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Posts Tagged ‘wax on wax off’

On Women and Fighting

wshaffer linked to an interesting column over on McSweeney’s titled Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting. The posts range around quite a bit, from actual combat-related thoughts like A Short and Potentially Hazardous Guide to Sparring Strategy (which might be of interest to the “writing fight scenes” crowd — I promise, I haven’t forgotten about that) to more philosophical things like “On Impact” to pretty good social commentary like “Dressing Up, Looking Down.”

Some of the things she says bother me, because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that she acknowledges herself to be a woman with a shitty temper, and that her behavior is not necessarily a model you should follow. But it makes for interesting reading regardless.

writers are messed-up people, yo

Within fifteen seconds of being kicked in the head during karate tonight, a part of me was thinking, “I should pay attention to what this feels like, in case I need it for a story.”

For the curious: very brief disorientation; swift (and only partially voluntary) decision that it would be better if I put my center of gravity lower for a few seconds, i.e. knelt on the floor; massive radiating heat from my ear lasting for a good half hour or more afterward. (It’s still red now, an hour later, though not swollen.) Oddly, the most painful spot is actually the skin in the crease behind my ear; presumably that has something to do with the cartilege being mashed by the impact.

(I was not kicked with any great force. Though admittedly, when one’s kumite partner is six foot three, “not with any great force” is still enough to be troublesome. And more than enough to guilt one’s kumite partner with — especially when he is also one’s husband. ^_^)

The Littlest White Belt Is Still a Ballet Dancer at Heart

In kobudo, I have begun learning bo (staff) kata. Shihan randomly had one of the senpai teach me the second bo kata last week; I’m trying to hold onto that sequence in my head just ’cause I don’t want to forget it, but today one of the sensei mercifully retreated a step and taught me the much less complicated first kata.

But they both begin with the same preparatory movement, and this is where my ballet training reasserts itself with a vengeance. It’s a bit complicated to describe, but there’s a point at which the bo is held vertically in front of your right shoulder, with your right hand gripping it low and your left hand gripping it high, over your head. You lower the left hand in an arc, sweeping it outward rather than down the front of your body; then, when you begin the kata, you sweep it back up the same path to grasp the bo again, before moving into the first strike.

To all the ballet dancers who just said, “Oh, you mean like a port de bras” — EXACTLY.

Guess whose arm immediately defaults to a gentle curve, whose hand turns to make an elegant line? If you pointed at me, give yourself a gold star! It’s like when I try to say something in French, and my accent is so Spanish it would give your average Parisian a coronary. I’ve hunted down and trained out a lot of my ballet habits over the last two years — in shizentai-dachi, I no longer rotate my foot outward into fourth position before stepping through; I’m learning not to tuck my butt under in shiko-dachi — but wow, do I still go first to ballet assumptions when doing something new. It isn’t even a simple matter of reminding myself before I begin the motion; if I don’t keep my attention on my hand every inch of the way, it goes straight back to what it knows best.

(I’m kind of afraid of the expression on Shihan’s face if he ever catches me doing that. I suspect it will be some flavor of baffled amusement, and I will want to sink through the floor out of embarrassment.)

Ah well. I’ve only been doing bo kata for two classes; I can’t expect to lose the habit that fast. But I’ve opened up my own private betting pool for how long it will take.

Return of the Littlest White Belt

Started kobudo today, which means I’m a white belt again. We began with sai (class always begins with sai, I think), and I went off to the side with a brown-belt senpai to learn the basics; then a little while later, the sensei had everybody switch to bo — except me. Which was fine: I said, and I meant it, that I was perfectly happy to spend the entire class in the corner practicing yoko-buri, the basic flip-out-flip-back move. I have to get that down before I can do anything else competently, including the other sai basics, so I might as well get started.

In fact, I have a virtuous plan in my head where I do ten yoko-buri at each level (gedan/low, chuudan/middle, and joudan/high) every day for the next week or so. We’ll see if it happens, but it would mean vastly better progress if it did.

Feels like a good start so far, though it was a little depressing to have another sensei tell me I’ll probably be catching my sai on my sleeves until I’m a blue belt or so. Overcoming that error faster is high on my list of goals, I think. 🙂

The Littlest Green-and-White Belt Gives the Gimpy Feet the Finger

Despite the broken toe, I went to my belt test on Friday. Yeah, possibly that wasn’t the best idea, but I’m annoyed enough by the time I missed due to the ankle surgery; the thought of waiting until September to test because of my stupid pinky toe was just not acceptable. (Not to mention that missing class Monday and Wednesday to let the bone start healing produced a noticable downswing in my mood; I’m book-stressed right now, and need my exercise to counter.)

