My How Tonfa Fly

Hello Again! It’s been a little while and I’ve had adventures and thoughts that I wanted to share. In truth, this blog should probably have been about 3 blogs, and while I began to formulate my ideas earlier I never got around to properly writing things down. Which is a shame, as now I have to try to remember everything I mentally noted over the past few weeks. I am going to apologize now, as I know there will be a lot of things that I will miss here, but my how time flies.

In my last post, I wrote about having thrown my back out for the first time, and how scary and unexpected that was. (Please take care of yourselves!) Well, with help from Sihing Csillag and Todai Ferris I have had some great exercises for strengthening and protecting the back. Since then, I have been able to adapt these exercises and mostly maintain my commitment of 33 pushups, 33 sit-ups (or equivalents), and 1 rep of my hand and weapon form per day. There were two things of note in the week following my back injury that I wanted to mention. First of all was that week we began to learn about a technique I think is called “turtling” where you are on your back and need to turn yourself to keep your feet between yourself and your opponent. I was nervous having just begun to recover, but the practices were fun and Sihing Bjorkquist was a great help. Although after having gotten rug burn on my shoulder blades I have started to wear a rashguard under my uniform.

Secondly, is that on Friday, my brother came over with his kids for the afternoon, and I pulled my mat’s out to the backyard to show him some of the takedown technique’s we had been learning. Specifically, I wanted to show him the move where when you are on your back, and the attacker is coming in at you, then you manage to push them to the ground with your feet and use their momentum to pull yourself up on top. What we wound up doing instead, was that I started to show my niece’s and nephew some basic kung fu inspired moves. Which quickly turned to us working on rolling, somersaulting and trying to do handstands. In all, it was a fantastic afternoon, and I keep hoping to someday bring some new people with me to the kwoon.

After that, things got busy. We were running a lot of training classes to prepare a lot of people to work in the current election. This very quickly turned into actually working the advance polling for the election. And, the past week has been almost all 14 hour days or longer, It has been so much fun. My role has been as the IT Support person, yet I also assisted with virtually all of the training. So, while we advance polls were happening, I was rotating through all of our polling locations helping with anything and everything possible. I helped with setup, and take down, technical problems, and random deliveries. On Tuesday alone, I clocked in over 22,000 steps and more than 100 km’s. I’ve still got a few things to do this coming week, but working the election was a very fun experience. Additionally, through the training and random discussion’s I now have a couple of leads on where I might be able to find some sort of tech related work, either in software development or IT. So that is super exciting!

Lastly, I was able to sneak out of work for a little bit on Saturday to watch a few of the event’s at the Tiger Challenge. I have got to say that everyone did a great job, and I am looking forward to participating in person next year. I knew that I would be unable to register, as I was scheduled to work all day Saturday; however, I was intending to submit a video with my weapon and hand form submissions. I had planned to record my video last weekend, though unfortunately, that didn’t work out. I lost my workout space inside when I got my new fish tank a while back, as I don’t want to risk accidentally losing a tonfa and destroying some fragile piece of glass that is holding back hundreds of pounds of water. So, I have been intending to clear some space in the yard, and later the garage to create a workout space. Last week though was horrendously smokey and there was no reasonable way to do that much exertion outside with the air quality being so bad. I was finally able to record my form’s tonight though, and I have sent them to Sifu Brinker.

It was interesting to see the manner that is practiced when people are presenting their forms for competition. If I would have submitted my video’s last week, I would have just done the form with no introduction’s or anything. And, that may be where I made a bit of a mistake. I think the hand form went mostly okay, though I definitely made a lot of mistakes and need to keep working on my form (and also my balance). But for the weapon form, Oh Boy… When presenting my weapon form I went up to the camera, “Hi my name is Shawn, I’m from SRKF Stony Plain and I would like to show you my Tonfa Form. Let me just present my tonfa for inspection” *Oooh so shiny*. I then proceeded to hit them on the ground a little bit to show of how amazing they were, and how stable and awesome of a weapon they are. The handle snapped off! Thwack, and it was gone. My how the tonfa fly. I did not present my tonfa form, and instead wound up doing my stick form. Where I felt like stick I by itself was too short, so I tried adding stick II which I’m still not very good at. I’m pretty sure I did the wrong moves there too. It is done though, and it was still a fun experience.

On that note, does anyone know where I can find some more Tonfa? And on that note, what about one of those big freestanding punching bags like we use at the Kwoon?

p.s. I’m looking forward to being back at class on Wednesday, but I won’t be around tomorrow as we will be counting ballots for the election until very late.