Last Saturday I did my first Krav Maga class in about 5 years. Today is Monday, and I’ve still got a very store strip of muscles around the middle of my back, from armpit to armpit, from throwing so many punches.
So a bit of history is in order. I had my last KM class back in 2010 (I think). I should research that. But my xyphoid process was broken in a training accident where I was holding a medicine ball to my chest and my training partner was supposed to throw hook and uppercut punches into the sides of it. Sadly, he didn’t know how to do those punches yet, so he just threw straight punches. The medicine ball focused all the power of those punches into a single point – the bone protruding below the end of my breastbone (xyphoid process).
Recovery from that injury took about 4 months or so. By Summer 2011 I was ready to train again, but I had moved to Thousand Oaks and cancelled my enrollment in KM, so I decided to try a summer class at UCLA – Intro to BJJ. That class went very well, and by Fall I was ready to continue. Unfortunately, the transition class (from intro to regular) was taught only on Saturday mornings, and I wasn’t about to make that drive, so I simply dove into the regular class. Well, that didn’t last long. I suffered a rib injury during a drill and it put me out of action for months. By April 2012 I was again able to exercise, but I didn’t train martial arts again. Just exercise, until I demolished my right hip while walking around England and Paris in the summer of 2013. That got rid of the exercise and caused a serious depression that lasted for a year. I gained 50 pounds and lost all my healthy habits and was just resigned to my unavoidable degradation and impending death.
Now I’m mostly over that, and I’m ready to get back to training and exercise and all the good habits I used to have. I’ve got a week of free Krav Maga classes at Simi Valley Krav Maga before I have to commit to paying in advance for my training. I’m going to probably start with a month and see where that gets me. The skills seem to have persisted fairly well, but my stamina and strength is gone.
This just made my day exciting. It’s apparently coincidental that another huge asteroid is making a flyby tomorrow, since the approach will be from a different angle than was apparent in this encounter. The blaze lit up the sky like the sun, and the shockwave set off car alarms and shattered windows. Very exciting!
I watched Fight Club again recently, and I realized that the guy who creates Fight Club in the movie is not Tyler Durden – it’s the guy who sees him beating himself up in the parking lot and asks him “Can I be next?” Without this one guy, the whole movie would be about a crazy person just punching himself.
I’ve been listening to this neural sequencer make music for me all day long. It’s never quite the same. I find myself repeatedly hooked in and then frustrated as it generates and then abandons promising developments and progressions.
John Cleese on Creativity – YouTube. This is a very entertaining and informative lecture on how to be creative (and how to prevent your subordinates from becoming creative and threatening your monopoly on creativity).
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I came across a file on an old hard drive that described a dream I’d had back in 2005. I’m not sure if I remember it or not.
I had another one last night, only this time I joined the Marines. In bootcamp I was the 2nd best Humvee driver so they gave me the keys, only I accidentally locked them in my bag. Oops. All the guys were blaming themselves because they knew they should have beaten me in the driving competition, and if they had then the whole key incident never would have happened.
Then I decided to break into the bag, but on closer investigation I realized I hadn’t locked it properly anyway and it just came right open. Inside were my old shoes and some crumpled up newspaper but no keys. I saw then that it wasn’t even my bag, it was Orwell’s bag. I at first thought he’d stolen my bag with the keys, but his locker was open and empty. I started digging in the dirt underneath my table and found some money but no keys. Then I went to talk to the lieutenant, who was a homeless guy, to ask him about Orwell. I gave him a bagel and he pointed me to the woman in the back office who was his wife.
This computer is awesome! Runs super quiet and fast and cool. Not the best at graphics but I don’t really need much and it’s still better than my old computer. Plus, the care and documentation provided by Puget Systems is far and away the best I’ve ever experienced from a computer seller.
A friend recently invited me to track my daily diet and exercise at http://www.myfitnesspal.com/. She’d lost a lot of weight and I was lamenting the fact that I’d gained a lot of weight since being injured and/or sick for the last 8 months. The site sounded appealing, so when the invitation came, I jumped on it.
So far I’ve been doing it for 4 days, and it’s helping me monitor and motivate my diet and exercise. It’s like a public scoreboard where I can post my daily efforts at improving my fitness, and I’m optimistic that I’ll soon have impressive results to share.
It’ll go on until I either fall injured or sick and am no longer able to pursue the task, or perhaps depression will creep up and sap my motivation. Or perhaps a solid and sustained effort will yield disappointing results and discourage my further use. These things have always happened in the past, so why should this time be any different?
But let’s see if I can drop 30 lbs. How long could it take?
