The rest of the first week

Thursday and friday were really though days, I have been having real difficulty sleeping, firstly my room must be about 10 degrees celcius at night. Despite being physically and mentally exhausted I just can't fall asleep. In the mornings lifting the bed sheets is a mission, I've discovered so many muscles I never knew I had.


During fridays morning session there was an argument between Rahul and Michael. Michael being in his 30's and experienced in martial arts got upset with Rahul who is 18 and on a mission to make it big in Bollywood back in India. I have been warned about him by all students and now I can see what they mean, he has no respect for the masters and everything is just a joke to him. I can't believe he has been here for 4 months already.

On friday a new student arrived, Axel from Malta who is in his 30's.

Most of the training sessions have a pretty standardised warm up but it does vary. We usually need to run 5 laps of the basketball court outside and with strong winds and temperatures ranging from -25 to -30 Celcius this is extremely unpleasant. This is followed by

Stretching
4 sets Sprints (about 30m with no rest intervals)
2 sets one legged jumps (30m no rest then swap the leg)
Stretching and holding mabu, gumbu, pubu for 1 minute (if you can)
4 sets of kicks (2 sets of straight up, inside, outside, side kick)
8 sets of different kicking and punching variations
2 sets of duck walk
2 sets of frog jumps
5 sets of 10 pushups with holding on the down movement for 2 seconds
3 sets of 20 squats with holding on the down position for 2 seconds

After this warm up we practice our forms.

We also had a room inspection, luckily my room was tidy, other students got gooned. A goon is the chinese word for stick, being gooned means you need to assume the push up position and accept a scolding from the stick. We were also told that "this is china no your home country, you must be tidy".

The snow outside just keeps coming and we have spent quite a few training sessions shoveling snow, something I've never done in my life before. The shovels are basically two pieces of wood nailed toegether, a long stick and a square plank, very innovative.

My knee has been hurting really bad from all the running in the cold and all the jumping and movements we keep doing, hopefully it passes.

The weekend was extremely boring, there is nothing to do and too cold to go outside, I did a bit of reading and just sat around letting time go by. I also did some washing, first time I've had to do in my life and I must say its actually quite relaxing.