week 6

This past week my energy level has been at its lowest and I felt more sore and tired than usual. The weather is changing and getting cold and I think hard training and a lack of sleep has caught up with me. My progress in training has slowed down this past week. The weather, being tired and having low energy were all part of it I'm sure. Another part is that my hands are all torn up and blistered from rope and cinder block training…I trained lighter on these exercises as the week went on so I could give my hands a chance to heal.



(Cinder Block Training...my hands get the most torn up doing this and rope)

Off to my appointments…

I left for Orange County shortly after Tai-Ji Quan practice on Saturday morning. Normally it takes about 9-10 hours for the entire drive but I drove a little slower and made a few stops so it ended up taking over 11 hours…still longer than I had expected. It was a nice scenic drive. This was the longest amount of time I’ve had to myself since being at the retreat center. It was nice to have some alone time and so I spent a large part of the drive just thinking and clearing my mind.

By the time I arrived at my grandmas house in Fountain Valley, Ca where I’m staying it was very late and I was so exhausted from the drive I ended up going right to sleep. My grandma went on a road trip with my mom to Missouri. She wont be back for a while and so for the next few days its just me here in an empty house.

It feels very different being back in a big city after living up on the mountain. Its very busy in Orange County. I have a great time visiting my friends and family when I’m down here and there’s definitely a lot to do. I’ve come to prefer the peacefulness of the mountain. I’ve really grown to appreciate nature….

Today (Monday afternoon) I went and saw my doctor, Dr. Carlos Prietta. He checked my knee out and said everything looked great and training has definitely helped with my recovery process. I had the feeling that my knee was doing fine but there was always that uncertainty of not really being sure…to actually hear it from my doctor was a big relief.

Tomorrow I see my Physical Therapist and from there its going to be a long drive home….back to the mountain.

Rope Training

(Another great way to tear up your hands)

Practicing Chin-na

Rii and our Assignment

There is quite an ambitious documentary being made about the Retreat Center project. All together it’s a 10 year project covering the entire course of training throughout the 10 years. We wont have to wait the entire 10 years to see it though as it will be released in installments.

Our friend Rii, who is involved in the project, drove in from San Francisco yesterday afternoon. She delivered an awesome Apple set up for us to get more involved in both the documentary as well as in developing media for the retreat center and our future projects. Rii spent a large part of the afternoon teaching Ricardo, Mike, and myself how to get familiar with both the computer and the different software programs we‘ll be using. I’m not the most knowledgeable about computers and Apple’s are totally new to me so there’s definitely going to be a little bit of a learning curve.

(Rii explaining the computer and programs)

(Our New Computer...Thank you to those who made this happen)

Shifu has assigned more homework for Ricardo, Mike and myself. Using the new computer we are to film the Retreat Center and design a 5 minute short documentary due when he returns from Taiwan. The documentary is to be about the Retreat Center itself including the facilities, the environment and scenery…no training though. Ricardo, Mike and I were all discussing and sharing our ideas on how we’re going to do this project. Together as a group we seem to have good creativity and we already have a lot of amazing images and footage of the center to work with but can we turn all this into a cool project? I’ll keep you posted on how it all turns out.

And in just a couple of days I’ll be leaving the mountain for my doctors appointment in Orange County….

Wednesday

There’s been quite a bit going on these past couple days. Last night Shifu’s youngest son Nicky arrived here at the Retreat Center from Boston Ma. Nicky is the current president of YMAA and teaches full time at the headquarters school in Boston and oversees the YMAA organization. Last time I saw Nicky was in January or February during Shifu’s winter seminars. During the winter Chin-na seminar I got locked (chin-na’d) by Nicky a few times…a painful experience…I can see he takes after his father. It was nice to see him again and hear how things were going.

Today Shifu, Nicky, Jon and Patrick left for Taiwan early this morning to participate in the World Tai-Ji Quan Tournament held in Taipei. We all would liked to have gone but money is tight. They will be gone for about 12 days. During this time it will be Ricardo, Mike, our guest Stephane, and Myself training here at the Retreat Center. Shifu has given me and Mike orders to use this time to catch up on our Chinese lessons or else…we’re a little behind.

5th week

Where does the time go? Every week I ask myself the same question. The 5th week is now over and the weekend has once again flown by.

This week was raining quite a bit which surprisingly didn’t interfere with our training like we thought it would. During meditation, qigong, Tai ji Quan, qigong lecture and Chinese lessons, it seemed to rain the heaviest. Thankfully all of this training takes place indoors. When it came time for everything else the raining seemed to lighten up or stop entirely. And so we were able to train as usual outdoors.

This week we added rock throwing to our schedule. This is to help build the foundation for throwing coins and darts later on. Its not so much throwing rocks as it is coordinating the 6 bows of the body (both arms, chest, both legs, and spine) and the waist to generate a whipping motion which accelerates speed and power beyond what ordinary throwing could produce. Although it sounds great I’m pretty bad at it so far and my accuracy is way off. So many times I tried whipping the rocks straight ahead but they would somehow manage to fly to the left of right of me and even behind me a couple of times. How is that possible? Man I need work. We do this training for about 20 minutes or so when we reach the bottom of the mountain during our daily run.

(Jennifer at Shelter Cove)

Jennifer, our guest from Montreal went back home this week. She is a very nice woman. Sometimes her and I would walk down the mountain together and talk about different things... life, the program, or Shifu’s lectures. All of us here look forward to her coming back in the future if ever she does.

This weekend Shifu had us put up more training equipment which I believe we’ll begin using this week. We tied a long rope to a tree for vertical climbing and we hung more rope from trees and attached different wooden poles to them for pull up and dip related exercises. Shifu also has asked me to locate some gymnastic rings online for additional training.