Well October’s here, and as you might imagine, that makes me a happy chap. Just last night in fact I enjoyed a lovely Pumpkin Ale after a Senior training session at the academy, an ale courtesy of Badger Brewery which is without a doubt my favourite brewery. I’m sure I must have mentioned on here before that I’m a fan of decent beers and ales, and now you know my favourite brewery, you know, should you be looking for gift ideas… (I’m also rather partial to a couple of local breweries such as Skinners and The Wooden Hand Brewery).
The senior lesson last night went well on the whole, I like the concentration and pedantry of the training is those sessions. We had a go at teaching a two and a half minute segment of an imaginary white belt class which was very hard, and flew by in what felt like thirty seconds, and then spent the rest of the time working on forms. I was pleasantly surprised at myself for how much of Bassai I remembered, and I think I’ve got the last 10-15 moves memorised now which was always the problem before. I did have a bit of a moment during Pyung Ahn Sa Dan where I totally lost myself and found myself staring gormlessly at the wall, but other than that I’m pleased with how training is going right now. I still have a lot of pain in my hip/thigh, which I keep promising myself I’ll try to sort out with a trip to the doctor, but always fail to do. Luckily I’ve found the stretches which seem to help it now, and ways to get into other stretches which caused me a lot of discomfort before.
We had some point-stop sparring training on Sunday which I was keen to get into, as it feels like certain things are starting to come together nicely. The main thing I’ve been drumming into myself and trying to improve is the speed and distance of my opening step and attack during a blitz, and I’m not sure how much of it is in my head but I feel like I’ve put close to a foot on the distance I can open up from and sped my front hand up considerably. I still have some areas which always seem to need work, like covering my head better in close, but overall I’m happy with everything.
These evenings which are drawing in are getting me in the mood to invest in a decent new game to amuse myself with when it’s just too harsh outside to go and do anything. The problem is I don’t have a clue what to get. Now there are some titles I’m looking forward to eagerly, such as Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 (both of which happily work with the Rock Band instruments – yeah!), but I fancy something more traditional for some reason. Last year I think I was spoiled with Mario Galaxy which was just beautiful and so much fun, but what for this year? I always talk myself into getting an RPG, even though I know full well that I’ll never finish it. I seem to get bored of them before the game is anywhere near finishing, so maybe a good action-adventure, or even a platformer perhaps. I’ve been playing the Pure demo a lot, I could see me getting into that, but I’m not sure how long for. Hmmm we’ll see.