communication breakdown

Exhausted

Wow, what a weekend. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I travelled to Madison, Wisconsin for two days of TaeKwon-Do training. The first day was a knife defense seminar; the second was a general Black Belt workout.

The typical 5-hour drive from Minneapolis to Madison takes me 3 and a half hours, but the entire round-trip 7 hours involved driving through Mother Nature unleashing her fury on the countryside. It was non-stop pouring the whole way each way. Makes for some not-fun driving...

Anyways, training was excellent, as my body will attest to tomorrow when I wake up. I'm sure I'm going to find aches and bruises that I didn't see before, on areas of my body that I didn't know existed. But it was all worth it. The knife defense course was a great asset, especially since I hadn't done anything like that before. While I wouldn't feel invincible around a person wielding a knife (and that's a good thing), I would feel reasonably confident that I could take the necessary steps to disarm and stop an attacker from threatening my life. And that's the whole point anyways. The one drawback was that my wrists were practically destroyed for a day or two. Most of the knife defense revolved around grabbing the attacker's knife arm and twisting it into a position favorable to you. All this twisting, combined with a firm two-hand grip on your wrist, leads to plenty of pain.

As if 4 hours of knife defense wasn't enough, we trained for 6 hours on Sunday on general Black Belt requiremenets. Patterns, flying kicks, sparring, breaking - you name it. It was really good to spend time with some higher-ranked instructors who can help me in areas where I need it - that's something I've been craving because we have no one of that caliber in the Twin Cities area. But the class was great and I think it really motivated me to start preparing to test for Third Degree.

Pictures are up here (also a nice video of one of my breaks). Unfortunately no knife defense or flying kick pictures, because I was too busy participating. However, I got some good breaking and sparring shots. Hope you enjoy.

For Memorial Day... absolutely nothing, and I'm sure that will be amazing. Right now, I just need a little R&R, and that's exactly what I'm going to get...