Hijacked by my Brain

Damn it. My adviser found me. All this time, I thought I was cruising along in the "no news is probably good news" category, having not heard from him in a few weeks and awaiting his direction on what to fix next, but I was actually bobbing around in the "I haven't had/made time to look at your stuff this whole time" box. Now that he's looking at it, I'm back to awesomeness: my academic responsibilities turned trump on my training. I spent the first seven hours of my day, after breakfast today, looking for "careless incidences" of the passive voice and reordering things to make them less "misleading to the reader." Sometimes, the exactitude that my adviser wants from me reminds me of the degree of perfection expected of serious YSB practitioners. Then I go into this quandary where I'm taking heart that he wants things (like it and me) to be as good as they can be, and yet I'm losing heart over the fact that I might just not be that good at details until they're pointed out to me in bold italics with a note about how stupid I am attached, usually with the s-word underlined in red ink. That also reminds me, at times, of missing details in YSB.... I was definitely told at one point in the past, by The Man himself: "maybe you're too stupid to learn this," which is kind of a hard, spiky, bitter, hot-pepper-coated pill to swallow when you're doing a Ph.D. in mathematics. I get a lot of verbal shit from people at various times, but the s-word isn't usually on the list.

Speaking of brain-related activities, my brain completely hijacked my workout yesterday. I wasn't "distracted" so much as I became intensely curious. Instead of grinding out scores of repetitions of the various drills I had chosen for the day (having decided that the saber was breaking my precious skin and need not be picked up), I started to do that and then was prevented from continuing by the overwhelming need to think and feel my way through the drills. I had to understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. I did drills for the same amount of time that I would have otherwise, about an hour, but I did most of them quite slowly, as if feeling around in the dark, stopping and pondering them midway. Some of them I figured out. Some of them I didn't. Some others I invented, but only in a slow, meticulous way where I could see the application before I proceeded. I'm hoping that today will afford me the opportunity to go drill the ones I have, shelving the figuring-out of the others until after I've managed a massive sweat and feel solid and powerful in what I'm up to. Today, so far, I've had only one window in which to train (which I shouldn't have taken... I've still got five sections to get through on this run-through of my dissertation), and it was just long enough for a challenging but too-short turning session. Tonight, I have to finish those five sections (more than likely) and write a final exam (*sigh*), so I'm hoping a window will open up in the near future that lets me go bust some drills out.

Tape

I've used a lot of tape lately. As strange as it may seem, as crappy as I still am with it, my muscular ability to cope with the saber is growing significantly faster than the coping ability of the skin on my tender mathematician hands. I had been getting blisters, some quite bad, some that tore the skin off before I knew I had them. Now I'm getting callouses, but I'm also rubbing my skin completely raw. Part of that might be due to the deep, unending, vague throbbing exhaustion in my hands from working with the thing day after day -- my grip kind of poops out on it after a bit and it slides ever so slightly around, giving me raw skin. The rest of it is a time-in-contact issue: I'm spending lots of that. Since my skin shits out on me long before my drive or ability to continue (not in any one particular drill... those still kick my butt), I wrap them with athletic tape and go back at it with hands looking like a boxer's before getting gloved up. New tender spots come up as a result of the extended training and slightly modified usage of my hands due to the presence of tape, so at the moment, I have at least seven such places between my two hands. It's awesome.

Today, I think, I will not pick up the saber on those grounds, and that perhaps will be the case tomorrow as well. My empty-hand training is suffering a bit as a result of wanting to get reasonably solid with the saber (which is a very slow-going process), so I'm planning to take the next couple of days to let my skin recover and my striking/turning endurance to get a little piece of the pie. Between my dissertation and the saber, turning has really suffered (to the point where a half an hour straight is pretty brutal for me instead of a relatively "pleasant" walk outside). That's got to be remedied... at least until my adviser gets back on me about other things to work on. My striking is, in my opinion, okay but nowhere near where it could be. I tend to tire-out pretty quickly, which isn't so good. Standing is alright, but my thighs are constantly wiped out from the low stances with the saber, so alright is as far as it goes. Forms... I'll get back to those one of these days, I promise... at least back to those that don't involve a giant sword.

