The Road Beckons

Heading out Thursday, flying in to Boston. It's been some time at home with just a little local travel. Hacked at the invading army of blackberries, prepped for and hosted our big annual party (corned beef and horse radish wontons, scotch eggs, BBQ steak, salted-carmel rum milkshakes...)

Time to get moving, though. And this will be fun, and busy, and intense.
Details for most of it are here:
http://chirontraining.com/Site/Sept_in_New_England.html

The first two workshops will be this weekend. Saturday, a one-day intro to violence. The usual: Efficient movement, fighting to the goal, a quick overview of SD law, of context, of violence motivations and dynamics. Power and counter-assault. More if we have time.
Sunday's workshop gets me excited.  There is very little new information in either martial arts and self-defense. People have been bad to other people since before there were people (judging from pre-human fossils who appear to have been hit from behind with an antelope bone). The quest now is to organize the information in ways that make the package tighter, easier to understand, easier to apply-- and do so without becoming vague or useless. So Sunday will be four hours exploring the principles of Structure and Void. Which sounds all cool and esoteric, but it is only how to offensively and defensively use your skeleton and the bad guy's skeleton (structure) and how to exploit the empty space between you, the threat and the environment (void.)

Then to Manhattan for a pair of evening workshops on the 16th and 17th. Gonna cram as much data in the first evening and principles-based physicality in the second as I can.

The following weekend in Rhode Island at "Just Train" will be an instructor class, "How to Run Scenarios". Scenarios are easy to do, but hard to do well. And if they're done poorly, they can mess students up on multiple dimensions.

The next week, three of the days will be spent filming Drills for YMAA during the day. Evenings, the plan is to run the CRGI/Chiron Instructor Development course. Specific material on teaching principles-based self-defense, limits of knowledge, trouble-shooting difficult students, developing and maintaining rapport with specialty teams-- stuff like that. It's _going_ to happen, even if we haven't hammered out exact location and price point. If everything falls through, I'll get with the interested people and do the class over dinners.

And then top it off with an infighting weekend at the Metrowest Academy in Natick. Martially, InFighting is the thing I love above all things, and a traditional JJ school will have a lot of the fundamentals down, so there will be some good people to play with.

Then home, for a few days, before hitting the skies for Europe.