Friday, November 21, 2008

Tuesday Night at the Budokan

It was another practice at the Budokan.

We practiced rollovers from the turtle. I'm a bit rusty.

Anyways, did standing and groundwork. Overall a decent time.

So, it's been tough trying to recover with my knee. It's quite sensitive and it still hurts. A knee injury affects and permeates your whole life. I guess the point of it is to overcome adversity and keep on going. It's tough, especially knowing that it's hard to get involved and life in general is tough. I do like judo and fighting. My knee seemed very mobile and it was working.

I just have to get going on my other activities, since I let my knee injury stop me from living life to the fullest.  I know now that life goes on, and I should've been going to the pool or something like that. When you stop working out, everything just piles up and you become rather lazy.

It's easy to become lazy. So, I gotta keep on keepin' on.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

A new spring in my step.... and Monday Night Arena Soccer Lights!

I think my knee is pretty much up to 97%. With my soft brace, I took to the field.

It was good to get the blood flowing as goalie. Again the game was fun, and it was cool to be in a Recreational League, however, I swear that the other teams are way better than us. It was the usual result, however, I had some more decent saves this time around with a few that were just whizzers that just blasted to the corners, and it was really tough to block. There were a few shots that bounced back or some that the balls where just there and the best thing to do is to just jump on the ball, curl in a fetal position and hope that the opposing kicker doesn't kick you. And this is a non-contact sport?

I still have problems bending down real fast to block or shots that are wide and I have to jump more than 2 or three feet. The shots are fast and some are cannons.

Our team is now 0-5. I think I'll be vying for one of the worst goalkeepers in the league, however, I think I retain my position, simply because... I have no real clue why.

In light of this dubious achievement, I really like to parallel this to Real Professional or College Teams of Seattle. Let's see. Mariners lost over 100+ games this season. U Dub has not won a single game this season, and Wazoo has only won a single game.

In fact the greatest thing about this weekend's Apple Cup is that someone has to win! It'll be another win for the Cougars or a first win for the Huskies.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/huskies/2008399147_uwfb17.html

I don't know if we have another comparable team in the Recreational "D" League. We are playing a double header next weekend and we need subs. Hey if you have a pair of shin guards and can breathe, let me know...

Anyways, at the end of last night's game, everyone in the Arena Sports Magnuson Staff bailed out quickly like rats from a sinking ship. They turned off the lights in the arena WHILE WE WERE THERE. Anyways, I raised my voice to express my displeasure in colorful language. We are paying customers, are we not? Regardless, I think they sheepishly hid till we left the building. It's their own fault, if they shepherded us out of there politely and helped us gather our things, we would be out of there in 5 minutes. Instead, we stuck around for 15 minutes trying to find our gear under the colorful lights of our personal cell phones. That alone will probably not want me to renew my membership. The soccer leauge is pretty much a cash cow, and there were no apologies given to paying customers, or the fact that the facilities themselves are falling into disrepair. Don't let me even get into the urinals in the men's room. But hey, I'm a guy, I have lowered expectations for sports, but still.

On brighter news, I feel much better with my knee functioning properly. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's judo practice and be normal.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Sunday Night at Seattle Jujutsu

With my knee passing the test of Thursday Night Practice, I feel that I can engage in more active sports. Besides that my fat ass is literally growing. I put on some compression shorts the other day and my belly hung over it. I've gained 8 lbs. since the knee injury and I have to do something about it. Blechh.

It's easy to fall into, "Woe is me, I'm injured..." trap where you don't do basically anything for awhile. 

It sucks in a span of a month. 

Anyways, practice was ran by Lana. She did moving uchikomi drills. It was fun to do an hour and a half of uchikomi to practice and refine some tachi-waza. 

We did some old school ouchi/kouchi drills, as well as combos between seio, kouchi/ouchi, and other drills. 

Overall it was a great night. It was great to get back and have the blood moving again. I took it rather easy and it was great that I can actually do the uchikomi .

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Back in the Saddle. Thursday night practice at Budokan.

Thursday Night practice at the Budokan, was a bit of post hangover recovery. That is, that people were back to practice after the Continental Crown.

Well the Continental Crown was a huge affair with the whole weekend taken up setting up and tearing down the venue, the prep work, and of course the matches themselves. It seems the club is getting tighter, mainly there are a lot of volunteers making the tournament happen.

