Earlier this month we started learning the Lung Shou Pai wooden dummy form. In our style we use a Choy Lay Fut style dummy, a ching jong, rather than the Wing Chun style muk jong. The primary difference is the upper arm is on a pivot inside the body and is held in place with a spring, so when you pull it down, it pops back up. We’ve gotten some plans and I hope to start building my own soon, possibly as early as this weekend.

I’ve also started picking up our straight sword form from a couple of the other black belt students. That’s progressing especially slowly since I have to catch them outside of class to get the next few moves, then practice on my own. It may be the only way I’ll get to learn it, though, since we may not roll back around to it in class for years.

If all goes well, I’ll start really preparing for my third degree test one year from now. I’m already ramping up toward that end, though. I’ve been wearing ankle weights in class, working with a kettlebell to develop strength and endurance, and eating lots of ice cream to build up my resistance to cold temperatures.

I finished up my physical therapy today.  I have one more follow-up appointment with my doctor next week, but he said if I’m feeling fine I can just cancel it rather than showing up.  I’ll wait until the last minute before deciding.  I’ve had some slight pain in my heel while running and walking hard, but I think it’s more a case of having to relearn how to distribute my weight properly than a real injury.

You know what’s funny?  About once a day since I got injured, I’ve had somebody jokingly ask me when I’m going to start practicing parkour again.  It was vastly hilarious while I was on crutches, deeply creative while was in a walking boot, meaningful and thought-provoking while I was working through physical therapy, and always witty and welcome humor.  Every time I heard it, I’d laugh and laugh.  Good times.  I’d even manage to suppress the desire to hit them with my cane.

The joke, you see, is that a lot of people seem to think that parkour itself is innately dangerous, superfluous, silly, stupid, or for some other reason a pastime that I should’ve known better about.  It’s a bitingly acerbic way to say “I told you so,” or more accurately, “I disapproved of the whole endeavor from the beginning and look what it got you.”  Also “Surely you’re going to give up this foolish notion now, right?”

So I’m going to say it once more:  I got hurt because a waist-high concrete wall broke into pieces under my hands.  I didn’t fall off anything: I was at ground level.  I didn’t screw up a technique or fumble a landing.  A chunk of rock the size of a breadbox landed on my leg.  I can’t recall anybody anywhere warning me about that part.  I’m pretty sure that has very little to do with parkour.

So will I go back to parkour?  I don’t know.  I’m going to focus on kung fu for now, and possibly running.  I want to get back to practicing solidly and maybe start preparing to compete at next year’s Taiji Legacy.  I’d love to run a 5K, just to demonstrate to myself that I’ve recovered enough to manage it.

I can honestly say, though, that even if I never again attempt a monkey vault or a cat leap, it won’t be because I got hurt.  It won’t be because of any of the smirking jokers who implied that I brought my injury on myself.  It won’t be because somebody “told me so.”

While I hate that I got injured, while I regret the pain for myself and my wife and friends, while I begrudge the time and money that my recovery has cost, I don’t for one second regret that I tried.  I found something I was interested in and decided to pursue it.  I believed and continue to believe that I’m physically and mentally capable of parkour, kung fu, hang gliding, scuba diving, snowboarding, and anything else I find myself wanting to do.  Anybody who wants to sit on the couch and sneer about it can go hang.  If I get hurt, I’ll take my lumps without complaint, and I’ll show my scars to anybody who wants to see them.

And if I do start training parkour again, every time I jump or vault or roll, I’ll be thinking about all those jerks who smirked “When are you going to start again?”  Screw you, buddy.  I never stopped.

Just in time for my birthday, I got an email from USA Chin Woo announcing the dates for next year’s Taiji Legacy, newly renamed as The Legends of Kung Fu.  Mark your calendars for July 17-19 and start practicing.  I’ll see you there.

I’m doing two sessions of physical therapy a week now, mostly strength and mobility stuff. One-leg presses to redevelop and retrain the damage to the big muscles. Balancing on only my injured ankle on a squishy foam block while throwing and catching a medicine ball to force the little stabilizer muscles to earn their keep. Toe raises. Ankle alphabets. Theraband pulls from every angle. Heelcord stretchs a dozen different ways, morning, noon, and night. And now tai chi.

If you’ve ever done any tai chi, you know how much ankle flexing, turning, and pulling is involved. My therapist signed off on it and I’m happy to get any kind of practice at all. Plus it really shows me where I am in my recovery.

I have about three weeks of therapy left. I may be able to return to class after that, I dunno. It feels like I’m palpably better every day. Yesterday I still had a little trouble with stairs. Today the stairs at work were pain-free. One of my friends at kung fu was surprised to see how quickly I’m bouncing back. “You sure heal fast,” he said.

“I get lots of practice.”

I don’t usually use cut tags, but these photos of my leg in varying stages of healing are a little gruesome.  The first photo was taken right after they removed the post-surgical bandages, so it’s a week healed at that point.  The most recent one is how it looks now.  There are no photos of the injury before surgery.  As I lay in the emergency room, Billy offered to take some for me, but I discovered that I deeply believe that no man should have to look upon his own bones.  I declined.

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I’m completely off crutches. I can walk without the boot, but it’s slow and uncomfortable and my foot is still really swollen, so I stick with the boot most of the time. I don’t really need the cane, but it takes my weight off the injured leg so it makes things easier and I figure it’s probably a good idea to reduce the amount of stress it has to bear, at least until the wound is completely healed.

