Mizblog

Saturday morning I woke up at 3am, fevered, chilled, weak, and aching everywhere.

At 6am I woke up again, drenched in sweat. My fever broke. I was so relieved. I had resolved that I was going to test even if I was still sick, so I was glad that the illness was getting better. I’d just keep going until I collapsed, either way.

The workshop started at noon. We lined up on the big mat, bowed in, separated orange belt testees from green belt testees, did a quick warm-up, and then the other orange belt testees and I went into the back room with Brandon but no windows and no fans. I was pouring sweat almost immediately. I joked with Jeff that I was like a Rain Bird, spraying sweat in all directions.

Brandon started off by explaining that he was only going to do about half of our orange belt workshop, and then someone else was going to come in and finish us off. This turned out to be a big problem later, but hopefully we’ll get to that. We started with chokes against the wall, and Brandon was showing us that you put the side of your face to the wall.

I had the hardest time with punch/kick defenses + counters. Especially 360 defenses with a counter. My blocks tended to use my fists instead of an open hand, and the counters were often open hand pokes instead of punches. Yikes! Even in the test, I was terrible and made lots of mistakes.

My easiest moves were the kicks (stomping kicks to the front, side, or back; with or without an advancing step) and the ground work (mount stuff, some guard stuff). I was able to rip through that stuff easily and powerfully. But we didn’t get to the ground stuff until the last 2 hours of the 5 hour workshop, and we weren’t taught the ground stuff by Brandon. We had a surprise instructor and tester coming, and it turned out to be Kim. She taught us all the ground stuff, and tried to fill in the stuff that Brandon didn’t cover (based on his notes).

At 5pm we were done with the workshop and we started the testing. I was 2B and Josh was 2A, meaning we were partners for the test.