Wednesday June 8th was the hottest day of my life so far at the academy. The funny thing was, it was not very sunny. The weather during the morning was a little sunny with clouds, not too bad. When lunch time came around it rained a little bit. Rain is good. Can’t be hot right?. Well i was wrong. It only rained about 10 seconds. Problem is the rain made the air sooooo humid.
We had power training this afternoon which meant we had to run to the gate which is about 5 miles there and back. I started running with Sam and Ash. The sun was covered by some clouds but for some reason it was HOT! After 5 minutes my whole body was full of sweat. When we got back i was drenched. Power training began. I have never sweated so much before. I was dripping sweat drops on the floor every time we did drills. It was like i was in a water park from HELL.
When we finished drills we began to do the stretches and drills on the ground. Mathieu and I have been helping out a new student named Abdule. He is a nice guy… just a little lazy. And we all tease him a bit and push him to train a little harder. If he doesn’t work hard, we “help” when we do stretching. Like one of us will hold one of Abdule’s legs to the ground and the other we will lift. If he is too slow during drills or not blocking right we will “help” again… well we hit him anyway. It’s all games and a little bit of pain in there too. He can almost do the splits so we are just helping. Really!
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So when we did power stretching we really stretched him hard. He almost got the full splits down. When we pushed him a little lower he was laughing and gave up. Shifu yelled at him saying “COME ON! Don’t give up!” Shifu was laughing more than he was yelling. So Abdule had to hold the splits twice as long. Abdule gets his revenge because he gets to stretch us after we do him.
The next drill was the 8 minute plank. The Plank is when you get in push-up position but you stay in that position. You are stiff and straight, like a plank of wood. If you sag, or if your arms bend, Shifu hits you. It is one of the harder things we have to do. My mat on the ground was wet with my sweat from the humidity and doing abs and other dills. For some reason Matheiu said that me and him should make this very hard exercise even harder. He said we should do the plank with our feet up on the bar just to make it harder. I am not sure why i listened to him. But I agreed. So we were not just doing an 8 minute plank, Matheiu and me were doing an 8 minute decline plank!
After two minutes of doing the decline plank, our hands where slipping from sweat, pools of sweat where gathering from the drops coming off our heads, And the worst thing was Shifu was walking around with a staff beating the people who fell! Then a little past half way thru the 8 minutes, disaster struck! It happened like a chain of reaction. First we heard Ash say, "Uh Oh." Then BOOM! Ash's hands slid out from under him and he fell face first on the ground. He was doing the regular Plank with his feet on the ground so he did not fall too hard. Master ran over and hit him till he got up! We all started laughing. But I was laughing so hard sweat got in my eyes!
While I was in the decline Plank I tried whiping the sweat away with one hand while the other held me in place but now it has been over 5 minutes in that position and my arm was so tired i couldn’t lift one arm and be sure I would not fall! Mathieu started laughing at me because i was yelling, “I can’t see! i can’t see!”, then because he was laughing at me, he couldn’t hold himself so he dropped off the bar and crashed to the ground. Shifu came over to us and began hitting him! Now I still could not see with the sweat stinging my eyes, but I could hear Shifu next to me hitting Mathieu! Now i really couldn’t give up or I’d be hit next! It seemed like I was in that position forever. Legs up on the bar, eyes stinging and arms getting more and more tired while my mat was getting more and more slippery. But eventually Shifu called ‘time’ and I crashed to the ground, I got to wipe my face with my soaked shirt and see again.
Last week we had sparring and i did pretty well. So that weekend i had a few friends come up and ask me if i can help them a bit to get ready for the ring. Two of the newer girls asked for help, Kelly and Brittany. I told them that I’d help them out on Wednesday. So after dinner i met up with them but Kelly said she was too tired for any additional training so Me and Brittany did a few drills. We worked a couple hours and with a few tips from me she improved a whole lot.
The next day i did a lunch break session with Brittany and Kelly in the ring. So i began to tell Kelly the basics and did some blocking and reaction drills with both of them. Afterward Kelly went up to me and told me that out of the 2 months she been here she never was taught how to properly block or do the drills that i showed them. She was really happy with the tips i gave her. I told her the Shifus give us so much info we get a little overwhelmed. I know I did when I was first here. The only reason i got good is because i broke the steps down with Jake. And now we are doing a lot better. So that’s what i did with them. I first worked on their stances, then their guard, then their blocks. Till they get those down we will worry about kicks and counters. But it’s easier to understand when it’s broken down a bit. And they both agreed.
For afternoon training it was San Da and Shifu paired me up with Abdule since he was pretty new to show him the basics. So i basically told him the same thing i told the girls. Then we did pad work. He got the basics down quick. When we swapped pads i would do my combos. I guess my punches were pretty strong because he ended up punching himself in the face and a couple hits hit him so hard it knocked his glasses off a couple times. Soon when he put the pads up for me to hit, he would back up because he didn’t want to get hit.
Tomorrow is the mountain run, then Saturday i told ash we should take Sam out to the beach and dinner for his birthday since it was this week and Sam didn’t do anything.
Ill fill ya' in more later
-Scott
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