Cat!

I made a flier for a pressure point seminar taught by a cat.

Why would I do that?  I have my reasons.  Those reasons aren't as important as the fact that I now have a flier of a pressure point seminar taught by a cat.

But the main reason is because I just finished a podcast about sexual assault.  I spent a lot of time being bogged down in very important and very serious subject matter, and it has left me kind of drained.  So for this month's blog post, I'm not being serious at all.  I'll go back to being helpful next time.

Back to the Martial Arts Road Trip: Arkansas

I've been posting rants, training articles, and general weirdness for so long, I figure some (most?) of you forgot that this is actually a martial arts travel blog.

To recap, I had this idea for a martial arts travel project, and Iain Abernethy was kind enough to help me get it started.  I visited Sensei Kris Wilder in Seattle, Washington.  Then after visiting only one state, the project had to be put on hold while I visited my ailing instructor in Korea and opened my school.  Being busy with owning a school and starting a podcast, the 50 States Challenge fell on the back burner.

What's the 50 States Challenge?  Since most people probably forgot...

The 50 States Challenge boils down to three main pieces.
1.  I travel to all 50 states and find a martial arts school in each state to host me.
2.  At each host school, I teach something and I learn something to pass on to the next school.
3.  We support a charity chosen by the host school.

And then I blog about the experience here, illustrating how much the different styles and philosophies of martial arts have to learn from each other.

So after a long hiatus, I'm traveling again.  This time I went to Arkansas because one of my students was competing at NASTA Nationals there.  Not wanting to waste the opportunity, I also visited River Valley Martial Arts, supporting St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.

If you've been reading my blog for more than a few seconds, you will not be surprised that it was not all seriousness.  I wanted to get the full Arkansas experience.

Yelling at Yellville!

Rocking a little at Little Rock!

Wait, what?

This little resident of Toad Suck was still learning how to fly.  He (she?) let me get pretty close before squawking a protest and hopping away.

It's okay, little guy.  I can't fly either, and I've been training FOREVER in bird years.

One of my first stops was Beaverfork Lake, where I snapped this picture of an old bridge.  It was built almost 150 years ago to cross Cadron Creek, where it stood until only a few years ago when it was restored and brought to this park.

<insert tortured analogy about building bridges to the past and future here>

That park was one of many picturesque places where I could have stopped.  Arkansas has a lot to offer if you're into the outdoors.  In June, it helps if you are not a wimp about the sun trying to kill you.  I'm pretty sure at one point I was more sunscreen than person.

It looks like Buffalo River, but it's actually a pool of my sweat after training in the heat.

Buffalo River National Park is especially interesting in that within its boundaries is the Rush ghost town.  It was once a thriving city because of its zinc mines, but as the value of zinc waned, so did Rush.  There are still some buildings standing, though.  Unlike most ghost towns, these buildings are protected by the National Park Service, so they are preserved better than most.

The houses were fenced off with signs everywhere forbidding entry.  I'm sure it wouldn't be safe, and certainly the buildings couldn't withstand much foot traffic, but that didn't stop me from wanting to explore.  I would really have liked to peek inside.

Then there's Pivot Rock.  If you brave enough hairpin turns, you can walk a wooded trail to see these weird rock formations that have been a roadside attraction for over a hundred years.

One of the upside down pyramid formations at Pivot Rock.

In North Little Rock, there is a place called The Old Mill, which is neither old nor a mill.  It's a replica built in the 1930's in the style of mills of the 1830's.  It has a little fame by being featured in the opening credits of Gone With The Wind.

It might not be real, but it's pretty!

The park around it was picturesque as well, not to mention teeming with wildlife.  There were ducks, geese, turtles, birds and fish everywhere.

Also not real:  all the wood in this picture.  They're sculptures.

Next up in my whirlwind tour of Arkansas parks was the one I was most looking forward to--America's only Taekwondo park.

This looks exactly like every picture I ever took in Korea.

