Posted 11:44 PM by spitgirl
WINDING DOWN

Well, I have a -really- good excuse for not blogging last night. I'm going to separate yesterday's post from today's post by writing tonight first and then last night's so that it'll look like I did post (but not really, of course). Tonight was another evening in reviews week, and it was pretty amusing to see different takes on it. For Dr. Ur's class, he had me warm up the class again (I love it! I really do!), so I set up lanes of different hankido exercises, one of falls, one of rolls, one of throws fit-ins, and one of kicks and hand strikes, and had the class go through it three times to warm us up. During the whole time I was trying to prepare the white belts for what they could expect from the test, and basically lectured as we went through different elements of the test.

After some kicks, some stretching and some fast falling, and after then... Dr. Ur had us go through some kick combos, some basic blocks, went over some falls, and just reviewed things overall. We worked some basic wrist techniques as well. Since Dr. Ur had a little bit of a cold, he took it easy on us - or maybe it was that he saw how hard I worked the class at the beginning that he took some pity on us.

The evening class was interesting - Laura ran us through our paces, did an interesting abs workout, and then split us into groups. The browns and reds were working bags (though I espied the blues and greens working on turning kicks and turning crescent and spin heel kick, arrgh) and then were doing flying kicks. Thankfully, I had all my pads with me, so I went at it against the heavy bag. Yes, I think I need more work on the bags as well, since I don't really conceptually understand what's going on with the bag anyway.

At the end of the two workouts, I was so exhausted that I sat back in my office, almost comatose... well, okay, maybe I was exaggerating a little bit, but I was pretty tired.

THE DEMO OF TIP TESTING

Yesterday, before tip testing, Miss Aloi had us doing some fairly strenuous conditioning work. This included deep stretching, lots of pushups (a la Dr. Link's 21-pushups workout), and other fairly fun (but painful) stuff like sitting against the wall, sitting against the wall while having our heels off the ground, sitting against the wall with our legs open, heels off the ground, etc. My legs were pretty toast after that, but I dutifully practiced palgae #1. Jerry went ahead and tip tested, but I was a little chicken and had to work on it a little more, even though I pretty much know it.

Tuesday evening, however, was definitely the highlight. I showed up early to the martial arts room after eating some sushi with Lucille (hiiii). Mike Shea's taekwondo class, the greens and blues, were there stretching, ostensibly after a half an hour warmup, and even though he was leading, he made a beeline for me, even forgetting that he was in the middle of leading stretches. Well, he asked me to dress out, so I hooked myself up with my new uniform (YAY! New uniform!), tied brown, and helped him teach the one-steps. Now, understand, I don't know the one-steps, but Mike just wanted me to teach them how to make the one-steps effective.

Not surprisingly, the one-steps that I was helping to teach were very reminiscent of 16-steps #1 and #2. Yes, the wrist material really helped, and I have, after all, been doing 16-steps for a year and a half now. You'd figure I'd know a little something about them. (Okay, after this semester maybe not. But still.)

So after I worked for about half an hour with them, just helping them get their form and figuring out Dr. Ur's somewhat cryptic notes, it was time to suit up and move mats. Laura, Steve, Mike Ashley, Victor, Kay, George and I hauled twelve mats out to Ida Sproul and set them up just in time for our demo. And I have to say, our demo ROCKED. It was a little small - maybe twenty people there - but we were loud, wushu was not, we were brutal, wushu was pretty, we showed pain, wushu showed flexibility. Though we ended up doing much more of the acrobatic stuff - we demonstrated falls, rolls, 16-steps, knife techniques, cane techniques, and then some self-defense.

Afterwards, we watched wushu for a while and then started moving mats. After the mats were moved, I asked the TKD black belts still on the mat after the last workout if I could work a couple of kicks, and I worked on spin heel/spin hook kick for a little while. Garth, one of the black belts in TKD, started helping me fix my kick, but it's still messed up. Sigh. MESSED UP! Must practice harder. Must practice more. Must wait for skin to grow back on the ball of my foot so that I can turn nicer.