After a long break for Spring Festival (Chinese New Years, Lantern Festival, etc.) I was finally able to get back to training.  I knew that after almost a full month away from wushu I would be in for a good wushu beat-down and for the most part I wasn’t mistaken.

I only lasted through the basics – just barely – and when they did nandu I went on the side and worked on some of my nanquan choreography – mainly end of the 3rd section transitioning to the 4th. 

They did full forms today, competition style.  And by “competition style” I mean that they would do the salue, walk-on, etc.  The coach also had it filmed for reference and was timing them.  Their competition will be on April 5 (according to Xiao Yu) and I was told that I might be able to join them and go there, so hopefully that works out and I can post up videos and results via wushuzilla.  Keep your fingers crossed.

After their full forms they did some half-sets and so I joined in with that.  I got through most of my second half (3-4), but it was pretty brutal.  Definitely my lung endurance has suffered from my break, and my body is not quite as responsible or strong as it was last month, but I was expecting that to be the case so it isn’t too surprising.

And here is my video for today’s training.  Be sure to watch the part that talks about their competition preparation schedule.  I thought it was pretty interesting what they are doing.

Last night Ruhi and I had a wonderful dinner with Khalil and his mom at their home.  While there he showed me these videos he made that were quite funny and I thought you guys would appreciate the martial arts humor.  There are three of my favorites.  Enjoy!

I am still in Hong Kong and will return to Xi’an on the 24th.  I will blog and provide photos and what not from my trip once I have had a few days to reacclimate to home.

Just a quick update to let you all know where I am and what I’m up to.

After a busy week Ruhi and I flew down to Guangzhou on Sunday afternoon/evening. We’ve been running around a lot and I’m going to write another more detailed blog later on when I have time, but here are a few highlights from the past 3 days:

• I met Kevin Spacey on Monday afternoon.  I almost didn’t wash my hand again.
• I did some background acting/extra work behind Daniel Wu and Kevin Spacey on Tuesday evening.  I hope I don’t end up on the cutting room floor.
• I’m going to be attending a conference in the New Territories for the next 2 weeks.  Tonight was the orientation and tomorrow the sessions begin.

So, I might not be online too much, depending on our schedule.  And anytime I am online I might have to be working and can’t really blog too much.

But I’ve been taking some videos and pictures so you can look forward to things later on in the future.  Until then … bye!

Tuesday I didn’t make it to practice, so I went on Wednesday instead.  But it turns out I might as well not have gone since it was a pretty light day.  Here is my training vlog.  Enjoy!

As you can see from the title, I’m going to do a bit of an experiment this month and instead of writing out these super long blogs (which actually don’t take THAT much time) I’m going to try to use my small camera to record more in-the-wushu-guan vlogs (video blogs), which I can just put up quickly.   This one is actually a little long because I took a few different clips and had to string them together, but if I can get things working right it should make the process much faster in the future.

A few things that aren’t on the video …

1. My nanquan section run-down for today: 4 x 4, 3 x 4, 2 x 4, 1-2, 3-4.  So, 12 single sections and two half sets.  Considering that I felt like crap most of the class, thats not too bad.  I actually noticed my endurance and recovery was markedly improved from the previous week. 

2. Xiao Yu mentioned that their commissary (lunch room) has a card system for non-athletes.  You can buy a card and put money on it and then just use that to buy various ala carte items from their food offerings.  I might try that out some time and put up a vlog about it so that you guys can check it out. 

3. Today Zhang Laoshi wasn’t there so Han Laoshi coached us.  He gave me a few “Ma Ke! (Mark!)” which was nice.  He actually remembers my name now.

Enjoy the video, and let me know what you think.  Do you like this sort of thing or do you prefer to read the written word.  Leave a comment! (BTW, if you have been having problems logging in, it isn’t you. My site is a little wonky and I haven’t had time to fix it yet.  Until then you can go here to login.

 

For those on alivenotdead and facebook, be sure to visit wushuzilla.com to read this blog in its entirety, with the full glory of videos and media!

I entered the wushu guan a little late on Friday thinking that the athletes would already be running around and getting warmed up. But when I walked in only Xiao Yu was on the carpet rolling her ankles and wrists.  I looked at her inquisitively and she shrugged her shoulders.

“Its just me!” she offered.