The H.U. Lee International Gate and Garden is in downtown Little Rock, which by no coincidence is also the headquarters of the ATA, which practices Songahm Taekwondo.  It is so much like parks in Seoul, that I felt like I was back in Korea, once again running around in oppressively hot weather with a camera, loudly announcing "I AM A TOURIST" in signs that everyone can read.

The park even had haetae sculptures on either side.  These mystical dogs are creatures of justice trusted to protect the people from fire and natural disasters.  They're also the symbol of Seoul, and you can see statues of them in places of importance throughout Korea.

Haetae!  Who's a good boy?

Immediately past the gate, there are statues of taekwondo students bowing to greet visitors.  

Students greet visitors to the garden.

I had a lot of busy feelings at this park, when I probably should have been feeling more tranquil.  The feelings intensified as I came to the main display in the garden, a bronze bust of Eternal Grand Master Haeng Ung Lee and a giant lineage chart behind him listing the most prominent figures of Songahm Taekwondo.

I'm visiting a park honoring a style of taekwondo that I don't train in.  My kwan doesn't have a park, and probably can't afford the $1.4 million dollars that these guys paid to get one.  But if we did have a park, I would totally rather go there than here, so I guess I don't belong here.  Except that THE WHOLE POINT of me being in Arkansas right now is a project about tearing down the walls between different styles and letting us all help each other.  Focus, Carlson!  Get some good pictures now, and mull over it later.

Having mulled it over later, it was the laser focus on one style of taekwondo, centering on one particular lineage, excluding figures of other branches whose achievements and contributions were equal to or greater than some of the names that did get listed, that made me feel weirdly unwelcome.  By excluding other styles, I felt excluded, too, like this place is only for Songahm people.  The cynic in me wonders if that exclusion could have been the intent, to improve the influence of their style by essentially creating a giant ad for it in the form of a downtown park.  But I tried to enjoy the place in the spirit that it was probably intended--to honor something they care about and the instructor who made it possible, and welcoming visitors to share in something they love.

The centerpiece of the garden.

Despite my roller coaster of conflicting thoughts, I do recommend this place to any other wandering martial artists who find themselves in Little Rock, especially if the weather is nice and the sun isn't trying to melt you into a quivering puddle of sweat and sunscreen.

Very near the taekwondo park was a restaurant called The Flying Fish.  Not to imply that I didn't enjoy my meal there, but the most notable thing was the Billy Bass Adoption Center.  Remember those singing fish that were all the rage in the early aughts?  Well, I found them.  Like, all of them.

Walls and walls of retired singing fish.  With no batteries, thankfully.

I left for home early on a Tuesday morning, when there wasn't much traffic on the rural highways, and it wasn't too hot yet.

From a scenic overlook on a deserted road.

Usually when I'm travelling for Martial Journeys, I am busy.  I have more things to do than time to do them.  I frantically rush from one spot to the next, trying to get the right picture to make a good blog post.  But when I got here, I was done and headed home.  I took a minute to just enjoy the view.  It felt so weird to be on a highway alone, seemingly the only person for miles in any direction.  I supposed that people didn't have much reason to be there at that hour.  Except for me, and I was there enjoying that view because I do martial arts.  It's been a weird journey.

Two down, 48 to go!

Of course sightseeing was not the main purpose of the trip.  I'll get to the martial arts in the next post, but if you just can't wait to have more Martial Journeys in your diet, you can check out my podcast.  I'll have a new episode out before the next blog post goes live.

Where Have You Been?

Hello everyone.  It seems my previously mentioned hiatus was longer than I expected, but the good news is I should be posting again soon.  The main hold-up is that I am, (and I'm using the technical term here) broke.

Look, it's that stuff I don't have.

Some Reasons Why My Budget Is Crying

My relatively sudden trip to Korea put a huge dent in my travel budget, as is to be expected with international travel.  I thought I'd be back up and running soon, but there was another wrench thrown into the machine right before I came back home.  Long story short, I finally started a martial arts school.

