My Wushu Blog

Okay, ham-ish title, and it’s not like it Wushu West is bad now, just me and my motivation.

As I explained before, the first year or so of wushu I was a wushu craving lunatic. I spent a lot of spare time at work searching for clips, which at the time were hosted on furiousg.com and then moved to wushucentral.com. I’m not sure why I don’t watch random wushu clips now, maybe its because youtube has taken all the work out of finding something, but I really take for granted how easy it is today to find any style you want. So I’d watch clips at work, then either go to Wushu West (from Dublin by the way) or head home to practice the basic combos.

Things were pretty exciting, and since October of 2001 I have constantly had sore legs every all week long. I remember the first night of practice Lynda was teaching me the basic combos and she had warned me of two things:

• Drink water, if you are thirsty when you walk in the door, you are already dehydrated
• you WILL BE SORE, soak in hot water.

The next day I could hardly walk up the stairs to my cube farm at Legato, I was smiling the whole way up though. Within the first month I had received my first injury, and it was a fractured elbow. Like ALL of my wushu related injuries, they are never really cause from wushu itself. It’s always during a game, or warm up. This time, it was while we were jogging around the class and my long pant leg had slid underneath my shoe while turning a corner. Like a clown slipping on a banana peel I went down hard, and cracked my forearm bone (i’m not a doctor so I wont pretend like i know it’s called the ulna or something). For the next few weeks Patti had me focus more on stances and kicks, which are still my favorite things to work on.

In the beginning, progress was quick, it was easy to go from not being able to touch your toes to touching them, then the floor, then palms flat on the floor. After the first year or so, I was involved in my first Wushu West open house where I led the beginners in a group form. I cannot recall what its called, but it’s the first real for we start off with, in between the five-stance combo, and the old school compulsory.

It was the first time I had seen the advanced students perform, and Wil’s emce-ing was pretty entertaining I think my favorite comment was right before Colin did his chain whip set:

Normally a 9-section chain whip is used, Collin however, has to use a 7 section

I remember how nervous I was, but I didn’t mess it up and then I got to spend the rest of the time watching everyone else, including Patti. That gave me goosebumps, I had never see a china pro in the flesh.

I’ve always looked forward to demo’s, and while I occasionally slip up here and there, I think we all pull it together as a group and put on a good show. I dread the thought of competing, and a big reason why eventually competed (once, lets point that out, I’m not totally over it) was because of a blog entry Mark had made. He said that since wushu is all about making yourself better, and you should not shy away from doing something because you are afraid of it or you are not good at it. Thats the reason why you SHOULD do it, you can’t always just work on that jumping front kick you are so good at, but work on the high horse stance, or compete if you are afraid too.

mike Wushu

One evening Michele was a little frustrated with me, about how I never really say anything. I’m a pretty private person even with my own family, so I don’t talk all that much beyond superficial “how’s the weather?”. Well, since I had this secret obsession with wushu, and I figured if Michele really wanted to know what I was thinking of I’d let her in. I believe she thought it was a little far-fetched, again, we didn’t know people who did martial arts especially adults. So I showed her a bunch of Yuen Wen Qing clips, and the cool Compulsory Longfirst routine on Raffi’s site (with Fakin’ the Funk as the background music). I think I had that form memorized in my head before Patti showed me a year or so later.

I still wasn’t ready to fess up to Michele that this is what I wanted to do. I also wanted to loose more weight, and that was also an excuse for me to put off going to one of the wushu schools. Finally we were on some trip, and we were in some hotel room (we may have been up in Oregon for a wedding) and I think I just sort of blurted out that I wanted to do wushu like I suffered from a strange form of turrets. Again, she was a little surprised, but not all that surprised at this point since I was glued to my monitor watching clips all the time. After that I just had to decide where I wanted to go. There were a few places in the San Jose area, and I worked in Dublin so I figured it was at least feasible to go there after work, but I was drawn to either Cal or Wushu West. The Jet Li pictures on wushuwest.com pretty much sold me .

