Kung Fu Retreat- Day 1

After my disastrous performance at the meditation retreat (details here and here), I thought that I should give it another shot, but with less ‘meditation’ and more ‘doing stuff that’s not meditation.’ So I dug around on the internet and I found a week-long kung fu retreat in Ft Lauderdale, Florida (which is where all true kung fu is taught, of course).

The details for the retreat included 4 hours of kung fu training each day, including both the active combat styles as well as slower, meditative practices. In addition, the retreat included seated meditation, field trips, a massage, yoga, philosophy discussion, and other activities and benefits. In total, the proposed daily schedule was about 13 hours of education, but only a few hours of that would be physical training. I figured that this would be a good combination of meditation and martial arts, so I signed up, packed my things, and headed to the retreat.

In my emails with the school leading up to the retreat, there were a few things that seemed a little ‘off’ that made me wonder about the legitimacy of the school and the training offered. As it turns out, most of my concerns were accurate. The training is held in a house (which she called ‘the loft’), but it’s not the instructor’s house. Apparently the instructor rents the house to teach in, and there is a yoga student living there (although she’s apparently studying physics for some reason). I got to the school at 8:00A on Monday to start the retreat. I finally met the instructor, a very petite woman in her mid 30s with bottle-red hair, and we chatted for a bit. As it turns out, I’m the first person who has signed up for her kung fu retreat. I was her only student.

Before we go too far, let me pause for a moment to help you build a mental picture of the training environment: The training space is in the living room of the house. The room is dimly lit, even with several candles and some incense burning, and the walls are covered in posters depicting chakra maps, the Buddha, and other esoterica. In lieu of curtains, the windows were covered with brightly colored tapestries. The floor is covered with a layer of padding that’s designed more to stop a toddler from getting injured than for any serious martial arts training. It’s thin enough that you can feel the uneven surface under it with your feet. In the background, she was playing Enya knockoff music on a pair of bluetooth speakers, and there was a cat roaming around the house, meowing periodically. There were a few small bookshelves along one wall. One of the titles that I saw was “Plant Spirituality.” She told me that they recently had held a ‘full moon’ event, to celebrate the full moon and work with the energies associated with it.

Training started shortly after 8:00A, and involved about 3 hours of tai chi and WaLu, a martial art that dates back roughly 50 years. No, I didn’t miss a digit on that. Some of my friends are older than this martial art is. It’s apparently a combination of Wing Chun, Ba Gua, and some other styles of kung fu. As the training progressed, I noticed the instruction was relatively disjointed; we didn’t start with a basic punch or stances, we started with the Five Animals form, followed by a Wing Chun form. I have no experience with either of those, so I had to watch the instructor in the mirror and I did my best monkey form. As in: Monkey see, monkey do. I had no idea what I was doing, but my reflection looked like it was doing roughly what she did, so I figured that I was on the right track. Then she stepped aside and said, “OK, let’s see how much you remember.” I’m not exaggerating- I couldn’t remember the first step. I started with what I thought was the first step, and she said, “Well, that’s step 3. Back it up.” To what? I started with the one thing I knew. She helped me get through the first section of the form a few times, so I hoped that I retained enough for the next day’s class. Despite the fact that it was a slow-moving form, I started to break a sweat within minutes of starting. That wasn’t terribly encouraging. As it turns out, the workouts that I’ve been doing at the gym don’t readily translate to being able to stand and hold a position for an extended period of time. (The ‘extended period of time’ being about 30 seconds. I keep saying that I’m out of shape, but nobody believes me.)

After the forms, we did some push hands drills, which are designed to help you relax your body in a fight and to feel what your opponent is doing before you can see it. For part of this session, we spent an hour in a local park with two of her friends who also study martial arts, so we were able to work on that drill with different people with different body types. After that, we went back to the school for an early lunch (it was around 11:15A) of a vegan taco salad. Nothing terribly fancy here, just a taco salad with walnut ‘taco meat’ and a relatively bland dressing. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it would have been greatly improved with ground beef. Or pork. Or chicken. Or some kind of animal product. After lunch, we took a break, and I went back to my hotel room to relax.

I returned to the school at 2:45P for the next block of training. We spent two hours doing various kung fu drills as well as other stretching and mobility exercises. At one point we were rolling on the floor. Not a kung fu combat roll to get closer to your opponent or to roll to safety when you are thrown to the ground. No. We laid on the ground and rolled from side to side like kindergardeners pretending to be logs. I have no idea what the point of that was, but it wasn’t even the goofiest thing we did. The stretching was good, but it further highlighted how much I need to modify my workout routine. All I know is that the older I get, the longer my legs get. Or the shorter my arms get. Either way, my toes are consistently out of reach. Around 4:30P, we finished the afternoon session. She gave me a dinner of pasta noodles with vegetables and a light sauce that tasted like it might have had a peanut base. We discussed what the schedule would be for tomorrow (slightly later start time, long break in the afternoon, then meeting with some of her friends for training in the evening), and I left. After all of that training and the vegan meals, I did the only thing that seemed reasonable. I drove straight to a restaurant and had BBQ for dinner. And a chocolate chip cookie. I earned it.