Oh right.  Fridays were light because most of the athletes in my group had school (or something) going on so it was just the non-school-attending professional athletes that showed up.  Today that was just Xiao Yu, Yuan Min and myself (sans the “professional” part).

To warm up Zhang Laoshi and the three of us played a little game of keep-away soccer.  On the other carpets were the taiji group as well as the kids from up north.  I also noticed that a few very young kids were training on the far side.  3 new children that I hadn’t seen before, 2 boys and a girl, probably around 7 or 8 years old.

While they were stretching out I noticed that the three of them were pretty flexible, but I thought that wasn’t particularly unusual.  But when the little girl did her front stretch kicks I had to pick my jaw up off the ground.  They were really, really impressive.  Whoever has been training her is doing a bang-up job because her zheng ti tui was spot-on.  Her other kicks need a little work, but she has that unique combination of power and flexibility that eludes a lot of younger kids.  You will see kids that have a lot of one or the other, but it is hard to find someone who can use both effectively.

I was doing my own training so I didn’t get any footage of her front stretch kick, but I did manage to get some of their other basics training.  Here are some of their kicks for your viewing pleasure.

 

For myself, I spent most of the class working on my choreography.  I worked through the rest of my nangun form, fine-tuning it and working out all the sections.  I now have something I can practice, which is nice.  I just have to be sure to keep it up so that I don’t forget it.

While I was training I also managed to get a bit more footage.  The benefit of it being a light day for me is that I can capture footage of other people training.  Here is a young woman practicing some taiji jian.

The wushu youths from up north were hard at work too.  Their coach (Coach Zhang’s assistant, who’s name I’m not sure of.  And for some reason he calls Xiao Yu and I “Garfield” –- ironically the same name that Han Jing called me back in 1999 in Beijing … Do I really look like Garfield?  No, wait – don’t answer that.) has really been giving them their money’s worth and they get tons of pointers.  Here is him giving them some pointers.

And here are the same youths running through some sections at the end of class.

And finally here is some footage of the wushu kids.  After their basics, but before they started conditioning they took a little break on the side of the room so I captured some of that.

And I also got some of their conditioning too. 

And that is pretty much it for Friday’s class.  I have already posted up my vlog and have prepared the blog for Monday’s class (2/1) so you get a double-dose of wushu blogginess today.  yay!

NOTE: For those of you on Facebook, you will want to visit my YouTube Channel to view all of the videos, since Facebook’s lame importing functionality doesn’t allow for embeded videos.

As I mentioned before, I had gotten permission from Zhang Laoshi and Han Laoshi to have a couple of my 外国朋友 (foreign friends) visit the wushu guan to check out the professional athletes doing their thing.  James and Charisse, along with Ruhi, jumped on the bus with me at the crack of morning and we made our way to the morning class.

Of course, what you are really wanting to know about is whether or not Ruhi was able to take any videos of the practice.  Well, you had best throw some appreciation towards the wife because she got a ton of really good footage which I am still organizing and editing to put online for everyone to watch.  Of course, by the time you read this I should be done, but just pretend that you had to wait an unreasonable amount of time, okay?

James even brought his camera along and was nice enough to toss his photos my way for posting online.  So, you can also throw a few “谢谢”over to him as well.

First up are some basics.  You might notice that I intentionally cut my own basics out of the videos.  I figured that (a) you don’t want me wasting precious bandwidth and resources with my sub-standard jibbengong and (b) it wasn’t something that you don’t probably see in your own wushu guan all the time anyway.  Not to worry, I will have a video of my own wushu later on in the blog …

It turned out that this particular day was a heavy nandu focus for training.  All the athletes had to do full nandu combinations many times.  So, of course that means we were able to get some pretty good nandu footage of the practice:

On the far carpet, as you can see from the previous two videos, there was a group of younger athletes training.  I mentioned them before – they are the ones from Northern Shaanxi.  It seems that they are here much in the same way that schools from the U.S. come to China for a month in the summer to train in Wushu.  The main distinction is that these kids are from China so there is no language or cultural barrier, and they are all much better than kids their age in other countries.  But the idea is sort of similar, since they are currently on a break from school so their coaches brought them to train with the “professional” wushu athletes.  Here is some of them:

And, as I mentioned, James was nice enough to snap some pictures of the practice.  Here are a few from the basics and nandu training:

 

 

 

He managed to take some pretty nice shots, huh?

