Cross Country Skiing Blastoff

Over the years at Maple, I occasionally heard from Soryu, and often from residents, on how Soryu said we should treat the exercise period in the morning: it was a formal practice period, and we should completely throw ourselves in, using up all of our energy in every moment. I wasn’t sure how that would be possible - I thought if we used up our energy in one moment, we wouldn’t have any left for the next moment of exercise. I also fairly often heard him teach about how when we use up all of our energy, more energy mysteriously is available and comes forth. Looking around during the exercise period in the main hall, I guess that maybe only 50% of one’s energy is available, and only for a few minutes or seconds at a time. Still, Soryu consistently spoke of using up all of the available energy in a moment to allow more to come forth.

Then one day when I was a resident, we had a community day where we spent the morning together at a local cross country skiing center. We all rented skis and had just gotten them on and were tentatively grouping together, wondering how we would get started, when Soryu skied up to the group. I wondered if he would be skiing with us, probably not I figured, as he was a very experienced skier, but here he was. After a bare minute of chitchat, Soryu suddenly took off in the direction of a trail. Two skis and two poles were flying in different directions all at once with apparently 500% of the energy of anyone I had ever seen skiing before.