Yeah, I named my school after my blog.  Stop laughing.  There are about 800 schools in Madison and all the
names are taken.  Except for Face Punch Martial Arts.  Or Face Palm Martial Arts.  Those are still available. 

Starting a school is something that I have always planned to do eventually.  Grandmaster Park has been encouraging me to do it for years now.  I didn't listen.  I didn't feel ready. As time passed, more people I respected began to push me and that direction.  I told them all I'd do it someday.  The encouragement became more insistent and strongly-worded until the combined force of it was greater than how un-ready I felt.  That tipping point came during this most recent trip to Korea, during a long talk with Master Do about martial arts, life, work, and being happy.  When I told Grandmaster Park about my decision to finally do it, he smiled in a way I've only seen from him a few times.

From that moment, it has been a roller coaster.  I still don't feel ready.  But as a friend once told me, "How awful would it be if we only ever did things when we were ready? We'd never do anything."  He was so right.  I don't know if anyone ever feels ready to start a business for the first time.  Maybe it's crazy to do this without more of a cash reserve.  Maybe it's even crazier to do this while still remaining committed to the 50 States Challenge.  But to quote more inspirational posters... actually any of them will do, but I was thinking of this one.  The point is, I'm doing this thing.

I know most of my readers are nowhere near Madison, Wisconsin.  But now that I have a home base, should you find yourself in town, please feel free to stop by one of my classes.  I would be honored to be a part of your vacation.

I do have some money set aside for the 50 States Challenge, but there's one last budget woe that needs to be resolved before I make any promises.  His name is Kaoru.

"I refuse to cooperate with any form of dental care, and now I need surgery.  Pet me."

Kaoru needs dental surgery, and since he's high risk with anesthesia, it will be the particularly expensive kind.  Until that's done, I can't really budget accurately for travel.

And Some Good News

I don't want to make any promises until I get the financial part sorted out, but in the best case scenario I could start travelling for the 50 States Challenge as early as next month. I'll likely have to stay close to home so I can make it a shorter, cheaper trip.  No Hawaii for me just yet.

If you want to host me, let me know!  Even if I can't make it to your state anytime soon, knowing you're interested is still helpful.  If you don't want to host me but you just want to say hi, that's welcome, too.  My Facebook and Twitter links are to your right, and my email is at the top of the page.

Let's color in this map!

Thanks, everyone, for being patient while I work out these pesky monetary details.

Spending October in Korea

I am very excited about the 50 States Challenge, and I have big plans for it, but those plans have to go on hold for the time being.  I have worried about this greatly, since after visiting only one state, I am going to spend my entire travel budget on a trip to Korea.  It makes it seem like I'm not serious about the 50 States Challenge.

Here's the problem.  I usually visit Korea in August or January, or both if I can.  This is because I can teach at an English camp, which pays enough to cover the cost of the plane ticket and my expenses while I'm there.  They also provide lodging and some meals. It's usually a really good arrangement.  However, this year the camp I usually work had an explosion of interest among teaching applicants, and they filled up before I even sent my application.  So I had to choose between not going to Korea this time, or paying for the trip out-of-pocket.

Well, I'm training with Grandmaster Park in Korea.  I figure for many of you reading this, that doesn't mean anything to you.  But try to imagine having an instructor who was good to you at a time when you desperately needed someone to be good to you.  Imagine having the chance to train with someone who has been deeply involved in martial arts since taekwondo was first finding its identity and even before the name "taekwondo" was conceived.  Imagine having an instructor who not only taught you, but went out of his way for you to a degree that could never be called fair.  Or maybe you have an instructor that awesome and you don't need to imagine.  But suffice it to say there is no force on this earth that can keep me from meeting up with him like I promised back in January.  Even if I have to put the 50 States Challenge on hold.

I've trained with him every chance I get, but only once
did it make the front page of Taekwondo Times.