Anyway, after basics and nandu it was time for forms.  Yuan Min told me that we were going to do 16 sections, so I decided to run through 3 of each of my nanquan sections, for a total of 12, and then go through my first section of nan gun 4 more time to flesh out the full 16.  I actually ended up doing something a bit more like this:

1 x 3, 2 x 3, rest 1 rotation, 3 x 3, 4 x 3, ng x 3

I really needed to take a short break in the middle there.  I’m not quite up to the endurance required for 16 sections in a group of just 6 other people.  The turn around is about 2 – 3 minutes for your physical recovery so it is pretty intense.  Not quite as intense as that SCWA practice in 2001 where I had to do 8 full forms in a rotation with 3 other people … but it was almost like that.

Here is some of the athlete practice media.  First up is Yue Xiao Yu.  You can see some really good intensity in the video of her nanquan.  I also like some of the pictures James took of her:

 

 

 

After her we’ll watch Yuan Min’s video.  i really like how his nan gun form is shaping up.  As you might recall, 2 weeks ago he taught me his nangun form.  Then a week later he proceeded to rechoreograph almost the entire thing and make himself an even cooler form.  So I’m stuck with his outdated hchoreography and he gets to look bad ass.  I don’t really mind though.  Even his outdated choreography is better than what I could have come up with on my own.

 

He was giving me a few pointers in that last picture, although the suggestions he gave me during class were way out of my ability level.  Some day though …. some.day.

Here are two more southern athletes.  One is a younger man who’s name I don’t know (practicing nan gun) and the other is Tian Jing Fang doing some nanquan.

 

 

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a wushu practice if someone wasn’t doing a bit of chang quan in the room.  Here are two athletes demonstrating a bit of that. The younger man in the first video is actually practicing with a wrapped ankle, so that is why he is sort of taking it a bit easy on some of the moves.

 

 

While we were doing our wushu thing, the taiji group was practicing over on the left side of the carpet.  Ruhi managed to get a bit of them doing some taiji.  So here is some of that.

Recently after practices the coach has had us do some stretching together in a circle.  A new development that I am actually rather enjoying. 

After class I asked James, Charisse and Ruhi what they thought of the class.  For James and Charisse this was the first time they had ever seen wushu, so it was nice to hear a fresh perspective on things.  I’ve been around wushu for so long that it is sometimes hard to remember how it felt to discover wushu for the first time.  As a bit of background on them, Charisse has around 10 years of dance/ballet experience and James did crew (rowing) at Stanford, so they both have an appreciation for physical sports and exercise.

And, as promised, here is a video of my nanquan practice from Thursday.  I will just say right now that my form needs work.  But it is at least better than it was before, and I am hopeful that it will continue to improve in to the future.

I realize this was a few days late but hopefully the abundance of wushu videos made it worth your while.  I have some more footage from Friday’s class too, which I will try to post up tomorrow if I have any time, including a pretty amazing little girl that has some pretty killer basics.  I don’t know who she is, but if she is up for adoption I might have to put in a bid.

Stay tuned for that in the next blog! 

Due to a busy schedule and some negligence on my own part, I didn’t have time to post up a blog about yesterday’s wushu class.  So I’m going to cover two days with this one blog. 

Monday (1/25)

But first I should mention that Friday Ruhi was feeling under the weather so I stayed home from Wushu to take care of her (Soup Making Skills courtesy of Shahaub’s Father).  So when Monday came around I hadn’t actually trained since the previous Wednesday.  Again, taking that much time off means two things: First, my body will have recovered a bit and I will feel stronger.  Second, the day after I will be sore as heck.

But due to some drama in the Taiji group at the beginning of class I ended up getting a bit of a light workout.  In fact, for a few minutes after my group had done some of their basics, they were all told to go back to their rooms so I joined in with the kids from northern Shaanxi for a few lines of basics.  But then my group came back so I joined back in with them.

We mainly did some combination training and I kept working out the kinks in my 3rd section.  But since the coach had to take off and there wasn’t really anyone there to oversee things, it eventually turned in to a wushu hangout session.  Zhang Yang and Xiao Yu were doing some stuff with a spear while Yuan Ming practiced Qin Na techniques on all of the other boys. (How to get out of a full nelson, etc.)

The other thing that was interesting was that there was a new guy with the Taiji group.  A taller, somewhat overweight young man who I found out was a son of a teacher and was learning some Taiji.  “Now you aren’t the biggest one in the room” one of my training partners told me. 

