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.

As of the beginning of the latest session, my friend Jay has started studying at our kwoon. If you enjoyed the stuff I was posting back when I was a beginner student, you should check out his blog, as he’s doing very similar things there.

It takes about a year, minimum, in Lung Shou Pai kung fu to go from getting your black belt to testing for your second degree. The second degree test is, in some ways, less strenuous than the first. It’s less rigorously defined, for one thing. You aren’t called on to demonstrate everything you’ve ever learned. You demo everything the lower-ranking classes have been working on, plus all the forms that you’ve learned in your time as a black belt student. For me, that meant eight levels of colored-belt material, plus Ssu Wang (the first black belt empty hand form), the chain whip, and the kwan dao. Plus an endurance test and a 3-man pyramid sparring test.

I did well on everything. I didn’t work as hard preparing for this test as I’d planned, but I felt like that ended up being a good thing. My endurance was never an issue, my familiarity with my material was as good as I could’ve wanted, and my sparring felt pretty acceptable, even if I did get a shiner. I always get hit in the left eye. I should probably do something about that.

I’ve got two years of training before I get tested again. That one will be another serious, comprehensive examination, but now that I can relax and breathe again I have a lot of stuff I want to work on. Tai chi, for instance. Chin na, too. During a break from testing, Sigung showed us some chin na applications that did things I hadn’t even considered.  I’d like to put in some work toward developing my sparring using more forms applications so that my fighting is concretely kung fu, not kickboxing.  I want to do some documentation on some of our higher-level material. I’m looking forward to the change in pace.

Also, I need to get my new certificate framed.

My wife Deirdra is about to start her second Yoga Teacher Training program, detailed here.  She’s already certified in Vinyasa yoga, but she’s branching out into Anusara as well.

As you can guess, a fight at my house looks exactly like this:

Starting next weekend, I’ll be teaching private lessons at my kung fu school.

One of our other black belts has recently decided to take some time off, so we were one instructor short and there’s a test coming up soon, meaning that there were students who want private lessons but not enough hours to go around.  Hopefully I’ll be able to help take up the slack.

I’ll have my own key to the school so I can open it for teaching, plus the privilege of working out there anytime.  I’ll get a cut of the profits from the lessons, but it’s not really a lot of money.  I’m doing it for the teaching experience and because I honestly enjoy doing it.  I’m really looking forward to this.

Last week was my birthday.  I’m sure my instructor didn’t intend it as such, but I’m considering this my present:  on the thirtieth anniversary of my birth, we finally started working on a basic tai chi form.  It’s not the actual Li family set, not yet.  First we learn a simple series that’s repeated several times on the left, transitions to the right, then repeats several times on that side.  We get to practice that set as we learn the principles and the building blocks before we move on to learning the real deal.  Even so, it’s really great to be moving into something internal.

We left Jackson for the tournament on Thursday evening around 6pm. There were four of us, Billy, Katie, Jason, and myself. We tried pretty hard to get other students from our school to go, but everybody else who was interested couldn’t make the time or didn’t have the money. Any more people and we would’ve needed to take another car, maybe gotten another hotel room.

We stopped in Monroe for dinner, took a wrong exit and ended up wasting about an hour trying to find a decent place to eat. Once we got back on the road we made good time and pulled into the parking lot of our hotel in Plano at 1:30am, just about the time I’d expected.

Last time I went to Taiji Legacy, the hotel for the tournament was a La Quinta surrounded by a light industry wasteland. There was a Steak and Ale and a Bennigan’s just one street over, within walking distance, but nothing else around except office parks, mini-storage, factories, concrete and asphalt. Not even a convenience store. I hoped that the Holiday Inn we were given for this year’s tournament would have a few more amenities nearby, but it turned out to be right next door to the La Quinta. And Bennigan’s. Nothing was open after midnight anyway.

We checked in to the hotel, passed out, and rose early on Friday. Billy and Katie both had a 13-position Wu Hao Taiji seminar scheduled to start at 10am and we all had to register beforehand, so there was no time to waste. The hotel breakfast spread wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t fantastic, either. The cinnamon rolls were good, but I missed the waffle bar over at the La Quinta. I figured it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to sneak over for waffles and settled for cereal and a warm Cinnabon.

It was still early, so there wasn’t much of a crowd yet, probably only forty people milling around in the hotel lobby eating breakfast, watching CNN on the big television, and lining up to register. I think all of us bought at least one Taiji Legacy 2007 t-shirt while we waited, and Jason and I made friends with some taiji guys from Oklahoma City who were behind us in line.

Billy and Katie disappeared into the big hotel ballroom for their seminar, leaving Jason and me to find some way to entertain ourselves. We went for a walk to try to find some redeeming feature nearby, but the neighborhood proved to be even more dismal and sparse by the light of day and the Texas heat made it almost unbearable. We ended up back in the hotel room practicing a Lung Shou Pai two-man set that we started refining back before I had problems with my knee.

