2005 Workout #142: Mission Impossible…

and I arrived around 8:20 am to workout on Saturday. By the time we got there, Garls-san, and were already practicing some basic techinques. Matt and I decided to stretch out and head right for the sparring.

We futzed around for awhile doing our same old thing, and then Sensei Hartman decided to up our ante. He told Matt that in order to beat up on guys like me he had to take an attack and then pursue me. I got the advice to look for the openings, fill them like “water fills a cup” and then get the hell out of Dodge.

He came down from the stage to show us a little bit of what he meant. For me, it was staying back at distance and then darting in and attacking openings, using the extra momentum and power from my techniques to vault myself somewhere unexpected. This proved to be much, much more difficult than one would anticipate.

This left Matt and I to spend the rest of the workout free sparring and trying to figure out how exactly to enact these concepts. I found out that this is WAY more octane than I’m used to expending while sparring, which made it for an extremely difficult workout for me. Even when told that its not really about shifting around the edges, when started to figure out how to pursue me it became a game of keeping a safe distance. That still took quite a bit of gas in the ol’ tank.

Inevitably, we collided a few times. I’ve got a few fresh bruises, but no lasting damage. My broken toe didn’t get in the way very much at all, but it was aching pretty badly by the time we were done. I know that getting these concepts to work at will is going to be my mission for the next several years.

It is good to have goals.