Expressions of Jay Drake

…at least that’s what it tells me.

I’ve a habit of searching phrases on Google that most wouldn’t really ever bother with, such as my own name, and today a search for Jay Drake quite happily turned up the Expressions of Jay Drake blog as the number one result. The good news, then, is that all those people out there looking for me, wanting to read what I have to write should surely have no difficulty in finding me. The bad news is there are probably all of three people who fit that description, and they all have bookmarked this site long ago.

That said, with Google on my side, I am inspired to write a little more in the near future about my Kung Fu training.

As I continue to train more and harder, little difficulties and overcoming them seem to be of great interest to me. One such difficulty that I have been trying to work through since earning my yellow belt has been the knuckle push ups at the end of our warm up exercises.

Prior to earning my yellow belt, knuckle push ups seemed like just another exercise in a warm up that I would not have too much trouble getting accustomed to. I was wrong. At first I thought the main issue was the mild case of tendonitis I had developed toward the end of white belt that caused me to miss out some in yellow belt on even the palm push ups, let alone the knuckle push ups, and that once I was past that and back to my normal condition, all would be well. That time came and went and still the knuckle push ups were the single most dreaded part of our warm up. While other things were, and still are, difficult on so many levels, the knuckle push ups, and my failure to complete them, was truly frustrating to me.

It wasn’t until recently, now an orange belt some 8 months after having entered the beginner class as a yellow belt, that I actually started to manage even a single knuckle push up. From there I reached 3, 4, but quickly got stuck there. A month later, 5 or 6. This week, however, I managed 10 knuckle push ups both Tuesday and Thursday, and though they were fairly shallow I was elated. Finally I had broken through this barrier and could quit concerning myself with something that really isn’t so very important in the grand scheme of things.

With steady, continued training I hope that I can reach a point where I am capable of 10 much more solid knuckle push ups before I test for my next belt and entry into the intermediate class.

One need not be a fan of Salvador Dali’s art to have heard of him and seen some of what he has created. Among his works is one that was brought to my attention many years ago as a favorite that certainly appealed to me, titled ‘Swans Reflecting Elephants’. If you have never seen the painting, feel free to take a moment to acquaint yourself with it now or later. It is worth the time.

In the painting, three swans float on a glassy pond, their reflections, combined with the reflection of other elements in the painting appear as elephants. While I’m sure someone with a better art background than I have could speak on, that bit that was significant enough to title the painting is what I am focusing on today.

The painting came to mind while I was reflecting on an event of this past week. As is fairly normal for me, I had been practicing my form out behind my place of employment while I waited for my wife to pick me up after work. In the midst of this, I noted one of my co-workers exit the buiding and just stand there watching while I finished. I’ve found this to be fairly common and I can certainly appreciate that stumbling upon someone doing kung fu in his business attire outside the back door at the end of the day is somewhat unusual and intriguing. As seems to be the custom for such a situation, the woman waited for me to stop before asking what I was doing. My response was simply, “Kung fu”. Normally, this leads to a question or two, or perhaps just a nod before going back about one’s business, but this was not to be a normal day. Where others might engage in polite discussion and then politely excuse themselves to their business, this woman seemed to find this to be so amusing that she simply began to laugh.

When I say that she began to laugh, I don’t mean that she chuckled a bit before politely going on her way, whether with or without a bit of conversation. Rather, she simply laughed as though she had just observed the most ridiculous thing of her life, walked straight on past me, still laughing and continued to laugh all the way down the sidewalk to her car. For all I know, she continued in this for untold hours.

This is where I come back to the ‘Swans Reflecting Elephants’. I am not the most self-concious person out there, by far. If I were, I would certainly not have started practicing kung fu behind my work place and definitely wouldn’t have continued. As it stands, I have been a little bashful about walking out and just going to it while people are around, but push through if people show up when I have already started, which is a step up from where I was when I first would practice this way. When this woman came along and started to laugh, however, I quickly felt very embarassed, as she continued while passing me I then became somewhat angry, but as I watched her continue on to her car my mood shifted again, and I saw how ironically funny the situation was and I felt sorry for the woman for not seeing what then saw all too clearly.

Yes, I am an overweight, older guy practicing kung fu out behind my work place, but the fact of the matter is that I am less overweight because of that kung fu and slowly getting into better and better shape. The woman who laughed, though, used to be considered a true beauty by many of my male colleagues at my place of employment, but where I have been shedding my fat, she has been gaining quite quickly. Such was my amusement, as I watched her waddle out to her car, laughing at me for bettering myself when she could surely use some form of exercise herself.

