Break Fast in Honor of a Break Fall, or a Leap of Faith Takes the Cake

My lame attempt at a “diet” is to not drink beer or wine from Monday through Thursday. Admittedly I was weighing the option of breaking this very simple “fast” earlier today after on small glass of red wine offered by our Italian teacher during the very informal Italian class at noon.

BUT, tonight at Aikido we practiced techniques requiring break falls and finished with a Koshi-nage (hip throw). So...all in all it was a glorious class where you were challenged and somehow managed to get through it.

It is a strange thing to simultaneously enjoy something so much yet be so bad at it. I've hit this topic before and it may be just because I am really a klutz and may possibly be the worst possible martial arts practitioner ever. I again felt like the more I practiced my breakfalls the worse I became, BUT, it was great. When we finished with a Koshi-nage from a wrist grab it was like breath of fresh air.

Tonight Mark was teaching and he mentioned doing a breakfall from a shiho-nage technique but said it was pretty tough and that was why we switched to koshi nage. After the demonstration I asked about it and he inocently asked if I wanted to do it and I also innocently said yes. ...I am fine now but with that throw you have to really commit to the leap, a physical and painful leap of faith,

You have to really throw yourself over or your wrist will break, but you can't get your head as low as you want for a normal breakfall and consequently the whole thing is potentially dangerous but usually not, as long as uke and nage are careful.

ANYWAY, for a minute of so it hurt like heck because I am a lumbering ox and getting an ox to suddenly flip it's legs over its head requires serious motivation, also known as “Pain”. But again, I took the fall and was glad I did.

From such a workout you feel great and given my intolerance for the intolerance of a diet, I celebrated with some wine and ate some mozzarella and tomatoes. That too was great.

And to top it off I came home and stayed up late watching too many episodes of The Wire. All in all a great evening of my own brand of paradoxical moderate excess.

The video shows a breakfall from shionage but on my try Nage (the thrower) did not go down to his knees, so I was a bit higher up.