Around 11:30, Billy came back from his seminar and showed us the Wu Hao 13 he’d learned. I took the same seminar in 2004, so I was able to follow along a little, and then Jason and I gave him a refresher on the two-man set while we waited for Katie. She has more experience with taiji than the rest of us do, so she’d elected to stay for the next Wu Hao seminar as well, the 24-move.

By this time we were all getting hungry, so we left the room to head back downstairs and meet Katie when she finished up her seminar to grab some lunch. We ran into the guys from Oklahoma and some friends they’d made, a guy from Baltimore (if I remember correctly) who studies taiji at a Shaolin-do school and a couple of ladies from Florida who study Choy Lay Fut and Liu He Ba Fa, so a whole big group of us walked over to Bennigan’s.

After lunch, Billy was signed up for a seminar to learn a simplified version of Tong Bei Quan, a Shaolin form. Jason and I were pretty tired of just standing around while everybody else got to learn new stuff, so we decided to throw in with Billy and take a class from a Shaolin monk. How often do you get to do that? It meant we needed to buy an extra seminar ticket to still make all the classes we’d planned, but we figured it was worth it and we turned out to be right.

The seminar was taught by Shi Yan Feng, who was scheduled to teach a Damo Straight Sword class in 2004 but had to cancel at the last minute. I’m glad I took the opportunity to work with him this time. I got to take a Shaolin class from another monk, Shi Xing Wei, while Deirdra and I were in Las Vegas for the wedding, so I had an idea of what to expect, but I didn’t know anything about the actual form we’d be learning. He started by teaching us the applications for several of the individual sections and had us partner up to practice them, then quickly moved on to teach us the form itself.

It was probably only twenty five moves or so, depending on how you count it, but the basic foundations are slightly different from Lung Shou Pai so there was a great many little corrections that I had to make on nearly every move. It was a hard workout, drilling over and over just to burn in the gross movements in only ninety minutes. By the end of it, I was drenched in sweat, but I felt pleased because Yan Feng and his students who helped teach us praised my technique and the speed at which I learned several times.

After Tong Bei Quan, Billy stayed for Shi Yan Feng’s next seminar on Shaolin Eagle Form while Jason and I met up with Katie. She’d decided to take a class on Taiji Sticky Hands and we went outside to show each other the stuff we’d learned. After half an hour in the heat, we had to seek refuge inside again. By now the atmosphere in the seminar room was pretty relaxed and there were plenty of spectators, so we found some seats to watch the end of the class on Eagle.

Next for me was a seminar with Gene Ching of Kungfu Magazine that focused on writing about martial arts and writing as compared to martial arts. I have a ton of notes from this seminar that I still haven’t gone back and reviewed, but it was fascinating and thought-provoking.

Right after that I had two back-to-back seminars with John Wang on Shuai Chiao.  The first covered entry, the methods used to close the distance with an opponent in order to grapple and control him.  We covered six different entries based on how you want to engage.  The second seminar covered a principle called Butterfly Hands, a set of techniques used to counter an opponent’s attacks and tie up his arms so you can throw him.  It was all really fantastic stuff, and my only regret is that we didn’t get any of it on video.  Billy’s been emailing with Mr. Wang, though, and he may have a line on a DVD.

Four seminars in one day was exhausting, so we headed back to the room.  After a quick shower, I realized I was starving.  It was nearly eleven and I hadn’t eaten since lunch .  On top of that, we’d done hours of heavy exercise.  I convinced Billy and Jason to ride with me to get some food and we drove around until we found a McDonalds, about the only thing open.  Rather than eating there, we grabbed our food to go and took it back to eat in the hotel lobby.  The only other people still moving was a group of about fifteen Chinese guys ranging from middle-aged to frickin-ancient.  They were laughing and talking and showed no signs that they were planning on going to bed anytime soon, though I’m fairly certain that most of them were scheduled to appear in the Masters Demo the following morning.  I’m sure the bourbon and scotch they were drinking out of hotel paper cups probably helped them sleep, though.  We would’ve tried to eavesdrop, but none of us speak Chinese anyway so it wouldn’t have done us much good.

Finally we went back upstairs to crash.  The first day was great, but we still had another day and a half of competitions and seminars ahead of us.

My instructor was out of town last Thursday, so the other black belt students and I got to teach some of the classes that he usually leads. We’re accustomed to trading off with the Intermediate and Advanced classes, but this time I also got to teach the Beginner level class, which is nearly three times the size of the higher levels.

I had a lot of fun, and several people stopped to thank me for teaching or tell me I did a good job. I’m looking forward to more opportunities to teach. I think it suits me.

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