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.