The other exciting opportunity on this trip is training in taekyun with Master Do Kihyun.  I talked about this a bit in a previous post, and this trip will be a continuation of what I learned from him before.  He told me once that the nearest taekyun school to where I live, as far as he knows, is in Vancouver.  That's only a 30-hour drive away.  As you might imagine, I don't mind travelling for an opportunity like this.

Of course, it's fun, too.

So, why October?  Two reasons.  First, the flights are cheapest in October, whereas August and January are peak seasons.  Unfortunately, that's a stressful concern.  And second, I've always wanted to go back to Korea in October.

The first time I went to Korea, I was there for a year.  I got to experience each yearly occurrence once.  Each season, each festival, each holiday.  The one exception was October.  I got sick in October, and it took me the entire month to get over it.  During that time, the weather was gorgeous and there were a ton of festivals and events, but I couldn't attend any of them because I couldn't exactly breathe.  I told myself that someday when I'm rich I'll return for the month of October and do it properly.  Well, I'm not rich, but I'm motivated.

How I spent my first October in Korea, except without Darth Vader.

I'll have a lot to tell about this trip, and I hope you enjoy it.  I'm anticipating stories about travel, culture, martial arts, and history.  I also have a couple more posts from Washington that will go up soon.  I will be posting one article per week until I run out of interesting stories to tell, but I am all too aware that when I get home, I'll to have to spend some time earning back all the money I'm pouring into this before I can resume the 50 States Challenge.  I hope I don't have to go into complete radio silence while I'm doing that, but if I do, know that I will be back.

Teaching Kicking at West Seattle Karate

When I realized my first stop on this project would be West Seattle Karate I was certainly excited, but I noticed one little problem.  I'd be teaching a group of students who were accustomed to being taught by Kris Wilder.

Between Kris Wilder and myself, one of us gets invited all over the world to teach seminars, and one of us came up with a hairbrained idea for a travel project that is, for some reason, actually happening.  I imagined students who learned from him regularly and thought they must be very happy with their normal instruction and might find me to be a disappointment.  A week later, I was certain that he had yellow belts more skilled than me.  A week after that, his yellow belts were all ex-marines who ran their own schools.  By the time I arrived in Seattle, I was envisioning a host of time-traveling Samurai from feudal Japan, who between their active careers in Special Forces and their side jobs as karate instructors, had no patience for my underwhelming kicking advice.  Thankfully my overactive imagination knows to sit down and shut up once class begins.

The first group:  novice karate students, or deadly ninja masters of disguise.
Who knows?

For all my worrying, nothing bad happened.  It's a fools errand to make any blanket statements about a group of students, since they're always individuals first and a class second.  But one trend I noticed at this school was that the higher the belt, the more eager the learner.  I hope I can foster that trait in my own students someday.

Very eager learners.

Given the broad assignment of teaching some kicking, there were a lot of ways I could have pared it down to a single lesson.  Eventually I decided to focus on pivoting.

In my opinion, pivoting often isn't given the attention it deserves.  It can seem like an inconsequential detail that can afford to be overlooked until the larger movements in the kick are mastered.  However, there are some very good reasons to correct it sooner.

First, correct pivoting can prevent injuries.  I know people who have done permanent damage to their knees because they kicked with poor pivots for years before correcting what seemed like a minor stylistic detail.  In fact, they were creating repetitive stress injuries by throwing their body weight against their knees at an unhealthy angle.

The second reason to correct pivots early is because it makes it much easier to correct the kick itself when the pivot is right.  When a student is having trouble with a kick, correcting the pivot almost always fixes the kick.  This is because when the standing foot is in the correct position, the hips usually fall into the right position with no effort. Conversely, if the pivot is wrong, it's almost impossible to kick correctly because the hip positioning won't allow it.

Some very flexible people can make a kick look right while not pivoting correctly.  Even in these cases correcting the pivot is beneficial.  By getting the standing foot and hip into the right position relative to the target, not only is the knee protected, but it also ensures that the strongest muscles are powering the kick.