I’m healing well. I can walk on my injured leg now, albeit slowly and primarily with the big black space boot. I could probably manage walking without it if not for the swelling that prevents me from flexing my ankle much.

I’m tired of crutches. It’s been startling to discover just how much using them wears me out. Yesterday we went to refill some prescriptions and after crutching to and from the store, I had to beg off running other errands just because of exhaustion. I’m not quite healed enough to leave them behind, but I think next week I’ll try just using a cane for any short stretches and only use the crutches for long distances. I move really slowly without them anyway.

Yesterday morning a bunch of us planned to get together and make our first real foray into parkour training. While sitting around waiting for the others to show up, I jokingly posted to twitter: Waiting around for the other wannabe traceurs. On the menu: rolls, speed vaults, turn vaults, kongs, precision jumps, and emergency rooms.

Let me tell you, as I lay in the emergency room, the bone in my shin exposed to open air, that joke was hilarious.

I’m fine. It was a stupid fluke accident. I encountered a wall about waist high, put my hands on it, vaulted over it, and as I landed on the other side, the top tier of concrete blocks came free and landed on my left shin and foot. It looked and felt really, really bad. Luckily I was running with Billy. He sprinted back to where we’d left the cars, rushed me to the emergency room, saw to it that I got admitted right away, and called everybody who needed calling. He also waited throughout the day to make sure I was okay, then gave Deirdra a ride to get the things we needed for an overnight hospital stay. He was a real hero.

It turned out that it badly lacerated the flesh of my shin, did some minor damage to a tendon, but no harm to the bone. At the hospital they gave me a tetanus shot, antibiotics, painkillers, x-rays, and eventually put me under so they could clean out the wound and piece me back together. I spent the night and got released this morning with a keen pair of crutches and a nifty mug. I go back in a week so the doc can see how I’m healing and what needs doing next. It looks like I’ll be okay, in time. The doctors were very reassuring. I’ll probably be taking a few days off work to recuperate, but I’ll be online here and there.

I wanna thank Billy, Marg, John, Ashley, Michael, Sifu, Katie, and all the countless people who called, wrote, and offered to help. You guys are awesome. Most of all, I want to thank my wife. She made sure the doctors and nurses did their jobs, went to get me food when I was starving, sat up with me when I couldn’t sleep and needed painkillers, and generally made herself sick with worry and caregiving. She puts up with my stubbornness and without her, I’d be…well, I’d really rather not contemplate it. She hasn’t yet beat me up for getting myself hurt. I think that says it all.

I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour.” I may try it once and discover that it was a monumentally bad idea, that my hands can’t take it or my upper-body strength needs more work than I’m willing to do or I’m just not that into running, even with the extra stuff to add interest. I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour” because I don’t want to tell a bunch of people that I’m all about it on Thursday and then be over and past it by Tuesday. I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour” because as far as I can tell, there are no traceurs within an hour’s drive of here so there’s nobody for me to learn from. I’ll be relying on YouTube and an APK tutorial DVD and bootleg compilation videos and that might not be enough to keep me in it. I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour” because it might not take, and then I’m a quitter.

I kinda felt the same way when I started studying martial arts, though, and five years later I’m helping out with classes and I’m one of the top students at my school, just one more rank from being able to open my own kwoon, take on my own students, and further develop Lung Shou Pai by adding my own contributions.

I only have one regret about kung fu: I wish I’d started sooner. If I had started studying when I moved to Jackson, I’d already have my master rank by now.

I’ve been talking to some other people about parkour and gauging the level of interest. I know that things like this are easier when you have training partners, and if I end up faceplanting into a wall I want somebody nearby to drag me to an emergency room. Half a dozen guys have already said they’d like to give it a shot. We have all kinds: guys from my kwoon, a skateboarder, a gymnast, guys with no experience at all.

My training DVD is on the way. I’ve been pulling technique tutorials from YouTube to put on my phone for easy field references. I’m looking into getting Jump London and Jump Britain as inspiration, even though there’s no way I’m going to be doing any roofwork.

The plan right now is to get all the wannabe-traceurs together, watch the DVD, then go out to a playground and start working on the basics. The fundamental parkour roll is very similar to a breakfall that we practice in Lung Shou Pai, so I’ve got a headstart there. I expect that before long, one of us will hurt ourselves. I expect it’ll turn into a lot more conditioning and fundamentals drilling than you’d expect from watching compilation videos. I expect it’ll be a lot more work than it seems. I may quit.

Right now, though, I’m getting into parkour. I hope that before long I find myself wishing I’d started sooner.

After hearing exhaustively about it on MacBreak Weekly for week after week, I finally broke down and got a twitter account.  I decided that I’d give it 48 hours and if I wasn’t completely engaged, I’d quit.  I think that within about 12 hours, Deirdra was already annoyed with my incessant checking on my phone.

I’ve found a decent iPhone-enabled webclient and I’m using Twitteriffic on my Macs, but I haven’t found anything worthwhile for Linux yet.  gTwitter sucks.  Since I don’t want to have to compile anything or install a gazillion dependencies, I’m probably going to have to resort to just using a webclient.  Any recommendations?

Also:  OpenID logins are broken.  I’m not sure why, but it’s resisted all attempts at troubleshooting.  Since WP 2.5 is out now, I’ll probably just migrate to a fresh install of that rather than spending more time trying to fix it on an older version.  Look for that soon.