Day 74, Add one more notch to the injury list

Gah, it just keeps growing longer and longer, doesn’t it?

Yesterday was Saturday, you all know what that means, right? That is right, folks, yesterday was judo day, or the day when I get to injure myself and then complain about it to all of you the next day. Which is today! Count yourselves as some of the lucky ones, most people never get to hear this. (Well anyone within earshot usually does hear about it but they generally don’t really care enough to have it register).

Yesterdays class was a mighty interesting one--it started off as it normally does with all of the basic falls and rolls and then progressed onto a very fast-paced bout of something that I cannot recall the name of, something very Japanese, I’m sure. It was during this exercise that the first and worse of my few injuries took place. During one of these quick throws I had the misfortune to land first, with nearly all of my weight, on my left knee followed by the rest of my body. Now the whole goal of falling in the judo sense is to distribute the force impact on the ground over your entire body, whether it be landing on your side, your back, or your front you want to land flat and, oddly enough, slap the ground hard. Well, that didn’t happen in this case, on this particular throw (and by the head instructor, too, some kind of sadist, he has to be) which happened to be a hip throw where I was picked up and thrown over this persons hip, something went screwy with it all and I ended up driving my knee into the mat before the rest of my body.

To illustrate the throw, here’s a picture of something like it being done


Here’s another one


In this case I would have been the guy in blue, the one falling very rapidly and from a great height, to the floor.

So there was that. My knee has swollen up a bit and walking is painful but it shouldn’t last too long. I’m still young, right?

The other annoying injury is my neck which was full nelsoned into a tight bundle of dull neck pain. For those of you who don’t know this is what it looked like:



This was, again, done by the overenthusiastic head instructor and, man, was this one annoying. I could literally feel it pulling the muscles in my neck at the very same time as it was cutting off the flow of air into my throat. Let me tell you all this, if you ever have the chance to be suffocated while the back of your neck is stretched like taffy then, please, pass on it. It is so not fun.

Well, that was my yesterday. Here’s to hoping that todays exercises go well considering everything that’s been beaten up. Have a nice day and here’s to looking forward to next Saturday when I’m sure I’ll be going through a lot of this same exact stuff again.

:-)