Expressions of Jay Drake

Tonight was an exciting night. It was the first night in months that I have practiced Lung Shou Pai kung fu along with someone. Truthfully, I haven’t practiced much at all on my own in this time, even. My return to practice was much needed and very much enjoyed.

When I first considered the prospect of moving away from Jackson, MS all the way to Tampa, FL I dreaded the thought of no longer being able to progress in the kung fu system I had grown to love. I knew there would be plenty of other kung fu families I could join in Tampa, but I had grown rather attached to what I had been learning and absolutely hated the thought of abandoning the goals I had set for myself of attaining my black belt in the Lung Shou Pai tradition and considering that as my new starting point.

Consistently able to help me in regards to my kung fu practice, Siheng Glover determined that there not only was someone I may be able to practice with in the Tampa area, but someone who was a master level black belt in the system. He made contact with Master Geoff and got us connected via email, which ultimately lead to us finally meeting up this evening for a good, if somewhat short, practice at a nearby state park. (Which I will certainly be exploring further in the near future as it seemed to be a very nice, large park.)

Today’s work out started with forms. We went through Yun Tung, Chen Ch’eng, Tiger, Combined Set and the little bit of Crane I had learned before moving, and then a few additional steps in that. We then jumped into some one-step drills that I had been previously unfamiliar with which each involved a single deflection along with a combination of hand strikes or kicks. We worked through five different one-steps to each side.

Showing up, I really did not know what to expect. I suppose this was, at least to some degree, mutual. I am very pleased with the practice we had and I am looking forward to the next opportunity to practice with Master Geoff again, which is tentatively scheduled for sometime next week, dependent on scheduling. Despite the workout that was approximately just over an hour being plenty to wear me down a good bit, I am hoping to spend a bit more time next week and push the endurance a little more. Tentatively, I am hoping to largely repeat what we did tonight, perhaps with more repetition, as I know my lack of practice, both this past few months and even months prior to that in some cases, has been hard on my ability to work through any of the forms beyond Yun Tung and perhaps Chen Ch’eng. Adding a little more to Crane would be excellent as well.

I think in the short term, what I would very much like to do is learn the rest of what I would have learned this previous session with Sifu Crake, along with new material like the one-steps we practiced tonight and then really become solid in this and the material I have learned to date. I suppose what I would like to manage is to reach a point where I feel very confident that I could pass the brown belt test I missed out on in the move, and add to that some amount of material that I might not have learned had I not moved, but that has been taught before at this level.

I do not know yet if I will seek to earn further belts in this system, or how I might do so. I do know that after I have reached this short term goal, I do wish to continue to grow as a practitioner of Lung Shou Pai and eventually be a black belt level student, whether I am awarded such or not. After all, the goal has never been to have the black belt, but to be capable of performing at the level of one who has earned their black belt.

My first week of this fairly restrictive diet has gone reasonably well. I have only had a few, very minor, instances where I ate something that wasn’t on it, despite the lengthy (and possibly growing) list of foods I’m not eating for this 30 days. Where I have slipped, most would forgive readily. A banana before kung fu is something most wouldn’t even conceive of saying no to. A little bit of sauce that was in a meat dish that I wasn’t aware of until after the fact, is something I could have checked on, but not a big deal. Adding a very light amount of thai peanut sauce to my chicken last night was probably the worst of it. As soon as I put it on there, I was admonishing myself for cheating. Ah well.

With the weekend upon us, I am going to have to work really hard to keep myself from indulging in the foods I want, or the foods that are convenient. I am still trying to decide whether or not I will go to a chili cookoff Saturday, noting that most (if not all) of the chili will likely have some element that is not on my diet. At present, I think I am going to stick with trying to keep my diet as clean as possible and skip it. If I can keep away from chocolate, I can live without sampling chili.

The results have been good so far. I have been cutting back on foods that I don’t need for all of 5 days and already I have shed 2 pounds at the scale. I was well pleased to see 230 even this morning after my shower. – A number I had surpassed this past year and then creeped back up over to sit around 232-233 lbs.

This number definitely encourages me not only to stick to it this weekend, but to make sure to put in some good exercise time as well. I’m (not) looking forward to some burpees, air squats, push ups and breaking out the jump rope Saturday, followed by some good, moderate stretching.

Previously I mentioned my fresh start, giving an overview of the many ways in which I am beginning anew, and wrote a little about exercise. To date, I am sad to say, I have done very poorly in this first initiative. I need to work a good bit more on getting to sleep early, so I can wake up and do what I have decided I want to do. I also need to just go ahead and wake up and force myself to get through it on those days when I don’t manage to get enough sleep.