Thursday Night was typical practice with warm-up, technique and then randori session. My knee has been getting better, and I finally deemed it possible to actually engage in newaza randori.

The technique of the night was an oseakomi pin, which was a bit unorthodox. It involves grabbing the arm passing over the top and pinning from the side. The pin was quite effective, and can easily transition to straight arm bar, or an ude garami. Otherwise it was a good pin.

You can see the technique in this Youtube video at minute 0:45 to 0:48. By the way this is one of my favorite judo video compilations of all time...




I engaged in a bit of standup randori for only one round.

Other than that everything was peachy keen.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Continental Crown...

Wow my brain is fried. I was doing the score sheets for Mat I in the Continental Crown. There were over 100+ matches on the mat and it all went smoothly.

Actually it went rather smooth, and the action kept on flowing. The whole table was doing great, especially with the scoring, texas match card wrangling and the runners. I was glad Dave was there to double up and recheck my work, as it's very important to do so. Especially with people crowding around seeing who was dong what.

At one point we were down to 3 people in the table due to different schedules, with just a score board operator, texas match card handler and myself with the draw sheets.

It was all rather good with the Texas Match Cards, I like that as it makes things simpler. The score sheet was rather simple, after awhile it was either blue or white. It was rather clear and the matches moved fast enough that you had to be rather quick. Over all, even though there were a 103 matches on my mat, I basically saw maybe a dozen of those matches. I know it's hard to believe even though I was in front of the matches, but trying to figure out who will be fighting who, calculating scores on the fly, and ensuring everything was accurate was quite important.

Round robin pools are the hardest as you have to calculate scores based on wins and quality of wins. You also have to do the calculations by hand and ensure accuracy. Looking at it now, yes, it's rather simple math, but things get blurry, when you have parents, coaches, referees asking you what the score is, who is fighting next and so on. The matches moves by so fast, that you have to keep people on deck and everything on track. There were also scratches and forfeits.

Being an Elite "E" level tournament, had to keep everything very accurate to ensure everyone is on track.

The double elimination one is much easier to keep track of, as person x goes hear and person y goes there. Winner goes here, loser goes there, and if loser loses twice, he's eliminated.

At the end everything went smooth. I like the tournaments with the Texas Match Cards as a fighter as everything is rather definite, you know you have match 53 and you're blue, afterwards you have match 58 white. So you know you have to be in your blue gi and then change to your white one afterwards. As a scorer, I like the Texas Match Card as it keeps a record of your wins or losses, as well as you can set up who is fighting who on the table and know who is up next. You also know that if an athlete gives you his card that he is checked in, knows when his fight is and which color he is. It's a lot more work on the prep end, but makes things so much smoother.

The funny thing is you start recognizing people all around. It's a small small world. The referees, the parents, the athletes, the volunteers. Familiar faces all around. It was a fun tournament. At the end of the night, I was tired. I was up early, up late last night and did scoring all day. When I came home, I crashed hard.

Anyways, I'm still hobbling a bit, but my knee is getting much better. I could do some things, but I think I can come to practice next week if I take it easy. All this sitting around makes me antsy. Looking forward to some good practices next week.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Listening to Auburn Bob's Advice

.... So I have been taking it easy.

I didn't go Thursday, Sunday and tonight's Judo Practice. Last night was soccer and I simply watched from the sidelines and watched.

It's really tough for me to sit on the sidelines. It sucks even more being hobbled. I skip/hop from place to place It sucks. I do need to go to the gym somehow and not push myself because being fat sucks. I've totally eaten about 3 lbs. of Halloween Candy. All that excess. OUCH!

Sitting down and being sedentary is just not good for my health. NOT so good.

Anyways took pictures from last night's soccer game. It was fun to watch, but I'd rather I was out on the field. The smart thing was that I didn't bring in my gym bag. Which forced me to sit on the sidelines and support the team. My Defensiveman, Ted, his outer left knee was bugging him and I saw him hobbling after the game. Not good.

I really think that my circle of friends and myself are getting older. I don't know. When I was much much younger, say 10 years ago, not as many injuries floated around, and if it did, people would be sideline for about a week or so and then back in the game.

Then again, I've only been hurting for a week and a day and it sucks. I have noticed significant improvement in my knee. It's coming to the point that it's almost mobile, I'm just going to take it easy because it's not as painful and I could easily push it to the point of breaking again.

For now, just enjoy these pictures: