Come Back Kid

Since Teacher is on vacation I been devoting my time to sorting out what I can and can’t do physically.  My last evaluation at physical therapy left me somewhat upset about those limitations. 

Part of my responsibility in class has been leading the warm up and I’ve been doing what Teacher showed me years ago with only a few variations.  After having the therapist tell I can no long bend at the waist and do other exotic stretches he showed me alternatives to pretty much everything I needed to do, but the question would be, how would Teacher take a possible change like this?

Since he’s out of town for the next month I was doing a lot of role-playing in my head about how to approach him.  Thankfully Beard invited me over to his new in home studio so we could practice katas and I discussed my conundrum to him.  Although he didn’t give me a definitive answer I got the feeling that he supports the change given that he’s about 6 years older than me and appreciates the less the extreme warm up I used to do. 

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This morning Teacher called me from vacation (half way around the world) and he asked about my back and how things were going and I gave him the thumbnail run down of what the latest progress was.  I finally stumbled into my conundrum about the warm ups and he didn’t have a care in the world.  He was totally okay with changing things up!  Woot!

Now I just have to wait to April to figure out how to tie it all together.

Back Eval 2

I went to the Doc today and have been officially graduated from my phase of traction, but had a rather frank conversation about what I can and can’t do. 

Principally I’ve got to watch my back like a hawk (keeping it straight and strong all the time) and completely adjust my stretching.  I went over everything I’ve done for years and he pretty much disallowed every stretch I’ve done.  He was trying to tell me all this info and my mind was going to the start of class and how I really couldn’t do any of the stuff I normally did. 

I’ve got to talk to Teacher and see if I can recreate the warm up when I start the classes.  Talk about monumental.   I’m not sure he’ll bite, but if I can’t change that I’ll have to warm up outside of class or something.  Crap!