Oh, I'm informally compiling a list of the initial questions I get when people see me with the saber. Here are the three most popular so far:

1. Where did you get that?
2. Is it heavy?
3. Is that thing real?

I think the third one is my favorite. I'm not even sure what to tell them because it's pretty obviously real. Almost everyone asks if it's sharp too, but that comes out later. I suspect that's what people mean by "real," though. It would be a complete nightmare if it was.

Buffening Up

Word on the streets is that my peeps are worried about if I'm getting stronger yet. Those peeps should rest assured that I'm working on it, day by day, and hopefully will have something to show for it despite the hee-hawing I could do about having a dissertation to write, correct, rewrite, correct, and rewrite a few more times in the intervening months and some kind of apparently serious lower-back injury that I'm only now getting somewhat out-of-the-woods on... being very tight and stiff on one side but not the other now with far less of the overwhelmingly painful and frustrating "stuck" feeling I've lived with since last summer. Today was no exception for buffening up.

This morning, after only a super-mini breakfastish snack, I hit about an hour and twenty of calisthenics and basic saber drills, followed by what sections of the form I know, along with my new favorite way to burn myself up that isn't the saber. This afternoon, I'm planning more saber drills, more saber form, some saber turning, and some zig-zag step strikes, probably with some more of my awesome strengthening drills and standing. If I can still stand after all of that, then I'll turn. If not, I'll probably get some of that in this evening. My puny weights were yesterday, so I don't expect they'll make it into today's routine.

So... this new exercise thing was kind of motivated by a few factors: 1) daoyin exercises; 2) weightlifting; 3) the overwhelming feeling of pointlessness that consumes me while I'm weightlifting, causing me to hate it not because it's hard but because it's lame; 4) little-to-no weight equipment here and a general disdain for the gym, and 5) standing postures. I'm doing weightlifting-like exercises with "extreme isometric tension" instead of actual weights. I haven't yet found a weightlifting maneuver that I can't do this way, though I'm not sure it's quite as hard as lifting a massive piece of steel, but I've also found about 100,000 exercises that I can't figure out how to do with weights that I can do this way. Isometric, by the way, isn't the correct term because there is moving in the joints. It's more like performing the exercises in super-slow motion with overwhelming internal resistance to them. Notably, I can do static strikes this way, which I'm nicknaming "mud striking" because it feels like dragging my arms through mud when I do them. Doing even ten to each side is really tough, and if at any point during the movement, there's a loss of "connection" within the body, it's immediately apparent because the strike starts to feel empty (like the mud suddenly disappeared). Mixing sets of that in with sets of strikes done normally seems to work both aspects of powerful, effective striking: strength and proper mechanics, and doing them so slowly and mindfully allows me to experiment nicely with putting my thought on various aspects of the strike or its goals.

Wicked. I'm about to go get at it again now, so for those about to rock... I salute you (with a badass workout).

Thinking It Through

Since my main partner in crime has been half a world away, I've had to turn off my "testing it out" engine almost completely and sink into total visualization to achieve my applications designs. This isn't too far from normal, really, since we really put a strong emphasis on visualizing what we're doing and how to make it work, including, when we really try, a subtle tactile understanding even though we're not making contact. It's been fun, and today, though not with Bradley, I got to give some of these things a go. I was pleasantly surprised again.

These techniques that today I was able to test/feel out for the first time on another person were surprisingly effective... much better than a lot of the half-forced drivel that I normally have to pass off as applications work. Things were smooth and effortless with a definite "one-two-three" feel to their balance going out from under them. The coordination was almost immediate on my part too. I was most happy to see it bouncing a 220-pound willing subject around a little with nearly the same, small amount of effort as it worked on the 115-pound other willing subject. The feedback that gave me made it more clear in which situations to apply those kinds of techniques as well as, in one case, the proper kind of stepping to use with it, and now I feel confident about drilling those moves ad nauseum, whereas before I wasn't entirely so sure.

For those of you that can do it, let me urge an active imagination. It serves as a brilliant proxy when a partner isn't around, and it's probably entirely necessary even when one is. In fact, it almost feels as if the partner is more of a "check" than a required part of the equation.

