Freak Finger

Surely going back to the lower grades syllabus should be easy? You’d think so, easier at least at any rate, but no, not for me. Last night I managed to do something nasty to my finger doing the very first set sparring combinations from the old Moo Duk Kwan syllabus. I’m so clever!

It should have been a simple combination; the attacker throws a rear-leg front kick, I block it with an inverted inside-to-out palm and retaliate with a reverse punch and kick of my own. It was going really well until the last kick of the session, when for some reason my brain decided that a much better block would be a straight-fingered spear hand to a moving shin… I had that weird few seconds at first where you aren’t sure what happened, followed by the realisation, pain and the ‘ohmygod, ohmygod, what happened? Did I break anything? Is there blood?’ shock reaction. I’m not sure what I did exactly, but it was incredibly painful.

So today I have a freak finger. It’s about twice the size of the one on the opposite hand, and the middle knuckle is now turning purple and red and all kinds of interesting colours. If I try to make a fist with my left hand now it looks like the same kind of fist you’d make if you were trying to strike pressure points with your middle knuckle, and I also look a bit special trying to type. My first thought when I got home last night was that I’d broken it, because it felt just like when I broke my finger last year, the same throbbing pain followed by a dull ache and not being able to put any pressure on it at all, but I’m not so sure this morning. I’ll just keep an eye on it for the next few days and see what happens, I really want to avoid going to X-ray again because it’s so incredibly boring.

Other than that little episode training’s still going great. Little changes made to the most basic techniques have made it a real task trying to re-learn without losing power or form. Things like floating a foot through the most basic blocks make them feel a lot more powerful, but I know I’m getting sloppy doing them. It’s all too easy to let the forward momentum throw your body forward into a lean, and forget about keeping square shoulders and hips… for now at least.

I started back at Dog Agility last week after a while away thanks to my excursions and those of our teacher, and it was great fun. We’re back to Monday evenings now, but with a 5:30 start, which means it’s a pretty frantic race home, get changed, get Murph ready and get over to the ground. We still both love it, maybe this year will be the one which sees me get him measured and entered in his first competition :).