The bo groove is back, now what?

Saturday's traditional class was good. As always a good warmup workout to help sweat out a bit. Was a bit frustrated that some upper back pain prevented me from going all out in the situp/crunches section. Going up and down was making me cringe so I held myself still. You gotta know not to push it when something's not feeling right. The pain started around last Thursday and is just about gone now. Don't know where it came from, might have forced the wrong way while holding Matty...

Class went on with us doing Sushi no kon sho a few times. After skipping last Wednesday night practice, I was not hoping I could remember the whole of it and yep, it's in there to stay. Now we'll start working on the form of it, make it look more natural. We went on to work on self defense techniques against a club attack. It had been a looong while since we'd worked on them, both me and my usual training partner, so it felt good to get some work done on them. We followed that with a run at the 12 upper level open hand self defense techniques. We are now to the point of adding a bit more speed to the execution of these techniques, more hips, less robotic movements...

A weird thing happened at the bo class though. We were having dinner Andrew and I and people we had not seen in the first couple of weeks of bo class were coming to the dressing room. First a kid took is lunch with us. Last I'd seen him, he was taking the first of two hours of bo, the one for beginners. I knew he was not a beginner, but thought he was taking that hour for special reasons (like havign another activity later in the afternoon). Anyway, that made for one extra student. Then another kid that I had never seen showed up. Then three 17-yo white belts arrived. I remembered about our instructor telling us that these three new students would probably be moved to the advanced class in order for them not to get too bored as they would most probably learn faster. This meant we were 13 students in that class. It was very cool for the warmup, where we only do strikes while standing in one place and you hear all these bos move and all, but it made for a tough class when we got to work on our kata. Think about it, my bo is 6 feet long and in my kata, I have some strikes where I'm fully extended, baseball strike style.

Anyway, we managed to each find a spot and nobody got hurt. I worked mostly on separate segments of my kata, repeating them over and over until I felt good with each one of them. I felt I really got my groove back in that class. Did my kata in front of our instructor toward the end of the hour and he told me it was day and night from last week to this week in the fluidity of the whole kata. He pointed out 3-4 things to work on. He's got a good eye and I pretty much always agree with what he's telling me to work on. I just can't see these things for myself. For example, he told me that I now lean a bit forward in only one sequence of strikes, which is an improvement since I used to lean forward on pretty much every sequence. I now need to concentrate on that one sequence.

He then showed us a new sequence he wants us to practice so we could include it in our kata. It's a pretty cool sequence, but I'll need mucho work on it to get to work. It includes a part where we drop to one knee, strike with one hand to one corner, go back up, spin and strike back to that same corner. Anyway, very hard to describe, as you can see by my complete lack of ability to do so. :) Andrew is not one who's comfortable trying different new things, but he didn't completely dismiss the sequence. I made sure to cheer him up saying we would take time to master it before we put it in. He always wants to do "like daddy" and while I was the first to modify our kata last Sprin, he asked me to show him the changes so he could do them, "just like daddy"... :)

The season opening competition is on October 15 and there was never any intention for us to put anything new in our kata for that competition. The plan right now is for us to enter the October 15 competition, skip the November one and enter the December 10 one. That would give us almost 2 months between now and December 10 to work on adding new sequences to our kata.

Speaking of competition, Andrew's probably the one of us two who's got the biggest hurdle to overcome. We're not officially entered, but I plan on competing in both weapon and traditional form. For my traditional form, I will present the same kata that gave me a 3rd place at the Quebec Open, Cat 2 which is also my highest kata. Andrew on the other hand, has been learning a new kata since he passed his green belt (5th kyu) last April. He'd been presenting Circle of the Tiger for a long time. He was used to it and had perfected it. Now, as a green belt, if he were to present that kata, he would be judged more harshly, or more thoroughly, so he's working on presenting his latest kata, the Statue of the Crane. It's a tricky kata to master. From the Studios Unis website, they say this kata (just like Circle of the Tiger) is derived from the Karazenpo Go Shinjutsu system, which doesn't help me much. The tricky part in it is that, as its name implies, it has a crane jump/stance on one foot, that is not always easy to land without looking awkward. Anyway, I talked with his instructor and he seemed confident that Andrew would have it in competition shape in time for the 15th. Other than traditional form and weapon, Andrew usually also enters in fighting where he usually fares pretty well. The kid's got instinct.

FM