Tag Archives: stupidity

Levitation Perfected

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The weekend played host to a couple of tough training sessions with the EMTF. SBN Kumar Jr traveled down with a few students from his school in tow and stayed down to take the first squad session for the World Championships next year in Florida. Between you and me this meant I knew what I was going to be taking away from the weekend – pain.

The couple of hours we had on Friday evening were pretty hard work (oddly I can’t remember anything from the lesson), but Saturday afternoon was the killer. From a CV point of view it was very tough, and we had a good test of both our aerobic and anaerobic fitness, not to mention a lot of strength and stamina work. I can’t remember doing as many sit-ups in one go before, and I hope it’s a long time before I have to do it again. The added palm strikes to the solar plexus during the exercises were the icing on the cake!

If that cake were made of glass, elephant tramplings and caustic soda that is, the entire front of my body is killing me!

I wasn’t too bad on Sunday to be honest, a bit sore but nothing to write home about, but after last night’s lesson which included more core work drills from the previous days, I went to bed in a lot of pain. I’ve had DOMS before, but nothing like this, it feels like I must’ve had a bloody hernia or something!

Of course, we training martial artists are the epitome of grace and always in control of our bodies and balance (no, really), which makes this morning’s performance of ‘How To Get Out Of Bed Like Bruce Lee’ even more atrocious… I slept reasonably well considering, only waking up a few times when I rolled over and when the dog decided he wanted a night-time jaunt around the garden to relieve himself. When the alarm went off though, I found I couldn’t actually sit up.

No matter how hard I tried I could not lift myself off the bed, and lay there for a few minutes wondering if this is what it’s going to be like when I’m eighty. Then, using my wonderfully logical brain and my love of applied physics, I came up with a plan:

  1. Lift knees
  2. Drop knees to side to rotate body
  3. Drop legs off side of bed to rotate into seated position
  4. Stand up and face the day knowing I AM MAN

What happened though was something     quite different. The bed had been shifted about 6-8 inches to my side of the room to accommodate the dog’s bed on the other side (so he doesn’t go off to make friends with the cats in the middle of the night and end up with a face full of claws), and as I hitched my knees up and rolled onto my side two things happened. 1) I fell off the bed. 2) I got wedged between the wall and the bed. I was barely conscious at this point, and the confusion of finding myself suspended above the floor in total darkness left me a bit bemused, but I figured it out eventually. I just couldn’t figure out how to get down. I couldn’t struggle or twist to get myself unstuck because it hurt so much, and I remember a tremendous sense of shame at having got myself stuck. Kinda like a ship in a bottle – how did it get there??

Eventually I wriggled myself free and slumped to the floor, unobserved and pride intact! I’m still not sure how it happened really, it was one of those only-just-awake things where you’re not sure if it really happened or not. Suffice to say, I’m installing some kind of airplane-style escape chute at the nearest opportunity.

Fail?

Creating A Human Panda (Man-da?)

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I woke up this morning in pain, pain around both of my eyes. Last night I managed to not only get my first partial black eye, but to go one better and give myself two black eyes.

I’d like to say my first came with some kind of fantastical tale of martial arts bravery, but it’d be a great big lie. No, instead the first bruises came (to my good eye) before I’d even got in the Dojang. I was chatting to my instructor as we were taking our kit bags out of the cars, and had forgotten that my boot door has a tendency to slip down a bit, especially when there’s a winter hurricane happening as there was last night. I was distracted, the light was dim, etc. etc. Basically I turned without looking (you’d think I’d have learned better by now with my training in the dojang) and caught my eye on the door. Ouch. Just as I was told that we’d have at least two new students starting that evening, what a great impression that would give, a student coming in holding a bruised eye before any kind of training even started!

I managed to get through the normal lesson unscathed and was trusted enough to take one of the new guys for the evening, showing him the ropes and trying to explain the ettiquette, and trying to make sure I could do everything asked of me. There’s not much point in demonstrating a technique if you can’t do it yourself. I think in some ways it helped me to be honest, the modicum of pressure kept my standard pleasingly high. We did some work last week on our kicking, building stronger and higher tollyo chagis, and it’s already paying dividends. My hips tend to be very tight when kicking, but yesterday I was able to go straight to head height and to the best of my knowledge, lock them out (hopefully!). The latest form I need to know, Pyung Ahn Sa Dan, is coming along nicely too. At the very least it feels stronger than some of my previous hyung have.