There goes my special-ness.

Tuesday (1/26)

This week I’m trying to increase the number of workouts so I will be training 4 mornings (Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri) with the team.  So the next day, sore body and all, I headed out to the wushu guan for some more torture.

I have never actually been there on a Tuesday or Thursday morning before so I was curious if it was any different than the other days.

Not so much.

One thing is that today was a weapon’s practice day for most of my group.  With the exception of Xiao Yu and the young NQ guy, the rest of us did weapons.

After basics I spent my time working on nangun and getting down my new choreography.  I would practice for a while off to the side until I felt like I had it down, and then I would join in on the sections.  They did 6 or 8 single sections and then a half set at the end.  I practiced my first section, with emphasis on the opening, and then fine tuned my second section.

One of the things I had to do today was ask Zhang Laoshi about having some friends come to visit to watch a practice.  Charisse and James were interested in checking out the “professional” athletes, so I asked him at the end of class.  He said he would tell me later on.  Then I saw him walk over to Han Laoshi (Taolu Head Coach) and ask him.  He came up a little later and said it would be okay.

So, that also means I will probably be able to get a little bit of video on Thursday. I’ve been focusing more on my own practice these days so I haven’t been taking much footage of the classes.  Not really since January 1, actually. But if all goes well (and my wife doesn’t mind) I should have some more footage on Thursday or Friday.  Cross your fingers.

The other thing I did today was talk to Han Laoshi about the cost for people to train here.  I’ve had a couple requests from folks to know what was involved in training with the Shaanxi Wushu Team, so I have been putting out some feelers.  But it has been a little slow-going so I had to go straight to the big dog today.  He asked me to write some stuff up for him and then he will let me know, but according to Xiao Yu, he is slow as molasses and it takes him a while to respond to requests for information. Hope it is before I leave for Hong Kong on the 7th!

And, just because I have zero wushu-related media on the blog today, I’ll leave you with this random photo from my past:

L-R: Sun Jian Ming, Wu Bin, Jet Li, Liu Xiao Lei, Cui Ya Hui, Qiu Hui Fang (January 20, 2006, Beijing, Huo Yuan Jia (aka “Fearless”) Chinese Premiere)

I’ve been so busy with work and life that I have not had a chance to blog too much recently.  This might continue to be the case until the end of February when I return from Hong Kong and start school.

Anyway, my most recent training session with the Shaanxi Wushu Team was pretty good.  When I got there I noticed a whole new crop of young athletes walking in to the wushu guan.  I later found out that they were all from the northern part of Shaanxi Province – a smaller town called Yan’an (延安).  You can see it on the map here:

View Yan’an in a larger map

They were combined with some of our younger athletes and put on the SW carpet with Coach Zhang’s assistant who ran them through a whole lot of basics.  Pretty much most of their class was basics, with just a bit at the end working on sections.  Based on their wushu I would say they are a bit rough around the edges but have some potential.  Its all in the details, after all.

I was told they will be in Xi’an training with us for a month.  There are about 12 or 15 of them, ranging from the low to high teens.  About 70% boys.  Should be fun to see them progress over time.

For my own class there were 8 of us in Coach Zhang’s group.  I was in a line with 3 other nanquan folks and surprisingly I made it through basics without too many problems.  I’m chocking it up to a good workout game of keep-away that worked up a nice sweat.

After nandu we did combinations – about 16 lines of them – and then switched to sections.  I focused primarily on my 3rd section, as that is the one I’ve been reworking.  I’m happy to say that I just about have it figured out.  Well … almost.  We’ll see how long this lasts.  I never seem satisfied with my choreography – mainly because I’m never satisfied that what I have choreographed is the best possible combination for my particular style of wushu.  The coach seemed to like this new version so we’ll see if it sticks.

Sections went on for quite a while.  I probably did about 8 – 10 sections before I had to stop.  But the other folks just kept on going.  Very 努力.  I went over to visit with Xiao Yu who was working (i.e. chatting with someone) on the side.  She said she will go to the hospital in the afternoon to get an x-ray on her leg, along with one of the Taiji athletes.

She also said she is still waiting to hear from the coaches about the cost of training, so still waiting on that information as well … But one neat thing that happened is that I had asked her what the possibility of having some of my friends come to watch the Team train and she said I could bring them any time.  Pretty neat.  So I’m going to try and arrange an outing for some of my friends in Xi’an who have never seen wushu to check out what it is all about.  I’m sure it will blow their socks off.  Perhaps next Wednesday would be a good day, since I’m not training then.