Michele was a class at LMC where she had to visit a few different colleges, and one of them was UC Berkeley. I took the opportunity to go check out the cal wushu club. I had a hard time finding the place, I had to ask around one administrative office (they didn’t seem to know anything about it) and they eventually pointed me to the gym where they met. No one was there of course, so I picked up some flyer’s and called it a day.

After that week, emailed webmaster@wushuwest.com and asked a few questions like if I could stop by and see a class. I got a reply back from Mike, which I assume now was Mike Chew. I went the next Tuesday after work, making my first trek to Berkeley. Turns out, it was one of those 5th Tuesdays of the month that Patti used to take off, so I sat there in the Finnish Brother Hall for two hours waiting for ANYONE to show up I was a little crushed, but the next day I called the phone number on the website to ask when the next class was. Patti answered, and she was very short and curt in her responses. She explained the 5th week of the month deal, and said I could stop by the next class.

There were a few other people already waiting outside the hall, Bryant and his cousin. They were both talking about The One, Jet’s most recent US movie at the time. I didn’t talk to anyone, I was still nervous about going there, and I was really nervous just GOING to wushu west for the first few years. Serioulsly, I’m such an introvert that it was a big step for me starting wushu at all. I did feel at ease knowing there were other Jet Li fan’s, and maybe they were just as dorky as I am. Finally Patti arrived, and I introduced myself as the person that called. I wasn’t used to how she addressed things, she was very short with answers and she came off a little mean at first. Hey, I’m sheltered, what do you expect. So I sat on the bench seat of the Finnish Hall and watched the beginner’s class warm up, do basics, and work on their forms. Now when I went in there, I still wasn’t sold on the place and I wanted to keep my options open. After seeing that though, I was very excited and I forgot about looking at other places. I stayed till the end, and when I started to get up and leave Patti came over and talked to me a little more. She gave me the paperwork, talked about pricing and the thing with paying for 3 months at a time (and I was very happy with the rational she had for it). I thanked her for her time and she told me to come back at the 1st of the month, which was in two weeks.

During that first year at wushu west, I would practice everything I had learned everyday after work. I was still very shy about it (still? I AM shy about it, I wont show anyone what I’ve learned in wushu), so I would wait till dusk and jog downtown for 10 minutes and find some little corner of a parking lot where I could go over the first basic forms. I would do front stretch kicks on my back patio (which at the time was tiny), I would find almost any reason to do a little jump, a kick, a front slap kick. When no one was present of course. I was like James is now I think it changed when Caralyne was born, and since then I’ve had a lot less time to do that outside of wushu. But when Caralyne was born wushu really helped my sanity, but there was a lot I had to deal with being a parent for the first time. That was probably my biggest peak with wushu, not peak as in how good I am, but where my excitment level was.

mike Wushu

I broke it…

Okay, I didn’t “break” anything, I decided to upgrade my server to fix some corrupted files (this is what happens when you let your server melt in 100+ degree weather), and in the process I sort of forgot to backup the large MySQL Database….

And to think people pay me to do this for a living.

admin General

Mark’s Wushu Retrospective journal has made me all nostalgic about my own experience with getting in shape, loosing weight, and starting wushu at our beloved Wushu West.

I had gained a lot of weight right after Michele and I got married in August 2000. Well, after high school (1998), I gained 20lbs, but I proceeded to put on more once we tied the knot. You would have thought it was my second full-time job, eating crap.

I never had a problem with weight growing up, I was always in pretty good shape and it was mostly because my Step Dad had a never ending list of chores which included mowing an acre worth of lawns, raking, cutting down dying pine tree’s and disposing of the brush. My Mom was also into eating healthy, so we had a lot of plain food growing up that were appropriately proportioned. So, while i never played sports or exercised on a regular basis growing up, the lifestyle I was offered took care of that. It never occurred to me how quickly I could gain weight.

As soon as I was out of high school, I started to work at Sears. This gave me the exact amount of disposable income I needed to get two large donuts and a quart of chilled WHOLE milk. Every day. Oh on occasion I would mix it up with a Jack in the Box breakfast, but those costs more that $2 so I mostly stuck with the donuts. I did this the entire time I went to Heald (started in September of 1998). Those two places were the only eateries that were close to my house in Oakley that were open that early, and since I’m not a morning person I choose to sleep in that extra 5 minutes it would take to make a decent breakfast. So that’s how I ate on the weekdays (this is where being a creature of habit can kill you), and not to worry, on the weekends I would make my own breakfast of 3 toasted waffles smothered in syrup.