After the normal lesson we had one of the fortnightly training sessions for the competition team. The theme of the year so far with regards to training has been stripping everything back down to basics, and the same’s happening with our sparring. Most of us who compete have a style which has been built and adapted since we first started, which means there are some pretty fundamental problems inherent in the way we fight, so this too has been torn down and is being rebuilt, and with great results. I think nearly all of us are feeling at least some kind of benefit. Anyway, back to my tale of shiners. One of the drills we worked last night was building a decent backfist strike and one of the drills was reflex and response building, one person throwing a quick backfist to the head, the other covering up with a decent reverse guard or just plain getting the hell out of the way! This moved on to random timing, as opposed to the ‘one-for-one’ patterns we’d started building up the speed with. At one point my training partner (who happened to be my brother and I’m sure took no satisfaction from it) and I both chose the same moment to blitz and dive forward. My fist was slower, there’s no excuse, and the penalty was a fist in the eye which wasn’t softened any by my own diving in at the same time. It was my bad eye* this time, so I wasn’t overly concerned, but it meant I had to haul myself off the mat after being unceremoniously dropped.

I had the good common sense to get something cold on them when I got home, so thankfully all that remains in the way of evidence of last night’s misadventures are small bruise to the corner of my eye socket on the ‘boot’ side, and a couple of blood blisters/bruises on my eyelids coupled with a bit of swelling on the ‘fist’ side.

Off on a total tangent, here’s yet another song which has been on pretty much constant repeat in my car over the weekend. I’ll certainly be looking out for a studio album.

Glamour Of The Kill – Rise From Your Grave
[youtube DMjvDCXC4JM]

*bad eye – I have a condition called Amblyopia in my right eye. It doesn’t affect me in day-to-day life, but it means I’ll never be able to do some things, like fly a jet fighter. It’s very hard to describe what it’s like to someone with 20-20 vision, but here’s the closest way I’ve found. Look at this page and notice how you can see things in your peripheral vision, maybe a mug or picture or something. You can see they’re there, you can see the shape and colour, but you can’t see any detail. That’s what it’s like over my entire right eye, even where I’m focusing. Unfortunately there’s no fix. I’ve never known any different, so it doesn’t really bother me, but there’s times when I wish I knew what it was like to see through a pair of normal eyes.

Oh, C’mon!

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Ever had one of those days? For me yesterday it was one of those evenings.

Tuesday nights are training nights, so after work once I’ve fed the various animals I start to get myself ready and get all my gear together. When I got home though I forgot that the cats had no meat left, just biscuits, and I had forgotten to buy any more at lunchtime. It might not sound like that big a deal, but in my house not giving the cats their tea at precisely 5.30pm is tantamount to heresy, and if there was a ducking stool available, I’d have been on it. I’m lucky they didn’t eat me to be honest.

The first calamity over with, I popped upstairs to get out of my work clothes and into something a bit more comfortable, a task which has become even more satisfying this week since the purchase of some new work shoes which seem to be made of plate steel or something equally as rigid. Size 11 my arse. As I put my jeans on I noticed something was a bit different, something was wrong – the buckle piece from my belt was gone. It must have fallen off I suppose, but it meant an evening of constantly hoiking my trousers up to somewhere less explicit.

Naturally I’d forgotten to put my dobok (translation available on the new teminology page!) out to dry during the day, so the neighbours kindly agreed to tumble dry it for me. I popped in to pick it up on my way past, and the handle broke of the tumble dryer. Much fiddling about with a screwdriver later, the dryer had relented and given in to good old-fashioned brute force and I had everything I needed for the evening (except of course my water, I forgot to fill the bottle and had to resort to one of the extortionate machines at the leisure centre).

Given the way the evening was going I was pleasantly surprised to arrive in one piece with no incidents on the way. I’ve recently replaced my car stereo which got stolen back last summer (thanks Rob) , so the novelty of having music on the move again is still in full effect. I sat in the car park to listen to the end of a particularly loud track (Crossbreed – Saints Of Grey if you must know), got out and got my bags from the boot of the car. I don’t know if you’re like me, but I have a mental checklist whenever I go anywhere to make sure I have the necessities, so I went through it.

Phone? – check, wallet? – check, keys?….. keys? Oh Crap.

Yes, being the absolute genius I am I managed to leave them in the ignition and lock the doors. After a few seconds of panic I remembered the boot was still unlocked, and so began the unceremonious task of climbing in the back of the car, flattening the back seats down, hanging between the front seats and desperately grasping for the keys.  Luckily I’d had some practise here, as a couple of weeks previous I’d done something similar and had to create the boot manoeuvre when I parked too close to a concrete pillar in a very busy multi-storey car park, much to the bemusement and amusement of the passing shoppers.

I’m pleased to report that training went without incident, I half expected my leg to fall off or something. Instead it just felt like it as we did lots of very slow, very deliberate kicking drills. There’s kickboxing training tonight which is great additional fitness work for me, I just hope the build-up to it is less eventful.