally I’m either standing at East Croydon station at 5am surrounded by people who are still technically on their Thursday night out, or I’m travelling leisurely on a Friday afternoon to catch the dojo session in Copenhagen. Both options are fine. Both options have toilets you can actually reach. Neither happened this time.
Couldn’t find a sensible flight. Ended up on an 8:30pm Norwegian service, which meant arriving at the airport in my tracksuit — karate suit packed to within an inch of its life, carrier bag rationed to the gram — while businessmen around me nursed glasses of wine and tried not to make eye contact with whatever I was. I didn’t blame them.
The flight left and landed on time. Small mercies. Late trains meant I didn’t reach my accommodation until half midnight, which was fine. Planned for. I’d emailed ahead. I had written confirmation that everything would be sorted. I had, in short, been lied to.
Because I was only staying a few hours, I’d skipped the hotel and booked a capsule place. My previous capsule hotel experiences in Copenhagen had been brilliant — clean, efficient, quietly Scandinavian in the best way. So I booked this one. I won’t name them in case they sue me, but I will say: if you find a capsule hotel whose reception desk is at the end of a nightclub bar, maybe keep looking.
A security guard — lovely man, blameless in all of this — pointed me inside. I found the check-in terminals, entered my details, received a confirmation email proving I existed and had paid money, and waited for an access code. The code did not come. A staff member appeared, told me to wait a few minutes, and dissolved back into the crowd of several hundred people having a significantly better Friday night than me.
Five minutes. Nothing.
She returned, fought her way behind the bar, handed me a code on a piece of paper. I headed outside, full of hope.
Reader, there were two keypads on the door. No instructions. No signage. Just two keypads, staring at me. I tried both. Eventually one worked. Progress! Beyond the main entrance, every subsequent door had three keypads. The lift wasn’t coming. I walked up three flights of stairs, code in hand, and tried the dormitory door.
Nothing.
Both keypads. Multiple attempts. Nothing.
Back down the stairs. Along the street. Into the bar. She checked her system. The codes definitely worked, she said. I was probably doing it wrong, she strongly implied. I went back up.
Nothing.
At this point I had taken a short video of myself entering the code correctly — partly as evidence, partly because I was beginning to question my grip on reality. When I showed her the video, she became angry with me. She went away for five minutes. She came back, said the codes worked, and headed off again.
I went back up. For the third time. Up the three flights of stairs. I tried the codes. Nothing worked. The door didn’t move. I stood in that corridor at twenty to one in the morning, a martial artist with a black belt and a growing suspicion that I was being defeated by a keypad, and I made a decision: I was going to find a different human.
I went back to the bar and asked to speak to someone else. An entirely different person appeared, with an entirely different energy — calm, kind, immediately apologetic. She came upstairs. She tried the code. It didn’t work. She tried again. It didn’t work. The vindication was immense.
She gave me her own override code, saw me into my capsule, and disappeared with a level of grace I did not deserve given what my face must have looked like by that point. It was quarter to one. I was in. It was fine.
Then I realised there was no bathroom. Just a sink, behind a curtain, in the sleeping area. No toilet. Not anywhere near the sleeping area. I lay in my capsule and did the maths on whether I could survive until morning. I could. I did. I wrote a very thorough complaint letter. They have not replied.
Saturday: A Train, a Breakfast, and the Small Matter of Not Speaking Danish
The train to Nykøbing is a journey I know in my sleep, which after the previous night felt appropriate. I got a coffee, sat down, and — in an uncharacteristic moment of self-care — ate actual breakfast. I am not a breakfast person. Breakfast and I have an arrangement where I ignore it and it doesn’t bother me. But that morning I had breakfast, and it was correct, and I have no further notes.
I arrived at the venue to find the car park full of coaches and the hall still buzzing from the kids’ session. Instructors were signing belts. This is one of those gasshuku traditions I love — apparently Sensei Ernie worked out quite quickly that you don’t write your full name, because you look down and there are 400 children queuing. Somewhere in my parents’ house in Cork is a t-shirt Kanazawa Sensei signed for me. I should really find it before it becomes an archaeological artefact.
Training ran from half one to half six, and we had a fantastic lineup: Sensei Tata and Sensei Gabriella over from Argentina, Sensei Larsen, Sensei Torben, and on the Sunday, Sensei Jakob as well.