As for my tribute... it still continues, even though the intensive is winding down. Now it's a quest to get mighty as well as competent. Part of that involved taking a conditioning class last night, which was a pretty decent workout, though some of the exercises seemed to aggravate my hips. Once they're feeling better (hopefully in a matter of hours), I have a feeling that the saber and I are going to go have a few more rounds, even though I've got a pretty decent bruise on my right hand now (probably from the saber).

Dogwood Winter

My tribute continues with harder workouts involving more resistance: I got a saber, like a real one, finally, at long last, with many thanks due in probably a dozen directions. I'm also incorporating a lot of body-weight resistance type exercises and general strength builders, in addition to the usual. This is partly due to my high desire to develop a lot more physical strength at the moment and partly due to the fact that we're having (another) Dogwood Winter right now. The weather here in the spring is pretty variable with lots of rain and temperature variations, and at the moment, it's finally starting to warm up from the last blast of sub-40 temperatures. It's also clear for the first day in a few, yesterday spitting snow on and off all day and the day before cold rain and sleet. Today looks better, but at the moment, I'm trapped in the office (with no immediate assignment).

Feeling rather creative and not wanting to waste the hour that I'm stuck here (waiting on a student), I decided to do some more of those body-weight exercises including plenty of squats and pushups... but nothing too "weird" in the office. Then, I was struck by an interesting/clever notion. I took a box filled with books and slid it to the middle of the floor, picked it up (it weighs around 60 pounds), turned around, carried it across the small room, and put it on top of the filing cabinet, which is about at shoulder height. Then I stepped back, went back to the box, and proceeded to put it back in the floor. After standing back up, I repeated the exercise a few dozen times. I don't know if it was a great one or not, particularly since I didn't work up a mighty sweat (which suited me just fine here in the office), but it was different and interesting and hopefully building some kind of functional strength, as opposed to just doing repetitions of routine calisthenics.

Hopefully the weather will persist today so that when I get home I can go spend time with my saber (and other drills, outside) again. My hands are mightily sore, though, since I've hardly put it down since I got it. I don't know if that means that I should ease up or not, but I'll push myself a little more first to find out.

Keeping it Up

Two days in a row now have given me workouts that, though shorter than expected, brought me to the point of complete fatigue. I'm turning with my saber, and I'm turning without it. I'm doing strikes and forms and standing, and I'm tossing in body-weight resistance and some light weight training with dumbbells for overall fitness and increased strength, I'm stretching deeply with integrated massage and patting, and I'm doing daoyin (for the first time in my life pain-free in my back, though it hurts a little again now that I'm sitting down and cooled off). In this way goes my tribute to the China intensive, which isn't so intense surely as what my friends in the East are getting.

I'm not sure I'm pleased with my circle at the moment. The wreckage wrought to it earlier in the year by a truck on wet earth has been repaired with a shovel and about fifty pounds of sand, but now it feels a little bit like the beach even after a couple of good hard rains and a fair amount of walking on it. It's not the same feel that it used to have, but I might be quasi-paving it in the process, which is kind of cool. I hope that a few dozen more miles on it will pat it down and bring back the good feeling I had with it last summer. It feels all strange and awkward now, and as often as not (mostly because of the mud but partly because of the feel), I find myself turning indoors or on pavement instead, when my dissertation life provides me time to turn properly at all. I miss the days of feeling like I cheated myself if I hit fewer than five hours on the circle in a week. Right now, and probably until I graduate, I am lucky to get a third of that, most of the time I'd have spent strengthening my body being replaced by sitting in a chair that may be slowly debilitating me instead. I look forward to them being on the horizon again. Maybe by then my circle will feel more normal again, and I won't be adding my current last exercise to my list any longer: sweeping up the sand when I come in the house (because I keep forgetting that it's still on/in/all over/part of/inextricably linked to my shoes, which I lazily only take off sometimes and only rarely when I'm tired, sweating, and wanting something to drink.

