Friday, August 23, 2013

First day back at Gompers Middle School - with more mats!

It's great to be back.
I'm super grateful for the new crash pad and new mats. Thanks, Mom!  Also, thank you to the very nice people at Soundcoat - the warehouse where I picked up the mats from Dollamur.  My sister bought them as a birthday present for my mom's 80th birthday. What Mom wanted was to support me teaching judo. How awesomely cool is that? The same woman who signed me up for judo at the YMCA when I was 12 years old.  My mom and sister are both super, "Buy American" fans, so they got mats made in the US. I got to the warehouse on their lunch hour and I was on a tight schedule from Santa Monica to a meeting in San Diego. Someone was nice enough to come in off of his lunch hour and load the mats into my van for me.

It was really nice to have more mats and a second crash pad. If you have to line up 16 kids on one pad, even if they are at both ends, each person does not get that much practice.

As you can see, the crash pads came to good use. It was HOT in there, so the energy drinks donated were also appreciated. Overall, a great start to a new year.


2 comments:

Fritz said...

I see you are a fan of crash mats...

The coolest thing in judo for me as child was Ukemi...

In the video we can see that the Uke (orange belt?) does not do any Ukemi, thats quite confusing...

What about Ukemi...?

Dr. AnnMaria said...

I am a big fan of crash mats. I didn't mind ukemi that much as a child but I liked throwing a lot more and a person can take a lot more falls on a crash pad.

The uke is not really an orange belt. All of our gis, mats, everything are donated. There must have just been an orange belt in the closet with the gis and he grabbed that one.