My group started with Sensei Larsen, who is an excellent tactician and genuinely brilliant at reading a room. We went deep into Gekkisai Dai Ichi bunkai, and the hardest element — something I am now adding to my training to-do list — was executing the bunkai in reverse order with multiple changing partners. It sounds manageable. It is not.
I should tell you that Sensei Larsen teaches in Danish. My Danish is, to be charitable, theoretical. I can usually piece things together from the Japanese terminology and whatever’s being demonstrated, but I have occasionally missed the “this is what NOT to do” instruction and enthusiastically done exactly that. At one point he came over and asked, quite directly, if I’d understood with a smile on his face!
The translation was from Spanish into Danish.
I want to be absolutely clear that I hold no ill will toward anyone involved in this. It just meant that the chain of comprehension ran: Spanish → Danish → my brain trying to reverse-engineer both. Enormous thanks to Julie and Felix, who stepped in and saved me from myself on multiple occasions across the weekend.
Sunday: Kumite, Recovery, and Why This Weekend Actually Mattered
If Saturday was physical, Sunday was brutal in the best possible way. Strong kumite focus, lots of partner work, real in-depth instruction. The session that stayed with me most was Sensei Tata’s kumite class at the end — and I want to explain why, because it goes beyond the training.
This gasshuku has been in my diary throughout my cancer treatment. The chemotherapy was, oddly, manageable — steroids help, it turns out, with most things except sleeping and being a normal human. The immunotherapy was a different story. Constant pain. Joints so inflamed I lost almost all of my flexibility. There were periods where I genuinely didn’t know what I’d be capable of again.
But I kept coming to this gasshuku. Kept showing up, at whatever level I could manage, and using it as a measure of where I was. A marker on a road I wasn’t always sure I could see the end of.
This weekend? I felt good. Really good. I’ve thrown the kitchen sink at my recovery — HIIT, mobility work, strength training, the lot — and it’s paying off. When we got to kumite, I wasn’t bracing for it. I was looking forward to it.
I’m not the ura mawashi fighter I used to be. My style has shifted toward hands and mawashigeri, and Sensei Tata’s session mapped almost perfectly onto that. Some of it built on concepts from the 50-man kumite we’d done at our own dojo the weekend before. I felt — and this is not a word I’ve been able to use lightly for a while — comfortable. Strong. Present.
The sessions flew by both days. When training is that good, time doesn’t really exist. You look up and two hours have somehow gone.
Getting Home (An Epilogue Featuring Céline Dion)
I made it back to Copenhagen with training partners, including Sensei Charlotte — thank you, as ever, for the lift. When you’re in the UK, I am your chauffeur. Unconditionally. Anywhere.
EasyJet spent the afternoon sending progressively less reassuring updates: five-minute delay, twenty-minute delay, and then, inevitably, cancellation. Sensei Linda and I have previous here — we once slept in Copenhagen Airport during a storm — so we recognised the signs and didn’t bother pretending otherwise.
HR mode: activated. Rebooked on morning flights. Decided that five hours in the airport was not worth a hotel. We found a spot with power sockets — the only real currency that matters in an airport at midnight — and Linda returned from a reconnaissance mission with 4.5 litres of water. I didn’t ask. I still don’t know.
We settled in. The man behind us put on Céline Dion and did not stop. Not one song. Not a playlist. Just Céline, on repeat, all night, with the energy of a man who had genuinely been waiting his whole life for this moment. I respect it. I did not sleep through it.
Incredulously my flight left on time. Arrived early. Shuttle was there. Train was there. I got home before midnight — result.
What I’m Taking Away
The Danish Gasshuku is one of the best on the circuit. I’ll keep saying it because it’s true. The training density is exceptional, the instructors are exceptional, and one of the things I value most is that Sensei Larsen gives other instructors the platform to teach. That’s rare. It produces something genuinely special.
But this weekend, for me, was a marker. Proof of something. That the work is working. That the body I spent the last few years trying to hold together and then slowly rebuild is now doing things that, not long ago, I wasn’t sure it would do again.
I felt strong. I felt fast. I felt, for the first time in a while, like myself.
That’s worth a delayed flight and a keypad that hates me.
This is Battle Ready. I’m Ciara Morrison — thanks for listening. I’ll see you on the next episode, or on the dojo floor. Bring your own key code.
KiyoCiara 
Great stories Ciara. Keep it up. Well done.