Tributing Still

I did the 6:30 thing a few times, but by no means every day. Mostly, I would focus on daoyin and standing exercises that early in the morning, but it always kind of devolved into stretching and meditating. I have been managing pretty solid workouts through the afternoons, however, and given that my time's been a little crushed by my desire to finish my dissertation soon, I've done a fairly decent job at starting to learn some of the strikes from other animal systems, though I'm nowhere near where I had hoped to be by this time. My dissertation, however, is in the "last lap" phase.. all written, proofed through, and awaiting the next (final?) layer of corrections and editions from the adviser. With so little as a temporary check mark from him, I should be able to ramp up the intensity to something more like "intense" than this simmer phase I'm caught in, just as the weather turns nice. I have a grim feeling, though, about the upcoming defense and the amount of preparatory work that might be required.

I've caved, though, feeling like I'm only getting marginally stronger with the fake saber I have. I've increased the protein in my diet and regularity of my workouts with it, to the sad exclusion of other parts of my training, but the development seems slower than I'd hope for. Now I alternate exercises with the saber with exercises with a weight, adapted from full-body kettlebell workouts that I've seen other people do pretty well with. Primarily, I need to strengthen my back and shoulders, which have always been pretty weak for me. As long as I stay on it, I seem to make progress. Maybe I'm coming further than I think I am, but that blade is, as they say, a "real burner."

The Tribute Continues

While I'm sure it pales in comparison to the Beijing intensive, I'm keeping my tribute going. I haven't missed a day (actually in a few weeks) where I didn't do something fun with my fake saber. I've also been much better about getting in some solid turning time (which has been more spotty than I'm used to due to my Ph.D. thesis and the variable weather of my adviser's mood on that matter). Top it off with a renewed dedication to drills, and I feel like I'm doing them some justice. Now all I have to do is decide to get up and start it all off at six in da mornin' to top it off (or train for something like twelve hours a day, which I don't think I can make happen so long as there's this jobby-job thing). Maybe I'll try 6:30 or something tomorrow. Sometimes you dive in; sometimes you put a toe in first.

So, my (half-dozen) readers around the globe, send salute and tribute to your YSB comrades that are either in Beijing or heading that way soon by upping your workouts until the end of the intensive. Feel free to comment and put some publication on what you're up to!

Integration

A number of things are going on. I have trigger point work steadily improving the dilapidated state of my low back to the point where I feel *mostly* normal again. I'm still leaning forward somewhat, but sooner or later, I'll get that released. My (outer) body is feeling more integrated.

I found a book on my shelf on "Internal Exercises" that looks totally crappy because it has no artwork and is mustard yellow, and I've been reading it. It's really freaking cool. The exercises I've been up to with it for the last few days seem to have made me feel generally better, are helping my back along more quickly, and seem to be improving my myopic eyesight. My inner body is feeling more integrated.

I'm doing a fairly powerful intestinal cleanse. I feel lighter. That's all I want to say about that.

I figured out a great way to "integrate" the saber into training as well as into life. First of all, when I make my "rounds" in the yard (checking on the various plants we're cultivating), I carry my proxy saber around with me until my arm burns so bad I want to drop it. Then I switch arms. However long my little yard adventures last, that carrying around does as well. That's day-to-day activities. Secondly, I just did a fantastic workout where I alternated between saber drills and empty-hand drills. I'd do some standing or striking or forms work without the saber, and then I'd pick up the saber and do a basic drill or turn or go through the three sections of the form that I know. Back and forth, back and forth, one or two drills each time. It was pretty nice and kept me busy for roughly 90 minutes straight. If I sucked wind in between, instead of standing there and waiting, I walked around my driveway (which is a little loop) at a brisk pace, in a low stance when my breathing wasn't terrible and in a relaxed manner when I was huffing and puffing (some of those low-stance saber drills wipe me out still). The only thing I didn't "integrate" was turning. I'll do that in a little while.

So this is the beginning of my humble tribute to my friends suffering and improving in Beijing, since I couldn't go with. They should be sleeping now, but I'm sure they're dreaming about the warm spring sun I was just soaking in while I sweat, keeping them in mind.

