day 261: coming back to spear and pao quan

concepts:

• drills
• 3-d
  

lessons:

• spear and pao quan

i almost missed class this Sunday because 1) i overslept (jet lag is always worse going east than west), and 2) my car battery went out and i had to make an emergency stop at Pep Boys to replace the battery (easy enough to do yourself, but it still takes time). but i made it in time to join everyone else for spear and pao quan. similar to yesterday, we ended up having to backtrack a bit, since most everyone had missed a significant amount of time.

spear

we took time to review the drills we've done to date (moving the spear so that the tip traces paths in crescents that respectively face with the open portion left, right, up, and down), and to do them both solo and in pairs. we then spent time working on a new drill that had the spear tips following long paths that resembled a "J" (uppercase) facing left or right.

Sifu reminded us that we can't have the spear tip follow these patterns on a 2-dimensional vertical plane. he noted that this has become a common mistake, with modern textbooks on spear showing this. he argued (and he referred back to past discussions we've had where he had shown us the modern and original textbooks) that the older textbooks clearly showed that the patterns are supposed to follow a 3-dimensional path, so that the spear tip traces the drill patterns, but also moves forward or backward (i.e., towards or away from the opponent).

this proved to be an added level of difficulty to the other drills. this is because what we did today required an extra level of control--something that's hard when you're already finding it a challenge to move a long wooden pole 2x your own height (and the funny thing is, in ancient China, the actual military spears were much longer than that...which makes we wonder just how much time the ancient soldiers had to spend training to master this weapon).

pao quan

we dedicated the 2nd half of class to pao quan. it's been awhile since we've worked on this (including vacation time, i count 4 weeks for me, possibly longer for some other people). i had to go through the part of the form we've covered several times just to get my bearings back. this ended up consuming the bulk of the time. we managed to get a little bit farther, but i think that for today it was enough of a challenge to our memory to just solidify what we have. hopefully we can get back to the swing of things the next Sunday class.