The Run Through

Now that Sensei has created a schedule he appears to be sticking with it.  This means that one Wednesday will be self defense and one will be sparring.  The whole class was mostly children so Mark and I popped off to the corner to work on our test.

Previous to class we worked tirelessly on getting rid of bad behaviors and this was pretty good during the class time, but it was a different story later.

After about a half hour Reed asked to help out with directing the kids behavior during the self-defense practices.  It wasn't for me to say, but I thought he was going into some pretty complex moves for fairly small  kids.  For my troubles, the six year old accidentally gave me an elbow to the face and I chomped my tongue.

I was often selected as Uke during the demos and this meant taking falls on the hardwood.  I mean I'm glad he knows that I can do it, but damn after the fourth or fifth fall I thought I'd said something to piss him off.  Part of the setup was a grab at the shoulder and his hands were taking handfuls of my skin.  When I took my top off later I could already see the black and blues starting.  That's going to look stellar tomorrow.

So that wore me down pretty well, but it was off to after class.  They had us run through a practice test.  We had four judges and then made us do everything twice to make it a bit more difficult.  I was wheezing horribly at midpoint, but we made it through.  Without going into too much detail about the corrections (because at this point it's become ad nauseam) the main point I came up with is to keep my mouth shut and try to recover as smoothly as possible after an error.

Today's practice was from 3:45 to 7:30.  I still have to pick my wife up at the airport at 10pm.  I see a short, hard night of sleep tonight.