I imagine myself to be like those swans, looking down into the pool and seeing elephants. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly no tall, graceful beauty yet, but I am certainly on my way to being a trim, good looking guy. The reflection of an elephant that I see is how I am used to seeing myself, and what I expect. I rather wonder if a reflection of a swan is what this woman is used to seeing and continues to believe in for herself.

Just shy of two weeks now before my next test, and it’s hard to believe that four months have gone by so quickly. I apologize to those who were paying attention and wondered where I had gone to during that time. I wish that I could say that my kung fu practice was taking up a great deal of my time, but the truth is that beyond getting to the kwoon on a regular basis, both for white belt and beginner classes now, I have not been putting in as much practice as I had in the past. Granted, going to both classes regularly means an extra couple hours a week of kung fu in itself.

So, with all that said, and a test coming up, I have taken some time to do a little self-evaluation. The sum of the material for this level is as follows:

• Roundhouse kicks
• Back kicks
• Knife hand strikes
• Ridge hand strikes
• Palm strikes
• Dragon claw strikes
• Finger tip strikes
• Plum Blossom B (all open hand strikes above)
• Beginner form part 1
• Hair grab defense
• Pull away, straight arm grab defense
• Push away, cross arm grab defense
• Fighting salutation
• Formal salutation

For the most part, I feel ready. I am reasonably pleased with the strikes and kicks, though I could certainly improve in most, if not all of those still, and I have reasonably commited the Plum Blossom B and form to memory. This is good. I feel rather strongly that I can pass this test, but I do see some places I want to improve before then.

First, Plum Blossom B. While I know it, I seem to really falter when doing it. Fortunately this is the easiest problem to overcome. I simply must practice it. Daily. Many times daily. The Plum Blossom B pattern of ‘knife hand - ridge hand - finger thrust - palm strike - dragon claw’ is very easy to manage just about anywhere, anytime, however, so I am not overly concerned. I simply need to go ahead and do it. It is probably a good thing that I don’t much care if my co-workers think I’m crazy.

Second is the form. I know it. I can get all the way through it, but much as it was with Yun Tung in white belt, I pause in some places. I still cannot make it straight through. Well enough. I add this to my daily list. Again, I note that I am glad that I am not one to get all embarassed when my co-workers laugh as I find that working my forms after work while I wait for my ride home is very helpful. And yes. Some of them do laugh, but that’s another story.

Those two in mind as where I feel the most need for practice, simply to smooth things out, of the techniques, I find the back kick to be the one which causes me most problems. Simply put, there are a good bit of direction changes, on one foot, and my balance is only so good at this point. I don’t know that I will be perfect in my execution by the time the test comes, but a good deal of practice should at least help to get closer.  I also want to work on each of my strikes a good bit. It is less a matter of feeling that any of the strikes are particularly poor and more a matter of wanting to continue to improve my general striking form. Engaging hips on the short strikes, making the adjustment to bow stance properly when striking long, and remembering to cover up with the front hand when the rear hand comes out. Going through all my strikes improve each of them, and the basic form that I need to get down.

And then there is endurance. This is one of those very basic levels of fitness that I have had a hard time with even as a teen, and this is one of the things I have really appreciated about learning kung fu. White belt was a very gradual ramp up, and moving into the beginner class allowed me to again ramp up gradually with the white belt class, then push for another hour in the beginner class. This has had fantastic results for me and I am now quite capable of making it through a couple hours of light-to-moderate exercise where ten or fifteen minutes had been all I could take before. A couple hours a day, a couple days a week has been good in the past few months, but I feel it is time to really start ramping that up. To those ends, I have picked up a little extra equipment here at home and hope to incorporate a bit more endurance training into my regular home practice.

The freestanding heavy bag is one of the more expensive purchases I’ve made so far in my martial arts training. For $99.99USD, I picked up an Everlast bag that is very similar to the Wavemaster bags we use in the kwoon from Sears. This, along with a good warm up, is a great tool for working my endurance and flexibility, while additionally working on my kicks. My current favorites for endurance training both employ the roundhouse kick. In the first, I will kick as many times as I can in twenty seconds with one leg, rest, switch and repeat. As my endurance improves, I intend to add more time to this, probably 5 seconds at a time. This is a speed exercise we do in the kwoon, and it is a killer. Twenty seconds never seemed so long. The second drill I like to do is to work with a one minute timer and kick, position change, kick, position change, repeat. Again, the intention is to increase the timer, likely in 30 second intervals, as my endurance increases. This one works well for long roundhouse kicks as well. I don’t recommend doing these exercises back to back.

