Posted 10:02 PM by spitgirl
BRUISE APPEAL

I'm cuter when I'm hurt, right? At least, I hope that's true, because I'm currently incredibly bruised. In fact, I hope the slight dings I got in my face and head don't turn into bruises, but there's pretty much 100% of a chance that I'll get some nice bruises on my shins.

I did a double workout today because I felt so darned bad that I didn't work out much over the weekend except for the four mile round trip hike I took with my guitar strapped to my back yesterday. The 4pm class was spent doing fun warm-ups, including low shoot and high shoot exercises and a number of rolls (my soft rolls are STILL going "thump, kathunk, kathunk"), and then we started working 16-step, which are our partner exercises. I got the only other brown belt in the class, Snehal, who is a bear of a sweet guy. So imagine about 6', 6'1", and... bearish. Right. So I asked him to teach me the carpet roll/rice thresher throws, which I hadn't had the pleasure of learning yet.

If you haven't learned the pleasure of a rice thresher or a carpet roll throw, just imagine your attacker rolling from your waist to the ground. Now imagine you're me and you're trying to learn this on Snehal. I think I needed another half an hour on that to even begin learning.

So after working with some people on wrist techniques, we bowed out... and that's when the real fun began.

So, as you can see from yesterday's blog, my bruise count was about four - one on the left shoulder, two on the right knee, one on the lower shin that was starting to go away. Let's up that to... one HUGE bruise on the right shin, two bruises on the knees, one on the left shoulder, and a face that had been accidentally kicked during matwork.

Speaking of matwork, we started with four rounds of matwork. Matwork, for us, is wrestling. Lots of wrestling. It's very fun, and the only rule is that you can't break anything, and the round ends when the other person taps out. (Hankido is nice and uncomplicated in that way. No points! Just who wins and who doesn't.) I worked with two 2-dan black belts, one of which was very nice and lectured me while we were working, and the other of which was also very nice and clocked me accidentally while putting me in an arm bar and smooshed my face against her stomach. I also did matwork with two of the three red belts that were there that day.

We then did two rounds of judo-style throws rondori. If there are four things that I'm really bad at, it's... throws, throws, throws, and everything else. Well, the instructions were "choose someone your own size." Jorge chose me. Now Jorge is more bear-ish than Snehal, probably due to the beard. But yes. I retreated the whole time - it was the first time I'd done anything like this, and the last thing I wanted to do was to have 200 lbs of black belt land on me. I think he was the one whose heel accidentally made contact with my shin. But I managed to throw him at least once. Then I got George. George is nice, but he's throws-happy. And I suck. Between the two, I think I got thrown maybe three or four times in a one minute round. Sigh.

Well, then we had more 16-step, and I worked with a bunch of people just on balance breaks. I needed to work balance breaks some more, but it was definitely more technique-based than the white belt that just about wrenched my arm off trying to get me to do an air fall at about my head level. That's what I get for choosing someone who's 6'3" as my partner.

Anyhow, I'm significantly more dinged up, but I'm going to ice up and start doing homework.