between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Gym today: 1.5 miles in 14:35 minutes, treadmill; 7.5km in 21:50 minutes, bike.

Also, a two-hour jujutsu class.

It turns out that L-the-jujutsu-guy is also a Kali afficionado. And it seems this jujutsu class is less a single-style class than a big mixed bag of everything that's, as the man himself says with brilliant grin and his German accent, exciting and fun.

His definition of fun appears to share many characteristics with a climber definition of fun: ie., it comes complete with pain.

So instead of spending two hours rolling around on the mats like last Wednesday, today we - all two of us - warmed up with some basic strikes, and then moved on to working with sticks.

I've never done any kind of weapon-based work before. It's not a Shotokan thing, and that's very much my background. Once I started to get the hang of the four basic movements, though, I found myself really enjoying it. It's a very fluid style, focused on using momentum as much as strength, centred around attacking and defending less from specific movements than from angles of attack. I found it hard to keep my wrists in a strong right angle while holding the sticks, and to maintain the right angles, but it's definitely pretty cool.

Interesting things: it's a major cardio workout. It also works the shoulder muscles in a big way: I ache across the shoulders right now to a degree I haven't experienced since I first started climbing. And! I have a lovely burst blister on the pad of my right palm now, where it rubbed against the grip of the stick. Another one starting to raise against the bottom of my right index.

Once you get into the rhythm, you can nearly keep it up indefinitely. The interesting part is changing from one rhythm to another, which presumably gets less tricky with more practice. And not tensing up and being distracted by flinching during drills with a partner. (I kind of sucked at that part, since I had a sort of see stick swing for head, want to run away instinct going there.)

In conclusion: very fun, very interesting, definitely want to do more. But right now, I have to go get me some paracetamol for my aches. *g*

I am so, so tempted to skip jujutsu and just go home to bed.

Stubbornness is the way forward. And possibly a chocolate bar, since lunch is over four hours ago and real food more than five hours away, if I go to get beaten up. (You would think a person could keep going on one meal. But not, it seems, if that person is me.)

Necessities keep piling up, and I keep finding more outcomes to worry about. I shall endeavour to remain obstinate, and attempt to rediscover my optimism.

Either that, or vent my rage and spite on the election posters.