Kung Four!

An epilogue of sorts

(Yeah, I know the title doesn’t really work.)

Kung Fu has continued. I’ve yet to break all of my bones and I think I might even be getting slightly back in shape, but those are only minor benefits I’m watching unfold with time. The true good news I bring today is that most if not all of my concerns about the class have evaporated. I’ve gone through two of the classes in the new semester, both from the perspective of the advanced class that I was too stupid to participate in last time around. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve really come along enough to justify my own presence, but since no one else has bothered to kick me out of the second group I’m going to continue to linger and lurk at the back of it each Tuesday.

Most of my previous issues lay in the content of the class and whether it was ever going to get into a more traditional feeling. It’s pointedly those feelings that were obliterated with a certain amount of gusto last week. See, the course is typically an hour long – and so it’s remained – but following it is usually Tai Chi. Sometimes in the other half of the room there would be people practicing what they learned in the hour before. However, since the attendance in the summer course dwindled for Tai Chi they’ve tacked on an additional optional hour focusing exclusively on Praying Mantis Kung Fu. It’s this course that Them Canadian Kung Fu-ers tackled last week on a ‘eh, why not?’ whim.

Turns out it’s moderately hellish.

And by moderately I mean it along with the hour before handily defeated everything the reserves have dared to the throw at me in one go. Everything was presented with their official Chinese names and we were encouraged to learn them. While limping back to the car after we actually tried calculating the number of punches we threw in that class alone (between holding the stances until our legs collapsed) and we gave up with it somewhere in the upper hundreds. I’m left both with a multitude of new words and terminology to consider and the depressing realization that the work out was both great for my legs and inevitably coming again next week. It’s going to be up to us to gather the required courage to attempt something like that again, but the benefits from it are clearly enormous and it’s exactly what I wanted. It’s hard to make up excuses not to do it in the face of that.

Also as an afterthought a round of applause should go out to Josh/Jotacon for sticking around through the entire exercise despite it only being his second week doing this stuff. I felt like it murdered me and I’m aware of the occasionally rigorous routines. What’s worse is I think I justified us staying by saying it should be ‘more laid back’. I’m fairly certain the only reason he hasn’t tried to kill me yet for that is because he either forgot it in the blurry fog of the workout or he’s been crippled from both it and having to work the entire following day. In my defense, I genuinely did think it would be more technique based. Oops?