Thursday night’s workout was interesting… I got some very interesting insights by way of a King of the Hill exercise, where we circled up and did some full speed matches, with the first point winner continuing on.
My first time around I had to go up against Rush-san. For those of you that don’t know, Randy was a brown belt when I got my first degree black belt, but shortly thereafter he took some time off. I understand now that he was doing some other martial arts or something, but eventually he comes back and is still quite skilled. We had a few skirmishes with no clear winner. I realized a bit in that my folly was not going to for the kill right off the bat, because as I tried to formulate a way to catch him, the guy goes bat-shit crazy and starts throwing all sorts of spinning hook kicks and crescent kicks.
Now, I am no dummy. I know that the best action for a situation like that is to pick a pause and drive in with a strong technique, however with Randy things were somehow flowing together in such a way that I could never pull the trigger. I attempted to break his distance with a hook kick and didn’t get close enough, so he snagged my leg on the snap back and dumped me. He didn’t follow up with a technique, but quickly got in with a round kick to finish me off.
It was a pretty unexpected match, I guess it was pretty entertaining to watch. My second go-around I ended up across from Erbe. We had a pretty blistering iuchi (mutual death, attacks landing at the same time). I caught him in the armpit with my side thrust kick, however he got a front kick up into my hipbone/groin. I don’t recall how he got the reverse punch in on me that ended the match, but I thought it was a good effort.
Garls-san was the king of the hill the first go-around (sneaky older generation!) and
I really learned that you need to be able to find an opening and pull the trigger. Also, I need to follow the commonly held technology credo of K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Until I get much, much more skilled with timing a hook kick I’m going to lay off of it. I will practice it only in slow sparring until I figure out my distance. I’m going to go back to my bread and butter stuff and go back to cultivating some of my hand techniques a little bit more. And I’m going to figure out how to use my stance and hips to generate quicker hand attacks. This is my plan, and I’m sticking to it.
Also, congrats to our guys that went to Pawnee this weekend. It sounds like everyone kicked a fair amount of shitoryu hindquarters. Special appluase goes to Walker-san who apparently tore it up with a good rendition of Bassai Dai. I’m proud of him for giving that kata a shot, I hope that working on it together on Thursday emboldened him a little. Even if it didn’t, I’m going to pretend it did. 🙂
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