On Friday, one of the new students had a little party at her house and invited all the other folks from our kwoon. There was a pretty good turnout and lots of great food. I ended up spending most of the evening outside sucking down secondhand smoke and talking about video games, standup comics, and old kung fu movies. It was a blast. I hate that I didn’t get to hang out with more of the folks there, but it was really a lot of fun, so I may host a similar get-together if nobody else does.

Saturday morning I went up to the school to work out for a couple of hours. I spent some bag time smoothing out my crescent kicks, especially the spinning ones, then worked on spinning backfists and the followups from Yun Tung. Just as I suspected, I was completely off balance at first, but I worked out the kinks pretty quickly. I’m pretty satisfied with that strike now. Finally.

After looking at it from every angle in the mirrors, I realized that my forward stance isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was. It just feels like my hip is way out of alignment. I still have to pay close attention to it so I make sure my straightened knee is turned down so that the leg locks out correctly and that hip pushes forward, but I’m much better off than I though. There’s a kind of relief about that. For a while, I thought I’d never get that stance right.

I worked all my forms several times and helped out a couple of the other guys with Chen Ch’eng. I got some clarifications on fiddly details, like where to chamber for the double backwards dragon claw strike at the end of Set 2. All in all, it was a very productive workout.

I also managed to push myself to work forms this morning as soon as I woke up. I always feel good when I get some exercise first thing in the morning, and the extra practice will pay off, I’m sure. I’m slowly slowly making progress with learning the B side of Longfist Shadow Boxing. I hope to have a good handle on it by…oh, crap, I just realized that the next Black Belt Club class is a week from today. Unless I’m mistaken, we’re going to be working Longfist Shadow Boxing as a two-man set, which means I really ought to know it better than I do. I’m going to have to buckle down and really learn it this week so that I don’t hold up class. Not only that, but the tournament in Dallas is this weekend. Looks like it’s going to be a banner week for kung fu.

Addendum:

I forgot to mention that Deirdra corrected my spelling of diaphragm in my previous post and offered to help me with some exercises she’s picked up from longtime vocal and yoga training. I’m looking forward to that, and hopefully one day we’ll get around to doing some yoga together.

Also, I had a lot of stuff I wanted to work on at practice Saturday that I just couldn’t remember. I need to go back to keeping a list of techniques that need work. I don’t like posting a list of stuff at the end of each entry, though. This needs addressing.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising considering the length of my last entry, but I left a couple of things out. One of the new white belts, Heather, is having a potluck and movie night for the kwoon as a way to get to know some of the other students. I think this is a really fantastic idea, and I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll probably have to skip out after supper when the movie-watching starts because I already had plans to go see The Bourne Supremacy, but one of the reasons that I like my school so much is that so many of the folks involved seem cool and I’d like to get to know them better. I’ll probably be making sausage/cream cheese/Rotel dip. Mmmm.

So what if I don’t know how to use it?

Also, I got a dao, a Chinese broadsword. At this rate, I’m going to need a sword rack. I’ll also need some, y’know, instruction in how to use a sword, but let’s not get distracted by details.

So I’ve been saying for weeks now that I wanted to get together with Rob and work through some of the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu stuff, we’ve just never gotten around to it until now. He came over and we went through all the techniques in the first section of his GJJ manual. Well, not all the techniques. A couple of them were things like sidekicks that we’re intimately familiar with already, or things that we’ve learned in kung fu to do in a different manner, like blocking a punch.

We worked for an hour and a half or so, and aside from some nasty rugburn, it was a blast. The techniques are really fun and you can instantly tell when you’re doing it right. If it’s wrong, your partner just kinda sits there. If it’s right, it doesn’t matter what he does, because you’re gonna pull it off. I’ve watched some of the Gracie videos but until you actually work the techniques, you don’t understand how solid they are. You see these guys doing takedowns and hip throws and it looks really impressive, but until you flip somebody over your hip and take them to the floor, you just don’t grasp how strong the technique is.

We did some takedowns and throws, escapes from the mount and from the guard, some headlock escapes, some submissions, a buncha stuff. We didn’t get to do any sparring or anything, but considering the carpetburn, that’s probably for the best. Hopefully we’ll do some next time.