Posted 12:50 AM by spitgirl
BRUISE PATROL

Me: "So, now's the time to play the game: 'Guess how Elaine got that bruise!'"
Dave: "Oooh."
Paul: "Paul Twohey!"
Me: "Are you sure you gave me that bruise?"
Paul: "No, but it's probably a pretty good guess."

Well, so one thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that I got this really incredible two inch bruise, about the width of a Sharpie marker, on the inside of my forearm. Today's bruise was much more impressive - for warm up we were playing tag, and Steve Brown reached down to tag my shin, which caused both my feet to fly up (don't ask me HOW) as I was face-down. My knee made a nice little thwacking sound on the wood outside of the birm that holds the mat in. It was tender to the touch the whole next three hours, but isn't now, for some reason. I'm still going to ice it, though.

After a nice warm up of rolls and falls, we worked some throws from the ground and then throws from chairs. I had Becca, a white belt I'd really never seen before, as my partner for the first, and then Paul and then Chris, the high school white belt, as my partners for the latter. It was really quite interesting to experiment with what it would be like sitting down or on the ground and trying to control the person. Paul and I worked out a really interesting thing about chairs - you can use both of your legs and the stationary chair to your advantage by hooking in on a near leg with one and pushing the groin muscle or the inner knee with the other while tweaking their wrist.

So yeah. Second workout was a lot of lines and then rolls across the room (ouchie, ouchie, bad bruise on knee) and then we got into sweeps, reaps, and their counterthrows. I got to work my sweeps a lot with a couple of different people (Sarah, Jerry), just remembering the throw. Then we got paired into working the counter to the sweep (just another sweep) and then a counter to the counter to the sweep, which was some kind of thrusting hip throw. It looked really cool.

We worked reaps - I got lots of reps and individual attention from Kevin, who helped me a lot with my reap. (Thanks, Kev!) We went from the reap to a counterthrow from the reap, which I just couldn't get on Sam. I tried! I really did! I almost took his knee out! I'm sorry!

Afterwards, a bunch of us went climbing at Ironworks. I took an old friend of mine, known as mconst, to the gym with me and taught him how to belay, then climbed with him until the gym closed at 10. Went for food (FUN fun fun) and then came straight home, pretty much.