Archive for June, 2006

I got to class tonight about 2.5 hours early as I car-pooled to work with another guy and he had to leave work early. So, I took advantage of it and did lots of kata before the kids class started. I knocked out about 25 or 30 kata in an hour. That’s not a horrible lot, but I was pretty well tired by the time I finished it.

Tonights class was just plain fun. We did “bunkai kata.” Basically it’s a drill we’ve done a couple times in shotokan classes, but not often. You do the kata responding to people actually attacking you. We were doing it with about 5 people surrounding us and were darn near combat speed. It was quite fun. I got busted in the mouth/eye a couple times, and I did the same to others. I also did my patented BBQG Big Toe stomp on a couple people.

Tuesday’s class was nothing special. Whole class was partner drills. Good workout, good sweat.

Tonight’s class wasn’t so good for me. My stomach was really upset. Not feeling good. I spent the class doing light kata while everyone else sparred. Hopefully next week I’ll feel better.

Ann and I just got back from watching the movie, The Break Up. What I wanna know is which one of my crazy friends video taped a typical night at the Kraft household and sent it to Vince Vaughn to make that movie. Holy crap did that movie hit close to home… pun intended. Ann and I laughed so hard through the first part of that movie that I thought we were gonna get kicked out of the theatre. I know for a fact that I’ve said the things that VV said in that movie many times. Ditto for Ann.

Overall, I thought the movie was very funny. There were some characters that I thought were a little cardboard, but I enjoyed the movie. I would recommend this movie as a good date flick. It definately would give some pointers to all couples.

This was almost not a workout, but I’m counting it. It was test night, so technically there was no class. However, I showed up at the dojo an hour before the test was scheduled to start and did kata for the whole time. I had a pretty good sweat going by the time the test commenced. Sensei Walker asked me to sit on his test board as a guest examiner. I was very surprised and honored.

The test went really well. The test was almos all white belt children testing for yellow belt. There were only 2 yellow belts, 1 orange belt, and 1 green testing. It amazes me how much these students look like our shotokan students at this level. Barring the stylistic differences, they all have the same general strengths and weaknesses. The higher ranking students test was a little bit different than what I’m used to, but mostly the same. A main difference in the tests is that Sensei Walker has an oral presentation section of the test. He asks the students questions about the style of karate they do. At the lower ranks, they just had to know things like the name of their style of karate, their instructors’ names, and the name of their kata. At the higher levels, they had to know the “complete” name of their style. Their instructors’ instructors names, Who created various kata, what year they were created, when the creator of the style built his first dojo, who the creator’s instructors were, etc. It was pretty in depth.

There were some things, as well, that were completely foreign to me. While the student was doing various drills, we would just sit and converse about different karate stories. Sense would sorta watch out of the corner of his eyes, but made it seem like he wasn’t paying attention. He’d make the student do some of the drills for 3-5 minutes non-stop. Sparring was pretty much the same way. He’d just make the student keep going, on an on. If they dropped their arms or rested, he’d say something like, “you just added abotu 30 seconds to your sparring time.” Then, after it was all overwith, the student had to do 50 pushups and 50 situps before he could leave. Sensei told me that “back in the day”, the instructor would just leave the room for as much as a half hour while the students were doing their drills and sparring. Then, when the students were worn completely out, he’d come back in and start crticizing them about looking sloppy and worn out. Sounded very wierd to me, but I guess that’s just the way it’s always been in that style. After the test, the students just bow out and leave. We then sat around a table and conferred about the results. Sensei won’t give the results of the test for a couple of weeks. We decided who passed and failed, and now he’ll order the belts for the students. When the belts come in, he’ll announce the results. I guess it’s also tradition to let the students stew about whether they passed or not.

After class, Sensei also surprised me by telling me that he’d already talked to his superiors about me. He told me that he told them that at the rate I was progressing that I would be ready to test for shodan in 15-18 months. That’s a heck of a compliment when you consider that he said that I had 30 months to train for the test. But, it also scared the crap out of me. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I’m ready for that kinda crazy test. I guess I better start steppin’ up a notch.

Tuesday’s class was a pretest workout. One of the girls in the class was testing for 5th kyu, so we focused mainly on her test. It was a fairly solid workout. A big surprise for me was that Ann decided to actually go to class AND train. She suited up and experienced quite a bit of frustration. It was sorta a bad night for her to start training since we were preparing for a test. Sensei couldn’t really devote any time to teaching her anything. She hung in there quite well though. She didn’t even get to frustrated. I think that secretly, she had a little fun.

My first workout back with the dojo in almost 3 weeks. Nothing fancy ocurred. Did some solid basics and a fair amount of kata. My kata sucked severely, and I forgot several movements due to my lack of practice. I didn’t stay after class and do anything because I was pretty worn out from not training in a while. It was good to be back again though. Ann came along and watched the class; which drives me totally nuts. I hate when she watches me train. I feel so self conscious.