I was particularly eager for this test because moving to the lowest degree of green belt (green with a white stripe) means I get to start kobudo, which is weapons training. Sai and bo mostly — the little hand-held tridents and the staff — though sometimes they break out the tonfa or the nunchaku. My only weapons experience is with Western rapier-and-dagger fencing, so I’m very keen to see how other things work. Plus it means I’ll be getting more like four hours of exercise each week, rather than two, and that is not a bad thing. In fact, if I can manage to have a pair of functioning feet for any real length of time, I’m hoping to go back to the SCA fencing practice on Sundays, too.

So I’m being careful, but I’m back in class. I’ll try to keep my weight off the outside of my foot until it’s been at least three weeks, and definitely keep the toe buddy-taped that long or longer; then we’ll see how it’s doing. Fortunately, in the immediate future I’m likely to have several new kata to practice (karate and kobudo both), so my attention’s going to be more on learning the sequences than refining my footwork. But any way you slice it, I’m not going to let a bone that tiny prevent me from getting my exercise. I am tired of this gimpy-feet business, yo.

The Littlest Blue-with-Black-Stripe Belt Goes Back to Class (with bonus gimpy feet)

I thought I’d be out of karate for two months following the surgery, but my orthopedist and physical therapist both said I could go back sooner, provided I wore the brace and paid close attention to what my ankle had to say. Fortunately, after thirteen years of ballet and other dance training, I am very good at listening to my feet.

So yesterday I returned to class, and god, was it a relief. Seeing people, stretching, getting some exercise . . . and it turned out better than I expected, actually. There are things I can’t do: jumping, for example. And my balance on that foot is very sketchy right now, so kicks are kind of off the menu (of course the senpai running the warm-up chose to do a kick combination across the floor that day). But the only thing really interfering with my ability to move is that I can’t pivot sharply; ask me to move from a left-hand punch to a right-hand one and I’m fine, but reverse the order and I have to just kind of mark it. It’s bloody hard to do sharp movements with the upper half of your body and cautious ones with the lower half, especially when you’ve been working and working and working at integrating your whole body rather than moving in parts.

Kumite (sparring) is still way in my future, but at least I can do kata, cautiously. As I said to several people, even if I could only do 40% of the work, that’s still a lot more than the 0% I had before. And it turns out I can do more than 40%. This makes me very pleased indeed.

The Littlest Orange Belt Is Feeling Clever

Yes, I really do mean to use that icon.

When you have a (popped) blister on your left foot that extends partway under the edge of a callus and you don’t want the skin to tear because it’s going to be unpleasant when it does and besides you’ll be grinding dirt into it all karate class long which is a good way to get an infection but band-aids come flying off the moment you pivot unless you put tape over them and that leads to you STICKING TO THE FLOOR when you try to pivot . . .

. . . then sometimes, just sometimes, you get clever.

You dig out your old lyrical shoes — which only barely qualify as “shoes” — and that protects the necessary area while still leaving you 95% barefoot.

And you don’t stick to the floor.

The Littlest Orange Belt Says Rarrrr

In non-Deeds of Men news, I had a really satisfactory night at karate.

I don’t think I’ve come out and said here that I’m going to be out of town for four straight weeks, traveling hither and yon for family events and a friend’s wedding and research and so on. This will include a week in London, so look for a return of the trip blogging. I’m pretty excited.

But it means I’ll be missing four straight weeks of karate, which is honestly a little frustrating. I learned pinan nidan recently, a new kata, and have just started practicing it; in a month everything I was told about the neko ashi bits will have no doubt fallen out of my head. (Yes, I can practice it on my own, and may very well, but it isn’t the same as having a sensei watch and correct you. I might end up practicing bad habits without knowing it.) On the other hand, tonight I had a better-than-average sparring experience, and while that’s going to rust even more badly than my kata while I’m gone, it’s encouraging to go into my travels with a high note fresh in my memory. (Some nights, my timing and aim and reflexes are on. Other nights . . . not so much.)

I actually asked Shihan whether we had a sibling dojo in London. (Our own place has seen visitors from Hawaii, Germany, and Slovakia in the time I’ve been there; it wasn’t unreasonable to wonder.) Alas, we don’t — or perhaps not “alas,” seeing as how if we did I’d have to decide whether I’d really haul my gi across the Atlantic, and whether I’d have any energy for practice after walking all over the city. This way, I don’t have to find out how lazy I really am.

Oh well. I’ll just do situps and pushups and shiko dachi every day, right? Right???

Sure I will.

Come mid-June, I’m going to be rusty like a rusty thing. Sigh.

atarashii kata o narau!

Today I had, to quote Lymond, a damned carking afternoon — but then I went to karate and instead of doing sparring (which I was very much not in a state of mind for), I got to learn pinan nidan, which is the next kata in the sequence.