So, on to the next beginning. Eating habits. I decided this week that it is time to go ahead and bite the bullet. Time to do away with my extremely poor eating habits and work on feeding myself in a way that is straight up good for me. To this end, I swore off sweet for 30 days. Not just sugar. Sweet. No sugar, no sweeteners, not even fruits. If it is at all sweet, it is subject to getting skipped entirely for the next 30 days. This isn’t a quick and dirty attempt to lose some weight over the course of the month, though. This is forcing myself to go without the sweet flavors that I can’t get enough of, and trying to break out of my habit of grabbing anything sweet and chowing down on it. Thirty days is only the beginning.

After a good bit of consideration, and a couple days of doing rather well with this, I decided that I was going to push this even further. So long grains. So long dairy. So long legumes. I am even considering saying so long to another group of vegetation that I have heard called nightshades. In short, I’m going all in for 30 days.

I am tired of being fat. I am tired of being tired. I want to see that I can make it through this, and then consider where I am going from there. I know it won’t be easy. Beyond the simple reality that I want things that I am not allowing myself to have, I have a wife and kids and that means there will be food in the house that doesn’t fit within my personal restrictions. It also means my time is that much more precious as I need to take some of it for them. As much as possible. More exercise and more food preparation means less time. I said it in the past about my kung fu, though. No excuses. Maybe I haven’t done as well as I could there, but so far I have done well. I can do this.

While I have certainly made steady progress in my kung fu practice, as well as in improving my overall health, today I took steps (literally!) toward ramping up my fitness and, if all goes as planned, I will also be pushing myself harder in my martial art practice as well. This week marks a new beginning in four ways. First, in exercise, what is most notable to me this morning. Second is diet, particularly breakfast. Third is my kung fu practice as we started our most recent session last night. Last is a new beginning for Expressions of Jay Drake. I have not written here in quite a long time, nor have I put in the effort as of yet to resurrect what once was here.

I have been talking for a little while with friends and family now about getting up earlier in the mornings and putting in a solid work out and getting together a more healthy breakfast to start my day off. Considering the recent time change, I have been really seriously thinking that this would be a great time to get right on that and, when I woke fully as my alarm went off yesterday morning instead of smacking the snooze button while still unconscious, I realized that I had best not put this off any longer.

So, with this in mind I set my alarm earlier so as to wake me at 5:55am (an absolutely unpleasant hour by my reckoning) and when that alarm sounded this morning, I got up. It took me a little bit to get my bearings, find clothes, get dressed, grab a glass of water, find our  cell phone (yes, we are a one cell phone family)  so I would have some means to track time and get out the door, then I was off and running! – Actually, I was off and walking. Exactly as planned, I went ahead and walked at something between a brisk and leisurely pace for thirty minutes. Glancing at the time every 5-10 minutes to be sure I was on track, I was able to plot out what turned out to be a perfect route from my door right back to my door that took me just under the thirty minutes I had decided on. Upon arriving home, I quickly set to some mild-to-moderate stretching, using the stretches I have learned in my kung fu practice that we do during our warm up. Once those were done, I was feeling fairly good and decided to go ahead and do the knee-to-chest sit ups and crunches that we do in our warm up as well. Fifteen knee-to-chest sit ups and nine crunches later, I was starting to seriously feel it. I knocked out another six crunches, rested a moment and decided to go ahead and do the push ups too. Ten dragon claw push ups were no trouble, followed by ten knuckle push ups that really had me hurting and I was done and ready to hit the showers.

Just under an hour, all told, and I feel pretty good about this as a starting point. The intention is to do this every week day, and possibly move up to jogging using the couch to 5k program. I also have some plans forming to put in an hour or two of kung fu each weekend, mostly working on forms, varying the emphasis between using the forms to stretch out and improve the endurance in my muscles as well as using them one after the other to build up my stamina all while ingraining them in me such that I can perform them when needed without fail. One portion of our belt tests is an endurance test, during which we are simply to perform kung fu at a strong pace for some number of minutes determined by belt level and from this experience I can say with certainty that just a few minutes of kung fu is a challenge. These forms practices will help me build up stamina both for this portion of the test and general purpose, as well as making it easier for me to do good, clean kung fu during the endurance test by improving my memory of the forms so that I can simply work through them during the test. – Often, in the past, I would get lost while trying to do this for the test at which point in time I would simply begin to perform kung fu freestyle.

These are my new beginnings, as they relate to exercise.