First Blood Part II
Jan. 16th, 2003 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynSome of y'all may remember that last year I was the first in my karate class to draw blood. It was an accident during an overhead strike/sidestep drill; I clipped an orange belt's glasses when he didn't sidestep far enough, and drove them into his nose by mistake. Well, today I was on the receiving end. We were practicing a similar drill, but the idea was for the other person to do a high block. In my case the other person was Jacob. He's my height, but he's a good deal older than me - he's mostly bald and what's left of his hair is graying. This does not mean 'no danger' to me; this means 'even if he only started training when he was as old as I am, HOW MUCH OF A LEAD DOES HE HAVE???'. Jacob's a yellow belt in our school but that means jack diddly squat. He's trained in other arts, to the point where I called him the Old Snake today - his strikes are that fast. After several rounds of practicing punching at the nose, but not hitting it - the idea was to get a feel for the length of our strikes and get used to our classmates coming close but not hitting - we did drills of trying to tap the other person's head while they tried to block.
A few rounds of that were eventually followed by 'not only do you have to block, but I want you to shuffle backwards as well, so that the striker has to move forward to try and hit you'. That was going swimmingly right up until:
1. I moved to strike.
2. Jacob started to shuffle back.
3. I lunged in faster than I'd done before.
4. Jacob's hand came up in the block faster than it had before.
I've never actually been seriously hit before, except for the time I ran into a concrete barrel with my face, which is not the same thing. It was startling, to say the least. The impact zone seemed to be from just above my chin to the top of the soft bit of my nose, and everything in that area hurt at once. I put my hand up immediately to see what was bleeding, thinking it was my nose, but it turned out to be my bottom lip (and possibly my top, but mostly the bottom). Jacob's block had slammed my lip upward into the second incisor, but nothing was broken or knocked out, and my nose was as firmly in place as my teeth.
We only had a few minutes left in class anyway, so I went to rinse out my mouth, then came back in and grabbed a paper towel. The instructor had me get a cold pack to try and take down the swelling but that didn't really work, as the pack was designed for arm injuries and was one of those liquid ones. Wouldn't stay put. I bowed at the end with the rest of the class, and Jacob and I worked out exactly what happened. I told him that as long as all my teeth were OK the rest of it was nothing, and he grinned at me. The instructor had asked earlier if we had been brother and sister in a former life or something because of the way we were practicing the tap-and-block drill (stepping out of line, feinting with one hand and striking with the other when we weren't supposed to yet, etc.), so I just said 'Brother and sister indeed'. We both laughed, I went to shower, and that was that.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to figure out how to hold the ice cube on my lip.
A few rounds of that were eventually followed by 'not only do you have to block, but I want you to shuffle backwards as well, so that the striker has to move forward to try and hit you'. That was going swimmingly right up until:
1. I moved to strike.
2. Jacob started to shuffle back.
3. I lunged in faster than I'd done before.
4. Jacob's hand came up in the block faster than it had before.
I've never actually been seriously hit before, except for the time I ran into a concrete barrel with my face, which is not the same thing. It was startling, to say the least. The impact zone seemed to be from just above my chin to the top of the soft bit of my nose, and everything in that area hurt at once. I put my hand up immediately to see what was bleeding, thinking it was my nose, but it turned out to be my bottom lip (and possibly my top, but mostly the bottom). Jacob's block had slammed my lip upward into the second incisor, but nothing was broken or knocked out, and my nose was as firmly in place as my teeth.
We only had a few minutes left in class anyway, so I went to rinse out my mouth, then came back in and grabbed a paper towel. The instructor had me get a cold pack to try and take down the swelling but that didn't really work, as the pack was designed for arm injuries and was one of those liquid ones. Wouldn't stay put. I bowed at the end with the rest of the class, and Jacob and I worked out exactly what happened. I told him that as long as all my teeth were OK the rest of it was nothing, and he grinned at me. The instructor had asked earlier if we had been brother and sister in a former life or something because of the way we were practicing the tap-and-block drill (stepping out of line, feinting with one hand and striking with the other when we weren't supposed to yet, etc.), so I just said 'Brother and sister indeed'. We both laughed, I went to shower, and that was that.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to figure out how to hold the ice cube on my lip.
