Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

Harry Potter weekend *MADNESS*!!!!!!!

I…haven’t read it yet.

Jess and I have been trying to get back on something like a normal schedule after having Grammy come and visit. Mostly that just means getting back into our exercise schedule, swimming at lunch, and then TKD and Hockey. We managed to get back to the pool and start turning out laps, which is a great way to break up a workday, let me tell you. And then Friday we took off swimming because we met up with some people to do Volleyball on Friday. Then we split up and she went to Hockey, where her team won, and I went to TKD, where I lost.

Well, that’s not really true. If we were doing our TKD on an ‘Olympic point style’ thing, where the referee awarded points and declared a winner, I would have lost. But we didn’t really do that, so I didn’t really lose. I sparred with ‘Mr. P’, who is a pretty tall, lanky, older guy with a lot of experience and power. He’s really good for me because his technique and body type perfectly matches my most glaring weakness in sparring. I don’t fake before I attack. When your opponent has longer legs than you, the *first* thing you have to do before you can even think about attacking them is get past the distance where they can attack you. Their legs are longer, which means you enter their ‘threat range’ before they enter yours. Further still, Mr. P uses a lot of ‘front leg’ techniques. What that means is that he can see me coming in and all he has to do is just lift his leg up and I plow right into him. I do this to younger students all the time whenever I get to spar them. (Which isn’t often. They tend to keep us in proper weight/size classes).

This means that before I can even think about *approaching* him, I have to fake him out. It sounds silly, but the few times I’ve managed to make it work, they results have just been astounding. This is what it does:

1) It forces your opponent to try and determine if every motion you make is a kick or not. The more they’re thinking, the less they’re kicking.
2) The less they kick, the better chance you have of predicting when the kicks will come, and therefore the better chance you have of avoiding their kicks.
3) When you fake, your opponent will often go ‘flat footed’, literally leaving their feet flat on the ground as opposed to on the balls of their feet. This makes it much harder for them to move out of the way.
4) If they’re preparing to counter you, a fake will often make them throw out their counter kick, which means you disarm their ‘weapon’ and then have the initiative to kick them back.
5) A fake takes only a fraction of the energy of a full kick, which means you get an extra thread for essentially ‘free’.

If that isn’t a good enough list to convince you that I need to work on my fakes, nothing is. I’ve been working on my footwork and fakes outside of class, but my problem has always been that whenever I get into a sparring situation, especially once I get tired, I tend to fall back on more ingrained, less effective techniques. So next time I go, I’m only, *only* going to work on faking. No special techniques, just faking before every single kick.

These are the kinds of things I think about on the way back from sparring.

So Saturday I had a roll-playing game session scheduled with some friends, and so I went off and did that while Jess kept herself busy with some shopping and the new Harry Potter book. She’s currently about halfway through it and going strong, and I’m quite content to wait my turn, so no one call me up and start blurting out story twists quite yet.

So I’m just going to sit down and play my most recent Video Game obsession (Odin Sphere) next to Jess, reading her book. Ta ta!

-N