2006 Workout #21: The Flying Board Blues…

This morning’s workout consisted of and I knocking out 14 Sochin in preparation for the demonstration at ICC. My fifteenth for the day was done in front of a live studio audience.

That being said, I will move onward to said demonstration. It all started innocently enough… Matt and I were tapped to devise an “attention getter” break. We decided we didn’t want to do anything that was being done during the main program, so we came with the idea of Matt breaking with his patented heymaker roundkick.

It worked. Too well. There is both photographic and video evidence of his roundkick smashing through the board with such force that it careened off of my forehead (leaving a neat little divet) and flew over my head and bonked one of our young girls from Mapleton dojo right in the forehead.

As noted, I think she was more embarassed/surprised and quickly became tearful and ran off for a minute or two until the scare was over. I generally attempted to ignore the small trickle of blood that was growing on my forehead, I did try to wipe it off with my hand pad in between sections but it didn’t work that well.

The rest of the demo went off without a hitch. Obvious crowd favorites were the Kid Power Stranger Danger skit, Womens Self Defense skit, and of course, the breaking demonstrations. To this day I have no idea how Sensei Brewer and Sensei Hartman are able to concentrate so much power into such a little space.

Sensei Hartman’s four way break was so quick it all but folded over the boards in the hands of the people holding them. Sensei Brewer hit his stack of three board with a reverse punch that rattled with such power that the front two boards were shook out of the hands of the holders, causing them to drop the third board. A quick reverse punch later and it too broke. Very impressive.

The environment was among the more unsettling that we have had demonstrations in… it was a small rectangular area with really slick carpeting that reminded me of the PTEC building at Pekin High School. It made doing Sochin quite interesting, as my feet tended to heat up and skid on this surface. Matt and I did a respectable enough job though, and continued into our full speed match. I won this time around, but it was a far cry from the quality of the last Mapleton demo.

The part that was most unsettling was the fact that we were surrounded on all sides by children and parents. Usually our demonstrations are up against a wall or a closed stage somewhere, this caused me a lot of anxiety because of the board breaking that was involved. Luckily, aside from the slight snafu of the opening break nothing else unexpected happened, and I think that everyone was pretty pleased with the end result.

I had several kids come up and ask me questions and tell me how neat they thought everything was. I encouraged them to come down and join us, and they seemed to be pretty engaged. All in all, I think it was one of the better demos that we have done in awhile. Everyone involved did a fantastic job!!

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Sochin Counter
Accomplished / Goal == Percent Complete
245 / 2000 == 12.25%
Average Kata per Workout: 17.69
Estimated Completion Workout:115