On Saturday morning I drove up to Crested Butte for a day of snowboarding using my free pass I received from volunteering at the ski race in December. I was able to get on the mountain by 10:00 am, and I spent the morning and early afternoon improving my snowboarding skills. One of the first falls, I focused on extending my arms into a hoop, like I emphasize when teaching forward ukemi, and my fall was a lot less painful. Duh! I now describe my snowboarding experience as moments of shear joy punctuated by white, cold ukemi practice. Because my snowboarding skills are slowing improving, I am getting more adventurous in trying harder, more expert black diamond slopes. The first photo is a mogul black diamond run that I had just finished moving down (not really snowboarding as every couple of meters I ended up on my back). I had collapsed into some deep powder at the bottom and took this photo of other snowboarders having trouble getting down as well.
This second photo is from the base area on Mt. Crested Butte Resort looking towards the mountain in the background. The final photo is below the Paradise Bowl and the warming building on the Northwest side of the mountain. For a late lunch, I drove back to Crested Butte and met up with my friends Marc and Pat along with a couple of other people, Richard and Peter.
Funny Aikido sidenote, Richard was describing a scene from Steven Seagal's new reality cop show on cable where Seagal does an ikkyo on a guy, Richard didn't know any Aikido but it was cool to be able to recognize the technique second-hand from a person who knows nothing about Aikido. We all went to a new Asian restaurant, Ryce, and I had a great chicken-noodle curry dish. I was able to get in another run on the mountain before driving back to Gunnison.
Sunday afternoon I went to the Gunnison Community Center for the 2pm Aikido class. Mike and I began warm-up and I added a kosatori tenkan and a kosatori irimi movement to the usual tenkan exercises. We then practiced the following techniques:
- kosatori ikkyo omote and ura
- katatetori koshunage (3 variations). The koshunage practiced started first with break-fall practice on the softer mats before using the standard foam mats they have in multi-purpose room.
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