I had quit smoking in 98, so eating was the natural oral fixation I was trying to make up for and it tasted good. Well, two years of that plus a few months of marriage had a taken its toll

I keep those handy, just as a reminder. I was about 240 in those days, and I was totally oblivious to it until I saw the photo’s you see above. I think my waist was around 40 – 42″ as well (in high school I was about 32″, today I’m around 32-34″). So, one day Michele and I ordered an elliptical machine, and a weight lifting station online, for cheap. Once it arrived we assembled both of them in out basement, and we would occasionally go down there and workout for 5 – 10 minutes and then calling it a night. I figured this was good enough, and I mean, it’s better than nothing right? Well, obviously those first months (until June 2001) were very unproductive.

Two things happened, the first was my cousin Michael Abrue came to visit. Growing up, he and his sister Cat would come and spend a few weeks with the family ever few years, and it was always a celebration. My Sister and I loved seeing them, and we always looked forward to them coming out. Since the last time Mike had seen me, I was 160 or 170lbs, pretty scrawny compared to my then present figure. He was a pretty big health nut and he sort of coached me a little, gave me some eating guidelines, and made it seem realistic and even easy for me to cut out little things here and there. One big thing was soda, and I would get a LARGE 32oz cup of fountain soda at lunch every day. Of course eating waffles for breakfast was a big no-no, but also cutting out fatty dressings on sandwiches and salads. From then on I stopped drinking soda, had two egg whites (and thats it) for breakfast and stopped putting mayo on my sandwiches. Oh, it’s also important to know that I also started smoking again after I got married. That also curbs the appetite a little.

The second thing that happened at about the exact same time, was a co-worked asked if I had seen the movie

Fist of Legend. This was probably the most important and crucial moment in my life (okay, maybe meeting Michele was really the first, but this was big). I watched it that night, twice in a row back to back. I then went down to the basement and went past my previous record of 10 whole minutes on the Elliptical to 20. I then came back upstairs to watch all the fight scenes again. Then I did what every computer geek would do, I googled for jet li (found his official site hosted by RT, and reading the handle “narom” for the first time), and then ripped FoL to DivX so I could watch it all the time. Imagine how disappointed I was when I found out Jet Li moved too fast for the DivX codec to properly render

Over the next few days, I started working out every night. Each night I would add one more minute to my time on the Elliptical, and I quickly moved the Elliptical out from the basement to our living room. I was bored, I needed something to entertain me while working out so I decided to watch more Jet Li movies ( then after than, ANY movie ) while working out. I did this everyday for about 60-90 days. I’m not sure, but at one point (before I started Wushu, but now im getting ahead of myself) I was able to last an entire 2 hour movie. This had ballooned my DVD collection from 6 to almost 100. I was getting new movies and every week to keep myself entertained, and I watched a movie EVERY night of the week. I soon started to get compliments from my family and co-workers, people were pretty impressed and surprised that I turned around in a relatively short amount of time. People asked me how I did it, and the weird part is I really enjoyed that attention, and when it stopped a part of me started to get really panicked and anxious. I would wonder if I was getting fat again, and truth be told I’m still pretty touchy about it now.

I do feel very bad for Michele, I never realized then that I was totally ignoring her to fufill my goal of losing weight. She started to stay in the back bedroom by herself, and eating more. It was almost like for every pound I lost, she would put on. I wish then I would have been more active with her and built up something we could have enjoyed together. But that was hard for me to do, I was very driven and had this tunnel vision mindset, and I figured I couldn’t afford other people getting in my way. And Why? What was my goal?