It’s amazing how easily something like that can improve my mood.

And then I went and had tasty tasty fried rice with crab. So my day is looking fair to have a much better ending than it did a start.

a followup on the karate criticism thing

Not so much “criticism I deal badly with” as a surfeit of riches: having three sensei and one senpai, in the span of three days, come up to offer me four different bits of advice on the same two kata moves.

To be fair, I brought it on myself. Having gotten that eye-opening pointer on Monday, I decided to practice it today — which meant I was repeating those moves when one of the sensei started watching me, so of course the pointer she offered had to do with them. Then I have two things to practice, which means I’m still working on those two moves when the senpai comes along, which means she gives me a pointer about them, and now I’m practicing three things when the other sensei decides to see how I’m doing . . .

So the bunkai is that it’s kind of a soto uke, and I need to open my hip out and then drop it forward for the double-punch, and make sure my zenkutsu dachi is wide enough, and think of my back when I chamber so the punch rebounds forward.

Or something like that.

Four different bits of advice, all of them good. But at this rate I’m going to spend the next month doing just those two movements, trying to assimilate all that good advice, and getting more piled on me every time somebody wanders by. <g>

The continuing adventures of the Littlest Yellow-And-A-Half Belt

Haven’t posted about karate in a while. (Still need a karate icon.) I belt-tested a while ago and got my yellow-belt-with-black-stripe, but they didn’t have any in my size, so I’m still running around in a yellow belt. (Am tempted to take a sharpie to it.) Two down, lots to go, but I’m enjoying the sense that I am progressing. I’ve got enough awareness of my own movements to be able to feel how I’m improving, and it’s kind of intriguing to observe.

Intriguing, and occasionally frustrating. Not because I’ve hit any kind of plateau, but because I’ve progressed far enough to run afoul of the one respect in which I take criticism badly: I hate being told I’m screwing something up when I already know that. Point out a flaw I wasn’t aware of, and I’m delighted, but bring up me one I’ve been kicking myself about for weeks? That’s the one thing I react badly to, in the sense that it just encourages me in my (occasionally counterproductive) habits of self-castigation. And now I’m aware enough of certain flaws in my work to hit that point.

On the other hand, the sensei tonight, after giving me a few eye-opening pointers on kihongata san, told me I did “beautiful kata.” Which, coming from a teacher you respect enormously, is enough to put you walking on air for a couple of minutes. At least if you’re me.

I need certain muscles back. Except that it probably isn’t even “back;” I can’t say for sure I ever really had much strength in my hip abductors, since dance almost never had me taking my leg out to the side in anything other than a rotated position (which shifts a lot of the work onto the glutes and the quads). So, okay, I need to get those muscles strong, because even if high side and roundhouse kicks aren’t anything you would use in a real fight, I’m asked to do them in class, and I ought to have good form. And the ab work we do for the belt tests is coming perilously close to making my quads give out (long before my abs do), so that’s something else to fix. And, y’know, the whole pushups thing. Stupid upper body strength. Or rather, lack thereof.

I am a looooooooong way from doing the one-armed pushup seen in that icon.

But I like feeling myself become familiar with a different style of movement. I can’t wait to get my orange belt, at which point I might be able to learn pinan nidan, the next kata; it’s very different from the ones I know already, and I expect I will learn a lot from it.

The Littlest White Belt is now the Littlest Yellow Belt

Meant to post this last night, but: Friday I had my first belt test, and yesterday I was presented with my new yellow belt. (Which really needs to go through the washing machine to be softened up; I could barely get it to hold its knot.)

I’m pleased, but it isn’t a huge achievement; people very rarely fail their tests for yellow, or so I am told. Since I did not fall over or accidentally punch one of the judges, I passed. It’s a nice mile-marker, though, and leaves me feeling energized for more. If I attend class regularly, I think I could be testing for orange at the beginning of February. Then blue, and then I think we start moving into the finer gradations of rank; I believe I have to go through blue-with-black-stripe before green (and green-with-white-stripe may intervene between those two). And you have to attend more classes between tests the higher you go, of course, so the rapid initial progress slows down eventually. But that rapid initial progress is nicely satisfying, and helps you feel like you’re getting somewhere.

Most importantly for me, this means I can practice kihon gata san without feeling presumptuous. Kihon gata ichi is the kata for the yellow belt test, and kihon gata ni for orange, but the two are all but identical, and doing them over and over again gets tedious. I’ll still work on both ichi and ni, of course, but at this point I’ll learn more about improving my form by doing things other than that same set of moves. I need to become more comfortable with the shorin-ryu style of movement in general, rather than just one limited example of it.

