Friday 18 December 2009

Endings. And beginnings

Last night was the last Tactical Edge class of 2009. Several things conspired to make it more 'interesting':

  • Only 4 of us turned up.

  • The weather - incl the first snow of the season - managed to make it even colder in the dojo than normal.

  • It was the last ever class in that venue.

Thoughts on the session - I'm glad I went even though I've been bone-tired all week. Because there were so few of us, Marcus ran a different sort of class. We worked variations of what I know as a pelampas defence, working from the inside and outside. We then developed this to start adding in striking combinations.

From there we moved on to some knife stuff, using the pelampas defences to defend against single and double blades. We did some sumbrada 5 count drills. It was nice to see that I was just as mince at sumbrada with a knife as I ever was with a stick lolololol. Adding a second knife actually made it slightly easier for me for some truly bizarre reason.

I was training with the inimitable Bear, who is a lovely guy and who definitely deserves top marks for his patience and sense of humour!

I'm certainly not sorry to be bidding farewell to that venue though. Unheated, damp, falling apart, grubby and nasty - nah, not sorry at all.

Here's to many happy training hours at the new venue.


5 comments:

  1. I learn so many new words and ideas from your blog - I have to go and look them up! I'd never heard of sumbrada drills or pelampas defenses before - you should write more fully on these techniques, they sound interesting. Thanks!

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  2. Hi Sue

    They're predominantly Indonesian / Filipino terms, and generally relate to weapons drills which originate from silat or kali (certainly the ones I was originally taught were). They're hard to describe and I'm not sure that I'm esp qualified to write about them, but I do take your point! One guy I trained with uploaded a number of videos to YouTube so I will try and link to those for you. I think you would find them interesting.

    Avril

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  3. Happy holidays to you and keep posting!

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