After class I headed out and took the bus home.  Ruhi is sick at home right now so I made some soup and worked a bunch from home.

Today’s practice was brought to you by the number 3. As in the third section of my nanqan form, which is what I was spending most of my time working on today.

The first part of class started off like most others. Warm ups (led by Yuan Ming), stretching and basics. Then it was time for sections. I started with my 4th section and went through it 4 times (I guess today is also brought to you by the number 4) but when it was time for me to start on the 3rd section I realized I didn’t really have it fully figured out yet.

Some of the athletes, like Xiao Yu, were on the other carpet working through their stuff, so I joined them and spent most of the class trying to fix the things that didn’t feel right with my 3rd section. Part of what I was working on was utilizing some of the suggestions that Gao Song had made regarding my movements in Hong Kong. But utilizing that feedback requires me to really retool some of my form.

Actually, most of my form.  He sort of shifted my paradigm a bit so I need to go through each movement and re-evaluate how I do it and whether or not it fits in with my personal style of wushu and nanquan.  A daunting task to be sure.

Anyway, after class I needed to pick up a memory stick that Xiao Yu had borrowed, but since she had left it in her dorm room she said I could go with her to check out what the living conditions are like for the athletes.

Actually, I had a few surprises.  Which I suppose I shouldn’t have had since I’ve seen the dorms before, albeit a different building.  Back in 2008 during the China Nationals in Xi’an, Wu Di and Zhao Qing Jian were living on the same campus while training with the China National Team for a demo in Taiwan.  I got to visit their room then.  In fact, here is a picture from that:

Anyway, the dorms are pretty much as I expected them to be.  Think post-industrial concrete meets pre-modern industrial.  A little utilitarian, but still quite livable.  The one thing that I was really impressed with was that each room only housed two athletes (unlike the 6 person rooms back in Beijing or the 4 person rooms in Shanghai) and each room had its own bathroom.  Thats right!  No communal toilets.  Rather nice.

Yue Xiao Yu’s roommate was Zhang Yang, who you might remember from this blog entry.  Xiao Yu is also quite the entrepreneur.  I remember when she came to my house a few weeks back, she mentioned that she would take the bus (1 RMB each way) to the train station to buy candies and various 点心 and then bring them back and sell them in her room.

The store at the school sold them for a little more than she did, so the students would prefer to buy them from her since it was cheaper and she was closer than the store located in the next building over.  She made a small amount of money because her costs were lower than she sold them for.  Not a ton of money (we’re talking a few mao per sale) but it was still pretty industrious of her.

Fast forward to today and I got to see the operation in action.  Actually she stopped doing it, but she still has some stock left over from her last trip to the Train Station so until she sells out she can keep selling them.

One of the little kids (from this blog entry) came in while I was there, clenching a 20RMB note in her hand ready to buy some candies.  It was pretty cute.  One of the Taiji athletes came in as well and bought something to eat.  It was mostly candies, crackers, chips .. that sort of thing.

While we were there I tried to show her my alive.tom.com blog (since it is the only place my photos are viewable in China) but her connection was super slow so it didn’t load up.  In the meantime she showed me her QQ page and the little girl also used her computer to check something.  I got some pictures of them here:

One of the things we talked about was a few questions I had related to having foreigners come and train with the Shaanxi Team. I’ve had one or two requests for specific information related to training here (mainly for people wanting to come during the summer) so I was doing some investigating.

I have to say that, while I enjoy having a professional wushu team all to my self, I realize that this is a pretty nice situation and a decent facility and that some other folks out there might be interested in knowing more about what it would take to come train here too. Especially since planning for your summer China training trips are probably in the works.

The other nice thing about this location is that it is probably the only city in China that has a richer history than Beijing (or at least pretty darn close), and some of the greatest tourist sites in the country. Add that to the fact that it is sooo much cheaper than training at Shi Cha Hai (but also keeping in mind that it isn’t a fancy 5 star hotel either — in case that sort of thing is important to you), and I personally think that it is a nice option for those who might be interested.

In any case, I’m not a travel agent, but if you want some information feel free to contact me through my website’s contact form and I will keep you in the loop with whatever I find out regarding training options in Xi’an.

Next practice … Wednesday morning!