Now off to the library I go.

this week’s adventures of the Littlest White Belt

I tried kicking in sparring today. Nobody’s really taught me how to kick yet; I just monkey-see-monkey-do my way through it in movement exercises, based on a small amount of education in front and side kicks when I was twelve, and constant reminders to myself not to turn out and/or point my toes.

I am learning to kiai. But I’m still getting chastised for not kiai-ing sometimes, and I’m not sure how to explain those are the times when the rapid-fire neurons in my brain have already figured out I’m not going to connect. (Which is not a reason to swallow it, I suppose. But try telling that to my brain, which so far has only internalized “the punch doesn’t count if you don’t yell while it lands.”)

Not so good: I think I am too dependent on the mirrors. When we do movement exercises, we advance across the floor toward the mirrored wall, but then we turn around and go the other way and unlike every dance studio I’ve been in, there are no mirrors back there. (Though there is a barre. Which convinces me there should be mirrors, dammit.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure my form is better going forward than back, and I don’t think it’s a side issue, since half the things we do alternate sides naturally to begin with. So: dear body, please pay attention to yourself, and don’t depend on the eyeballs to do it for you.

My hip joints hate me. I’m thinking Thanksgiving break will be a good thing: a whole eleven days between rounds of dislocating my legs out of my pelvis. Maybe that will be long enough to get them to stop creaking like this.

Maybe.

think fast!

I need to figure out what I want for a karate icon.

My trial period is over; I’ve decided to join the dojo for real. To that end, I bought myself a pair of gloves, and sparred for the first time yesterday. (I kind of sort of sparred last week, but it was more like a set of sparring drills; when it came time for people to do scored bouts in front of the teachers, I was never called up.) They paired me against one of the black belts — all of whom, from what I’ve seen so far, are good people who understand that nobody benefits if they just wipe the floor with the little baby white belt. I “won” our bout, because she decided my lesson this week should be learning to attack: she launched the occasional strike at me, but mostly baited me forward, luring me into, y’know, doing something.

Which was both familiar and strange. I’ve sparred in fencing, but bare-handed combat is new to me. It’s a lot closer-range than I’m used to; the black belt kept beckoning me in, while I floated out at something more like blade length. On the other hand, since I don’t have to control a heavy piece of metal — and if you think rapiers aren’t heavy, you haven’t tried to wave one around for very long; they gain a pound with every passing minute, I swear — I was able to follow through much more cleanly when I saw an opening. Which my sparring partner even praised after class: the fencing experience means I do see openings. (I see them in fencing, too, but when I try to exploit them my point goes haring off god knows where, because my wrist strength crapped out three passes into the bout.)

Now, if I can get more than basic punches and some half-assed what-block-was-that stunts into my repertoire, I might get somewhere.

I also need to learn to kiai. Since apparently a point doesn’t count if you don’t yell when it lands. Just wait until I start doing this in fencing: the peril of pursuing two martial arts at once.

Wednesday . . . is gonna hurt. Because if I try to come down into the straddle splits from above, the way we do in class, it strains my hips without actually stretching me, so yesterday I did it the way I used to in dance: start on the floor, then roll forward into it. Their way, I’m a foot and a half off the floor; my way, maybe four inches. But it isn’t a method that lets you ease gradually into anything, so I fully expect my inner thighs to stage a violent protest come tomorrow.

When I will make them do it all over again.

The Littlest White Belt

I was good about going to the gym in 2007. In 2008, not so much. I managed it some of the time for the first four months; then I was out of the country for May (albeit on trips that involved much walking), and then it was the summer, with the moving and all, and I really didn’t have the time or energy for much of anything in the way of exercise.

Since last Monday, I’ve been to four karate classes and a fencing practice.

To quote my Scandinavian heritage — uff da.

I didn’t plan to dive in headfirst. It’s just that in karate, you pay by the month, not by the lesson, so it behooves me to go to all three practices each week if I can (and I really don’t have much excuse to say I can’t). And I’ve been trying to get my butt up to the city for fencing practice these last two months, so when it turned out I was actually going to manage it this week, well, “but I’ve already worked out a lot lately” didn’t seem like a very good reason to stay home.

Sheer bloody exhaustion might count, though.

On the other hand, if I can keep this up, I’m going to be fit in no time flat. Karate may be only an hour each time, but it’s all-levels, which means that tonight I was chased across the floor in sparring by a brown belt and three black belts. (Retreating is something I’m very good at.) And fencing is technically only for an hour, but if last Sunday is any example, I don’t have to worry much about the heavy fighters showing up and kicking us out of our field; I think it goes until people quit. All of it very acceptable as cardio work, too. Four or more hours of that a week? Yeah, I call that working out.

(Just don’t ask whether I’m really thinking about eventually taking up kobudo — weapons — twice a week, too.)