This was my thinking as I filled the classes with drills, technical details, tips and trick for kicking.  I also got to tell a couple stories and the occasional joke.  Overall it seemed well-received, and thankfully my concerns about starting this project were groundless.  In fact, I was lucky to start here.  They were a great group, Sensei Kris was kind in his hospitality, I learned a lot and it was a lot of fun.

Not to mention donating 400 pounds of food to hungry children!

The first entry in the Statebook!  I know I missed some
people because I kept forgetting to tell people about it.

The Statebook

With Seattle less than two weeks away, there's not much time left to add ideas to this project--at least not if there's going to be a complete set of 50 when I'm done.  But I've added the Statebook.  (At least until I come up with a better name.)

Whatever I end up calling it, it's a blank book with two pages per state set aside for everyone to sign like a yearbook.  To quote a Facebook friend, it's like a reverse guestbook.  Anyone who is involved in the 50 State Challenge in any way--hosting, donating, or training--is invited to sign their state's page.  If people want to add notes, pictures and whatever else, that's welcome too.

I'll post each page on the blog as I go, but for right now it doesn't look terribly interesting.

Sticky notes go away before anyone signs anything.  I just don't know every state flag on sight.

All of my friends are tired of hearing how excited I am to be starting this project, and so are you, so this should be the last update until the project is finally underway.

Preparations

Although I have been bubbling with excitement about starting this project, there hasn't been much to tell.  I'm sure no one wants to hear all the mundane details of booking my plane ticket or shopping for a camera.

Proof that my new camera works.  And because
there might not be enough cats on the Internet.

There are a few things to share, though.  First, I'm really moved by how supportive everyone has been of this project.  Once I made the blog and the Facebook page live, friends and acquaintances reached out to me with encouragement and contacts.  That is awesome and appreciated, but what really floored me was getting the same from complete strangers.  

Iain Abernethy, who is only one weekend of seminars closer than a complete stranger, really went out of his way to help me get this project started.  I would have thought that someone like him would be too busy to make time for someone he's barely met, but he set aside time for a phone call (or as I have been calling it, the Interactive Iain Abernethy Podcast) and he had some great suggestions.

In particular, credit goes to him for the idea of a "takeaway technique" from each school.  I figured by the later stages of this project, I could teach a lot of classes like "Four Philosophies for Improving Power" or "Five Different Styles of Sparring" or the like. Certainly I aim to share what I learn over the course of doing this.  But his idea of taking a specific technique from one school to the next and creating a chain of cross-pollination was too brilliant to pass up.

Another suggestion of his was reading Are You Dave Gorman? by Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace.  It's a book about the antics surrounding Dave Gorman's quest to find other people with the same name.  I found it to be a very entertaining read.  I don't expect this blog to be a comedy, but funny things are inevitable when you travel, and I wouldn't be so selfish as to keep those things to myself.  

When I was a kid, only really old books belonging to my parents had yellow
pages.  Now books published in the early 2000's come pre-aged with yellow pages. 

The only stop that is officially booked right now is West Seattle Karate.  In setting it up, Kris Wilder was very kind in his support.  I could tell how busy he was.  It was a hair-on-fire kind of day for him when we first spoke, but he made time for me nonetheless.  He had the great idea of supporting West Seattle Food Bank with fresh fruits and vegetables since those tend to be scarce in food banks.  I don't know what I should expect to learn when I visit, and I'm happy to keep it a surprise, but he has asked me to teach some kicking to his students.

Even though the trip to Seattle has occupied most of my planning time, I've put a little thought into the next leg of the project.  I hope to do a driving tour of the Midwest, though nothing has been finalized yet.  That said, if anyone in Ohio or Indiana is interested in hosting this project sometime in September, please contact me.  

I'll post again when there's more to tell.  For now, thanks so much for your messages and emails.  You guys are awesome.