tailbone

I haven't been as enamored with fighting class lately. A lot of things have played into that, including the fact that work frequently makes me late, so I'm not in the right mental place when I rush in and try to jump into the middle of the workout. 

I seem not to be able to drink enough to hydrate myself lately, and I feel desperately thirsty in the middle of the workout. (I'm trying to drink more earlier in the day to fix that.)

Now that I am a more experienced student, I often end up working with new people rather than learning from the ones even more experienced than I am. It's good for me, but it means that I can't just blast through the scenarios and get advice. I have to get my wrist wrenched over and over in service of teaching someone else how to disarm me.

One of my instructors has decided that I need to work on my speed and explosiveness, two things that are not exactly the forte of my body. My body prefers moving slowly, even when it could keep going forever. (See also: hiking.) So he pushes me to work harder, which I need, but I am also desperately thirsty at the same time, which is miserable.

The same instructor has us practicing the self-defense scenarios in the air over and over, for multiple minutes at a time. It isn't that this practice isn't useful - I have been able to focus on some things that frequently got left behind - but I also find it sort of tedious.

Tonight in the advanced class, though, we did multiple attacker scenarios in the dark - one person comes at you punching, the next kicking, the next choking, the next headlocking - and as I blasted through them, heart pounding, I remembered why I love this stuff. 

Bring it.

Despite the fact that I still can't fall. 

When I had to be an attacker and actually got thrown to the ground, I still landed every single time on my tailbone. I felt that little electrical shock that you get when you land on your tailbone. It's been two years of fighting class, and I'm still going to end up crawling out of bed in pain tomorrow morning (or worse, Saturday morning).