Been Meaning To

I've been meaning to post again, I really have. I just haven't had much time. I've been desperately trying to figure out what else to do for my dissertation (without hearing a peep from my adviser, which is making me nervous again) and therefore chasing wild tails that go nowhere but take a long time, doing tremendous side research because my wife's planning to have a surgery in May, and, of course, training. Thanks to a little "detox" tea (involving senna), I have time right now that I can't use for training, I figure I've researched up enough for my wife, and I just don't know what else to do for my dissertation. Thus, I'm finally posting.

Here are some of the posts I wanted to make but didn't:

• Turning With the Saber: After finally getting access to the saber basics dvd, I learned to do this properly. What a tale.

• Proxy Saber Under the Worm Moon: I went outside near midnight on the night of the full moon this month and turned in the bright, pale moonlight, carrying my proxy saber. Then I did some drills with it. Then I turned without it, but only for a few minutes. It was late.

• It's Not Cold Now, You Pussies: Now that spring is arriving, I was considering changing the small online ad for our study group to include this line based on the fact that our group has grown essentially none through the cold months, though some interest was expressed until people found out that we practice outside (even that one night when it was 12 degrees F out, which kind of sucked).

• No Sleep Till Saber: I'm feeling the itch and burn for the real saber I'll have in hand in about three weeks, after Bradley comes back from Chink-a-Chink-a-China. In the meantime, I'm burning up my proxy to prepare for the training I want to do that will do justice to the Silver Snake once I have it.

• Yijing: This would have been the exciting emotional rollercoaster that tells the tale of how I spent a long time compiling a nice list of how the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing might correspond with or lend theory to each of the forms in YSB, even though I'm totally ignorant of the vast majority of those. It was long, it was interesting, it might have been worth something (or not), and my computer ate it after I finished it. All was lost. There was almost crying, but I laughed and let it go instead. I might redo it piecewise (instead of all at once) in a more secure way.

If I gave a different title to today's post, it would have been along the lines of "Kicking it Up and Branching Out." Besides the increased practice with the proxy, loving some of the drills from the video (and hating others!), there's been a general increase in all things training. There has also been an increased emphasis on practicing three-strike drills with applicability and intent foremost in our minds, some of which are borrowed and some of which are o.g.'s (i.e. original), designed particularly to help our new guy (note: singular) develop with the Lion basics. That covers the "kicking it up" part.

The "branching out" is partly in reaction to the posted curriculum from Beijing and partly in reaction to something I read on our forum that indicates that a stronger feel and understanding for the Lion system comes from tasting the other animals a little. Since I have all the basic-drills videos now, the idea was to start learning some/all of the basic strikes from the Dragon, Phoenix, and Bear systems, though not making those a foremost part of our practice. I've only done so up until now with one palm in the Dragon and one palm in the Bear, but I have four palms total (2 Dragon and 1 from each other) that I want to look at this week. The new drills are making me sore in new ways and forcing me to think about emitting force differently, which is interesting. It's also already changing my approach and thought about the Lion System, which is rocking cool, though slight at this early hour.

Another post I might have done today might have been "The Fifty-Six." Bradley and I have decided that it's high-time that we sat down with the videos (figuratively sitting) and learned all 56 Lion System forms. At our peak, we knew roughly 30-35 of them, but we've forgotten most because we didn't know how to train them properly and didn't make time to practice all of them frequently enough (we often wonder how it is that one is able to do all of the training that we should as well as "maintain" 56 forms while drilling certain ones really hard to get good at them.. then we realized that there are certain forms that we'll probably never forget now and are getting better with.. realizing that what made that happen is intense drilling with intention and analysis). We've realized we can probably intensely drill two or three forms at a time, maybe per week, which should get us all fifty-six within a reasonable amount of time. We've also conjectured that we can speed this up and benefit more (win-win or two-for-one) by focusing on one attacking method at a time and working those, since in theory, at least, there should be some overlap.

That gives some idea of what's been going on and what will be going on. With luck, I'll have time to keep updates on here. With more luck, I'll graduate soon and no longer have the fear of a dissertation hanging over me and will have more time for all things good. In any case, Bradley leaves for China in less than a week, and so I'll have to figure out how to deal with my separation anxiety while he's gone. So ronery....