The other piece of equipment I picked up was a jump rope. Ever since the first time I saw Rocky, a handful of years after it’s 1976 release, I have considered the jump rope to be an important part of learning to fight. For the longest time I really didn’t understand how it was, but I figured if Rocky pulled that thing out every day, then it must be important somehow. Now that I’m old and out of shape, I truly understand the value of the jump rope, and find it’s insignificant appearance to be entirely deceiving.

From this I come up with my typical 2-3 days a week work out. I spend anywhere from 1-2 hours going through it, sometimes working one or another part more often. My average workout is something like this:

• Warmup and Stretching
• 20 second roundhouse speed drills (both sides)
• Plum Blossom B
• Back kicks
• Open hand strikes
• 1 minute roundhouse endurance drill
• Fighting Salutation
• Formal salutation and form
• Jump rope

In addition to that, if I feel up to it, I like to take some time to work on Plum Blossom A as well as Yun Tung to keep up with my white belt work. I also enjoy just spending a few minutes here and there blitzing on my heavy bag, and taking a walk and/or jog.

I’ve had a bad habit for awhile now. I’ve been a regular in the crowd that goes out to lunch at local restaurants. In recent past I’ve curbed it a bit on occassion, mostly because I wanted to push my diet a little harder, but this week I have been really thinking about just how much those lunches (and breakfasts) are costing me. It doesn’t seem like much when I hit up a restaurant at lunch time and spend somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen dollars, and even seems less serious at breakfast which tends to be under five, but when I start to really consider it that’s a lot of money when I start doing this four or even five days a week on a regular basis!

Let’s do the math, shall we? To start with, let’s be really conservative and say that eating breakfast and lunch out is costing me $15 a day, five days a week. Staying to the conservative side, let’s call a month 4 weeks even. This means that any given month that I eat out this often (which has really been all too common) I am spending $15 x 5 x 4 every month, or $300! Even if I’m being good at least a little bit that’s $3000 a year. It’s plausibly as expensive as a smoking habit.

Any reasonable person can take note of this and simply decide to not go out to eat and put that money into savings, or paying down debt or even just leave it in that checking account and leave it alone, but I have to admit that my ability to be reasonable when it comes to finances is just not what I’d like it to be.

My co-worker, who also has decided to stamp out his lunch habit has gone the route of having the money he would have been spending automatically pushed to a savings account that isn’t immediately accessible, making it impossible for him to just go on out to lunch without a great deal of hassle. While this seems entirely logical, I find the method a little drastic and honestly somewhat scary to me, having hit the wall with my finances in the past and had those little hassles bite me in the overdraft. Beyond that, it’s still really a matter of willpower for me as I can quite happily go spend the money and move it anyway.

So I decided to make a bit of a game out of this. Instead of saving my money on the front end, expecting to not go out and eat, I save my money when I manage to muster up the willpower not to go out and eat. The workings of my system are simple. If I go out to eat, I lose. I failed. Bad dog. If I skip going out for breakfast, I earn $5, and if I skip going out for lunch I earh $10. Sometime in the afternoon, when I’ve a short break, I figure out how much I earned for the day and transfer it straight on over to my savings account. What really makes this system better for me is that I have potential reward for the challenge every day. The reward that I get for a given day overshadows my desire to go out to eat, and that has helped immensely in keeping on track.

Another part of this that is important for me is that I can still go out for the social interaction. Just because I went ahead and packed a sandwich to munch down at my desk doesn’t mean I can’t hop in the car with my buddies who are going to whatever restaurant and chat with them about whatever topics come up just like usual. The only difference is that I don’t have a plate of food in front of me, and in general I’m drinking water instead of some overpriced soda, tea or juice, which is better for me anyway.

Following this plan I hope to win in so many ways. I get to keep my at-work social life, I get to bolster my savings account and I get to better control what I eat to help push me closer toward my fitness goals. This also opens me up for some options to go ahead and skip out on going with my friends on some days and spend that time doing a little exercise.