This past week has been hellacious to me… work has been driving me into the ground, and a laundry list of other social events have kept me out of the dojo a lot more than I would prefer in nice weather such as this. An appointment kept me late tonight, but I decided to get in one class in Mapleton.
It’s better than no class, as my beautiful wife says.
And it was. I got there at the tail end of the first class, in between the classes I did one Sochin kata so I could get Sensei Brewer’s input. He said it was coming along, and offered a few points that I need to work on. I’ve gotten a lot of good kata feedback from very good resources this week. It bodes well for the rest of the summer. 
I’m starting to feel comfortable in the kata. Tonight was the first night that I felt stable throughout the kata, and my movements felt like they were gradually picking up power as the kata continued. I like that feeling, I hope it comes back frequently.
For the second class, we did all the Heian katas required for the people taking their test. We capped off the class with some three-time attack and three to five time attack. It was a nice, laid back workout that I really needed. Work has been taking it out of me and I find the dojo very cathartic and refreshing in times like this.
Tomorrow my wife and I make for Indianapolis and the beckoning maw of Gen Con! I will come back with a Flickr album and a lot of stories, I’m sure!
Sochin Counter
Accomplished / Goal == Percent Complete
1057 / 2000 == 52.85%
Average Kata per Workout: 13.73
Estimated Workouts Remaining: 69
Workouts that gained more than 1%: 25
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5 users responded in this post
May I ask how/why you and Matt decided to choose Sochin as the kata to do 1,000 times this year? How did this all come about?
Of course! The tale begins for me on January 21st of this year. I was looking for a goal to do for 2006, and told me to pick something crazy and go for it, like 2000 Sochin or something.
The reason it was Sochin was because Sensei Hassell recommended that kata for me to work on as my next one so it could help correct some of the problems I had with keeping the center of my body stable and my stance on the ground.
So I decided to stick with the aforementioned 2000 Sochin as a goal to be achieved by Jan 21, 2007. Whether or not I will actually make it is yet to be seen, but I’m going to try. Plus it doesn’t help matters that we happen to have a local expert on the kata to provide advice. I’m sure you don’t know anything about that.
I decided I wanted to get good at Sochin several years ago, as it is a kata for big moose-type people, and I am a big moose-type person. As a result, I worked on it a little bit and did the kata on my first nidan test. That didn’t work out so good, so I stopped doing it for awhile to focus on kata a bit more test-friendly.
Then, when I found out Josh was going with his insane goal, I decided I would go along with him (albeit at a slightly less insane pace), as I both liked the kata a lot and wanted to prove to myself that I could do it at an advanced level.
That, as Paul Harvey says, is the rest of the story.
local expert?
my daddy…Rickie Lee Brewer?
I’m so proud of both of you! That’s quite the motivation and discipline!
Next year you should both work on becoming vegetarians!
…dirty carnivores…
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