Stroke Clinic

A great day in Lake Union. But before that I did some warm-ups by helping my friend Steve and Andrea move. As always, I'm one of the first people to get called for a move. Don't know why. Perhaps I show up? That's the thing about me, I may not be the best athlete, but I do show up. Almost all the time. The more unpleasant the task, the more likely I'll be there.

And so we did a round at Super Buffet. I don't know what it is that makes you hungry at a buffet. And what do they put in the iced tea? I swear I drank a 3/4 of a pitchers worth of iced tea. I felt mighty heavy after the Super Buffet. But it was super fun.

So, onto the Stroke Clinic. I've been dragon boating now for a couple of months and have been given a rudimentary lesson in how to paddle. Seriously, put paddle in water, pull, how hard could it be? Well apparently, there's a lot to technique, and there was something fundamental that they taught me that day, that applies to a lot of sports.

For example when you throw a ball, you don't lead with the upper body right? You lead with the hips. When you throw a punch, it's from the hips that generates the power. And of course in judo, it's all in the hips.

It's the HIPS! I have a fairly strong upper body, but I don't get everything out of it. The whole paddle, is to move your outboard hip forward and push off with it. It's a linear motion. I gotta work on my stroke. I also over-rotate my upper body, which doesn't really help much as I spend the first half of the paddle, counter-rotating. And so it was a good exercise. It was the first time I got a one-on-one instruction on how to paddle. It was lots of fun. To top it off it's a great day on Lake Union. Lots of people and lots of sea-planes taking off and landing.

After an hour break, enough to get home and get my gi-bag. I head over to Seattle-Jujutsu. It was a normal practice of warm-ups, uchikomi, and randori. Elena Zeitsev who was a World Sombo Champ was there. She is very athletic and it was fun to watch her do acrobatics during warmups. I was lucky enough to do some grip fighting with her. She is quick she had some awesome leg picks and same side grip.

Did some more light randori. For the last half hour of practice or so.

It was normal randori. Nothing too bad. Tweaked my left knee a bit, so sat out the last 15 minutes of class and iced my left knee with some frozen corn.