Headless Style New Heights

I'd forgotten that I was supposed to put a little effort into writing these entries.  It's usually time that prevents me from really thinking about what was going on in class.  Honestly, it's a fertile ground for all kinds of writing nuggets, but it takes time for something to come up.  

I took a run this afternoon and chatting about class with my running buddy made something surface.  But first the setup.

I'd forgotten that class wasn't going to have a leader for a week and half.  Andy and Colette are out of town for a couple weeks, so we were left to our own devices.  When this happens, the senior student runs the class.  Mr. Moore is still recovering from his knee surgery, so I thought Mr. Rome would take over, but he wasn't here today.  In the end our most senior was Mr. Jacot who has his third and is working on his fourth.  He's so focused on learning forms that we just went about business as usual.  

Business on Thursday is partner drills.  Since we did three-step sparring yesterday we did sleeve grabs today.  Mr. Amigud, Bill and I got through about six of them with varying degrees of success.  

Before class I was working on my double kicks again and I had a slight revelation.  To improve my jump height, I've been doing box jumps when I get to class early and now, I'm setting up targets to kick around that height.  

There is a slight flashback here.  

When I was in Tang Soo Do, fifteen years ago or more there was a guy from the high school.  When he jump kicked he would appear to float in the air.  I'm not sure what the dynamic was that made it look like his hang time was so long, but I stopped what I was doing whenever he did that.  I wish we had cell phones more prevalent back then, because I would have got as much video as I could.  

Back to the present.

I warm up at home so my legs are flexible and have plenty of blood in them.  When I get to the school, I stretch a tiny bit and then do about three to six jumps.  After that I jump in front of the "box" (stacked mats) and try the double kick.  So I know I can clear that height and some.  At best, it's about three feet.  Definitely not what I'm shooting for, but small steps and all that.  

While I'm doing just the jumps, I noticed that a few of them seem to put me into the state where I feel like I'm floating for just a second.  I say to myself, "wait a sec..." I immediately think of the floating kid.  Have I tapped into something here?  It definitely has something to do with bending my legs deeper than usual, but that additional half second allows me to target better.  So I set up pads and used those as targets and built a bit more.  I'm terrible at hitting both but I was comfortable with the height.  Now I have to work on more height.  I'm hoping forty inches will be enough in the end, but that's still a long way off.