Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Wishbone

Life Lesson 42:  Heavy squats at the gym and while fighting a cold is a really bad idea the day before class.

I went early for the kids class in hopes that I could warm up my legs a bit.  Squats the day before had left me stiff and inflexible.  Dealing with the sniffles on the side also made it hard to get my blood pressure up and going. The kids class went by quickly, but I never really warmed up.  Teacher plainly has a good time teaching that class, but I was totally out of it. 

The adult class went by quickly, but during the second hour we were knocking each other off our feet.  The standard move being that we slide our leg in behind the Uke’s calf and simply straighten our leg.  The Uke’s leg goes flying out. 

As Uke with my neophyte partners I’d end up crashing to the floor to save ripping my groin muscles.  More experienced partners would do the “pop” and then catch me to reduce the odds of doing a split. 

Near the end of the night Teacher came around and started working on refining the move.  In my case he pointed out that I needed to stop being shy and grab the face of my Uke to “steer” him.  As usual he demoed on me, but for whatever reason my normal flexibility was gone and his steering left me in a position where I could neither fall to my back or grab him for support.  A blinding flash of pain in my hips, coupled with an inadvertent yelp and I was able to get a knee under and fall down.  I had to lay on the floor with the “stupid, oh my god I’m in pain, far away eyes” look for a good 30 seconds.  My partner gratefully hauled me up, but I could barely stand. 

I realized that if I kept moving a little bit my legs wouldn’t collapse, but in my head I was really kind of worried that I had done some kind of damage.  My legs were literally shaking trying to hold me up.  I couldn’t really do the move on my Uke and I definitely couldn’t do the move as the Uke.  Teacher finally called the end of that exercise to which I was eternally grateful, but then he calls me over to demo the moves more fully to the class.  “Oh s#!*” I thought to myself.  “Can’t he see that I’m having troubles standing up?” I guess not.

So he expands on the two moves and then has me do a couple of attacks to the waist (wrestler grabs) so he can demonstrate what do with that.  Thankfully I was mostly in a static position and not any splits. 

End of night report – 10K mg of Ibuprofen and only a little stiff this morning. 

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