In the zone

Meerkat spent the day badly driving his white van, as all good white van drivers should, honking horns at arrogant BMW drivers, swerving into the next lane before indicating etc. All in aid of fetching 36 nearly-new dayglo yellow sports mats from their factory in Leighton Buzzard (home of the martial arts mats) down to our dojo. Muchos thanks to our Fire Officer who secured free parking on campus.
So anyway, we laid them out and I had the bright idea of making a two-tone pattern, two rows yellow, one row black. The purpose was to divide the dojo into ‘zones’. The result though made our training room resemble a giant flattened wasp. Worse yet, some of the mats clearly had not stretched due to their newness and awkwardly started to rise upwards so as to look like a speed hump.
Still, these are minor complaints. It is just such a luxury to train on fully fitting training mats that are pleasant to breakfall on, that do not slip under your feet, and do not have holes missing. Oh, and the weird smell from the old mats is gone. They are however, exceedingly bright and after three hours of being in the room, my retina seemed to be permanently cast with a blue haze (the ‘negative’ of course of yellow).Other news: Meerkat gets his third stripe in BJJ class and immediately gets spanked by clubmates. Yep, the age old tradition of a rank promotion is coupled with a serious attempt by fellow club mates to pour cold water on any thoughts of thinking you are any good. I survived the onslaught and even managed to accidentally foot slap the big Ukranian’s face. Luckily he found it amusing cos I was fearful he would crush the Meerkat whilst laughing manically – he is that scary.