Practical Application

More bruises! This morning a big blue one on a bicep and big brown one on my hand. I know the one on my hand came from the wrist locks, but where did one arm come from? Mysterious and I don't bruise very easily - at least I haven't in the past.

I assumed that since my legs were barely functioning that we'd be doing kicks because karma is like that, but instead it was night of applying kata and then an evasive move to throw.

In TSD our katas can seem often bizarre (to me anyway) and since we don't have formal bunkai we are often left questioning the practicality of certain movements. So Teacher took a couple of odd bits and made sure we had an idea of how they played into reality - fun!

The rest of the class was devoted to evading a bear hug attack. Teacher's friend was all drunk the other night and he got to pull this one out of his hat. We do the double upward block (from kata!) then using an elbow to the shoulder, a behind the elbow pull and a step out of the way the uki goes flying. It took about an hour to get it flowing, but it was awesome fun when it worked correctly. No effort for a beautiful flight.

Ironically my legs were nicely loosened up all the activity.

Realisation - we need more people for the class. We're going to be losing two more folks this summer and then it'll be Nilon and I with Beard on occasion. Yikes.

It's full of stars...

The afterimage of a hundred flashbulbs flashed in the darkness. After the static in my vision cleared I tried to quickly pick myself up and get out of the way of the next uki. I took a horrible fall and the result was a sore neck and momentary loss of vision. Tough night.

We started with punching and kicking drills that somehow seemed incredibly fun and fast. I got paired with Nilon and AOS. Nothing really new, but Teacher Slim came in for his once in a month visit. He was to my one side correcting my newly developed bad habits, while Teacher corrected my old ones. Making a fist, breathing, etc. As usual Nilon struggled to remain consistent with the exercise and immediately started trying his locks and grabs. Teacher Slim really doesn't have patience for such things and wandered away. When I have both of them its like watching ADD in stereo. Teacher Slim only wants to teach advanced moves and concepts - often pushing far beyond what I capable of doing, while Nilon wants to try whatever he can think of instead of the exercises at hand. This frustrates me because I want to know what Teacher Slim has to offer, but you really have to concentrate and give him your full attention and that's not possible with Nilon.

Nilon, whom I used to call Nut, was getting on my nerves again last night. I'd like to think that I was making my peace with him, but he has special powers to drive me over the edge. The more energy expended the more he gets energized. Thankfully he took a three hour hike before he came to class. Even the constant exhortations of "relax" from the teachers had a limited effect.

So the mats came out at half time since Teacher Slim was there. Nilon, still full of vim and vigor took care of that all by himself. Youthful energy makes me jealous. But seeing it makes me even more tired.

So it was on to Aikido. I may have mentioned this before, but Teacher Slim had some exposure to Aikido in the past and has taken some favorite things from that art and combined with them with some really painful stuff from Gojo-ryu.

We partnered up and then practiced all the basics and a little of the advanced moves. From there we had the person in the middle and the rest did a line. Attack, attack, attack. Supposedly we are trying for variety, skill, and timing. In reality there is a lot of poor falling, poor throwing and general poor execution - well, at least from me.

And that's where the stars came in. Beard pulled me in and executed a wrist lock and take down so fast my feet left the ground. I didn't even have time to tuck my chin. Boom. From there everything got a little less smooth.

One of the moves takes the attacking hand and moving it into a circular block to move the arm out of the way. You then take your other hand and grab the back of the head forcing it down and if executed well then the uki ends up doing a roll out. I crashed to the floor thunderously. I got a really sore foot from that one.

I slept like a log last night.

Knife attacks always hurt

I'm writing fast today because I don't have a lot of time at work. Here's the skinny version.

No Kid Speed! Not the most demonstrative person I've ever met, but this does seem mysterious to me. Of course at 15 I assume he's thinking about girls and what his friends are thinking about. In the years I've known him I've never heard him string together more than five words together. At his age I couldn't shut up (I'm not much different at this point).

We started with kick combos and then knife attacks. Exercise one was low inside crescent (to foil low kick or movement forward), then other foot roundhouse, followed by punch punch. Very awkward and definitely not smooth for me. After lots of corrections we changed to low inside crescent, switch foot round house, remain balanced then with same foot back kick. That worked great because I didn't have to bring my weight back around.

Knife attacks always hurt. I have a bad habit of blocking down instead of across because of height difference and me not twisting my torso until too late. This means that the point of our wood knives find themselves embedded in my boobie. Ouch.

So after lots of corrections and a variety of attacks and defenses we went to the stairs. Teacher had taught practical self-defense in the past and had obviously thought it would work with a small class. We went to the stair case and learned how to foil attacks from every direction. This means that I took a lot of sprawls down the steps. My feet felt a little bruised as I'd fly down the steps trying to find a spot and inevitably miss.