Punishment Round

After a somewhat strenuous Black belt only class, in which I showed some nice improvement, we all headed down the hill to the school.  

I was feeling some degree of pleasure because I was given corrections and was able to deal with them right away.  Not always the case for me.

Sensei closed out the Black belt club with discussions on how to deal with test stress.  This was more oriented to our Brown belt who could potentially be testing along side me.  She's pretty young and is juggling the options.  She's never been to Yakima so she's considering do the test here in the Rose City.  

I hate the travel and expense, but I love going to the mothership.  It's a nice experience and it's great to see all the high ranking folks from around the region.  It confirms a deep bench for our Style/school even if it is just a regional thing.

Regular class started with movement.  This consisted of back and forth attacking and blocking. Although we haven't done this in awhile I didn't think much about it until we got going.  I ended up with Kyle, who's my height and quite a bit heavier than me.  I get a kick out of this because when I started at this school he was still going through puberty.  

We were doing a multitude of attacks and defenses which started out fine, but after two runs I thought the muscles in my forearms were broken.  I mean I know there is bruising, but my muscles actually felt like they burst.  By the forth run I could barely make contact.  I kept think that the bruising was going to be horrible that night or today. And to my surprise I don't have one mark on me! My arms are a bit sore, but there's not one bruise.  Totally weird.  

Notes On A Hot Day

Jeeez, I'm not really good at this posting thing lately.  The main focus is on the esoteric these days.  Smaller and smaller detail work.  It appears to be paying off as I received many compliments from my co-students and teacher last night.  I was a bit concerned about how I'd do because I'd been on vacation for two weeks and was only able to practice two or three times.  

We met on Wednesday of last week and I got a full sheet of notes.  I picked the lowest hanging fruit and started working on those pieces.  We went over the first five kata last night and everyone agreed that I was much improved.  This carried over into the normal class where we worked on two more and ripped into them with great detail.  

Exhausting due to the heat and a bruise on my foot that I picked up on vacation from walking so much?  Anyway it turned out to be a right to bed night.  

Today my foot is aching furiously.  I'm off to call the doctor.