On the Black Mask DVD, one of the “special features” was about Wushu. It didn’t show any footage, it just said that Jet Li grew up on the Beijing Wushu Team. After googling for Wushu, I came across this killer video clips of all the China pro’s (including Patti). Raffi’s site, http://www.beijingwushuteam.com/ was my daily homepage after that. I read the bulleten board every day, read all of his articles, and checked out jetli.com daily. I was in heaven, I knew I wanted to do it. I was so amazed that the human body could preform those feats, with such confidence too. I wanted that, I wanted to do that. Living in Antioch, your options are slim when it came to martial arts, especially if you don’t want to get caught up in a belt/money making scheme. I accepted Berkeley as part of my search scope, and thats where I found both Wushu West, and Cal Wushu.

I remember how sheepish and almost embarrassed I had felt wanting to do martial arts as an adult. Everyone I knew did that thing as a kid, with other kids. There were no adults, and then there was that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer joins a Karate school and it turns out his a giant middle aged adult with little kids. I was afraid of that, and I was also a little shy about being a white guy in a very Asian sport. I know, its stupid and a reverse racist thing, but those were a few things I had to mentally get over. I remember telling Michele that I wanted to do it, and I showed her all the clips I had saved on my computer. I think she was pretty perplexed, and probably hesitant, but I’m very annoying and persistent when I want to do something so she went with it.

After that, it was all about finding a place to learn from.

mike Wushu

This movie had Guillermo del Toro’s name attached to it, and I anticipated that it would be awesome and have some really cool creature effects. I was off on the latter, while the movie is a really good horror/suspense there is very little physical gore. One tiny part was graphic, and I made Michele mad that I had her watch the movie

The premise is a little orphan girl grows up, and as an adult she adopts a little boy, and then buys the house that used to be the very orphanage she grew up in. He grand plans of running her own orphanage are quickly ruined as her son disappears and she finds out a little more about her beloved childhood place.

Very cool movie, and it wasn’t what I was expecting (and thats a good thing).

Just in case you missed the title, I am not losing my job here. That makes me very happy!

mike Movies

Westerns never caught my attention, I avoided them at all costs. It’s mostly because my whole family was into all of that, and since it conflicted with my indoors only activities of computers and guitar playing, I rebelled against then and refused to watch Lonesome Dove. Also, it was an older movie, and I’ve discussed my aversion to watching older movies.

Well, I was doing my usual workout where I’m half-way lifting weights but mostly preoccupied trying to find something entertaining to watch so the workout wont feel so boring and lifeless. I don’t usually channel surf, I usually pop in a braindead action movie, but this time i came across a scene in the middle of TGTBTU on A&E. It was when Tuco drags “The Good” out to the desert. It grabbed my attention until I finished the workout and decided to Tivo it that evening.

So when Friday evening rolled around (and I do all my movie watching on the weekend till the wee hours of the next morning), I spent the two or so hours watching that. Awesome movie, the music is classic even though I’ve seen it spoofed hundreds of times it still holds up on its own without becoming cheesy. I’ve got a few more Sergio Leone movies lined up now, the downfall is some of them I’ve essentially seen, since they are remakes of the Akira Kursawa movies I posted about, but they have their own twist and even though A Fistful of Dollars was nearly identical, it still added its own flavor to it.

Anyway, today is Wednesday, the 21st, I find out tomorrow if I have a job here at the Lab or not. I did a phone interview for another place in Fairfield, and i still may be able to make it to Wushu, but I’ll have to wait and see how things go.

mike Movies

The past few weeks have been pretty busy, Owen is still in the hospital (and we expect him to stay there another two weeks) and his collapsed lung has healed up. Now they doctors are getting him off the pain medication (down to morphine now), helping him feed on his own, and get his bilirubin resolved. We’ve been going to see him everyday, and we were finally able to hold him last week.
I’m back at work now, which is a real drag. We’re going to have another big layoff here on the 22nd and I may be a part of that. It’s been real shitty dealing with a sick newborn AND stressing over what is going to happen to me. So whatever happens happens, and maybe I’ll get more time at home.

What has amazed me is I have not gained 20lbs from all the wonderful free food i have received in the last 3 weeks I’ve been doing a little weight lifting, but mostly I’ve stuck with my punching bag and cardio. It’s been helpful, and I’ve been able to do it almost everyday that I’ve had off.

So thats that, not sure when i’ll get back to wushu, after Owen comes home but with the scary possibility that I’ll be out of a job it may be a lot longer than that.

mike Family