Last night’s BJJ class was a lot of sparring drills. Normally we drill a chain of moves for a while and then spar from the knees the rest of the night.
Last night had a takedown drill: you “win” if you can lift your opponent’s leg or if you get double underhooks. After that we did a guard pass/sweep drill. Win, you stay in. I was trying to pass a purple belt’s guard, thought I just about had it, then he swept me. I must have landed funny, because it hurt immediately. I tried stretching for a little bit, then went back in (trying to pass a black belt), and of course got swept. I was done for the night.
I figured I wouldn’t be able to make it in to work today, so I slept in a bit. I picked a local chiropractor almost by random, as the last chiropractor I went to is around 25 minutes away. At the appointment this morning we naturally discussed how I came to be injured. So I told him about BJJ. And he says, “Oh, I’m friends with a guy who trains there. Do you know ____?”
My response? “He’s the !&*@# who did this to me!” Okay, I didn’t speak in punctuation, and I didn’t even say any naughty words. The sweep was clean, and I’m still befuddled as to how exactly it caused my back to do this. But I’m still kind of boggling at the coincidence, as I don’t live in a particularly small town.
I’m doing much better tonight than last night, though transitioning from standing to sitting and vice versa is kind of tough, and doing something like tying shoes is almost beyond my capabilities. Of course, I still went in to teach TKD tonight.
BJJ, Health
I’m not usually much for reading biographies, but a really interesting series of blog posts came across my Google Reader recently. The blog site is called Body Recomposition, written by Lyle McDonald. He’s a fitness professional, who writes a bunch of things that are usually way more serious into the science of exercise and peak fitness than I can normally grok. But there are sometimes interesting tidbits that I can hopefully apply.
It turns out that he has been a near-Olympic class speed skater. This series is a fairly fascinating foray into the seamy underbelly of speed skating. I just wanted to type “seamy underbelly”, though it turns out that not everything is quite copacetic there. But the really interesting part to me is the psychology of someone pursuing a goal through significant obstacles. He spent five and a half years pursuing the goal, and never made the Olympic team. But he considers his pursuit a success. He figured from the start that he could live with failure, but he couldn’t live with never giving it a try.
The first installment in the series can be found at: No Regrets Part 1.
Fitness, Training
I’ve exchanged half a dozen emails with a young man who found my blog whilst searching for information on separated shoulders. His shoulder looks much like mine used to. His may not have been quite as bad as mine, but bad enough that he had surgery today.
Good luck with recovery, Matt!
Health
My wife thinks I’m nuts. There are several reasons for this, most of which I won’t go into here. But one of the primary reasons that she thinks I’m crazy is that I like to do martial arts in the first place. She can’t figure out why I’d choose to do an activity where I might get injured.
Considering that I have been injured a number of times, from my separated shoulder to broken toes to cracking skin, broken noses, and dislocated ribs, getting hurt hasn’t been a rare occurence. And that’s aside from the wrenched backs, sore hamstrings, bruises, and abrasions, and the other normal results of training. And on top of even that, working out hard at anything is difficult and tiring and painful even (especially?) when you’re doing things right.
I was thinking about this following class tonight. The beginner class struck a nerve. Most of the time I’ll do the complete warmup with the class, pushups and cardio and whatever else. So I’m doing the cardio part of the warmup: jumping jacks, then feet front and back with arms doing the jumping jack movements, then legs front and back doing reverse punches. Over half the class stopped to take a break as I was just getting going. Then pushups were lousy. There was a general lack of effort and just quitting rather than pushing to their personal limit. Believe me, they were nowhere near their limit.
So I was thinking about the black belts I train with. All of them are a bit nuts. We have 3 black belts who have had their hips replaced, and trained before and after surgery. Everybody trains through nicks and bumps and thinks nothing of it. It is just a part of what we are. And what we are is kind of crazy. Frankly, the best martial artists I’ve encountered have been even more nuts than I am.
So I think that anyone who seriously pursues martial arts needs to be a bit nuts. If you aren’t a bit nuts, you will quit, and most likely within the first year.
Here’s to being crazy!
Teaching, Training
A year ago, my instructor passed away from leukemia. We miss his presence, knowledge, and enthusiasm, and can never replace that.
The dojang, though, is still going strong. His widow has been running the dojang since then in an administrative position, and has been helping out as a secondary instructor. The classes are still going strong, run by dans of various ranks from first to seventh. Quality of instruction has remained high, even as there have been some changes.
Our school has been converging with the way our parent school teaches techniques, due to our Hapkido instructor, who trained for 30 years at the parent school, having taken over the Hapkido and children’s programs. His wife, a 3rd dan, is doing a lot of the operational work in the Tae Kwon Do program.
I’ve still been training and teaching regularly, despite my dearth of posts. We just came to an agreement on the sale of our house, the process of which has been my primary (lame) excuse for not posting. I’m planning on posting more regularly again. Right now, though, I’m off to BJJ training.
Hapkido, TKD, Teaching