Test Info and Notes

I talked to Teacher this weekend and told him that I’d gotten a bit further with my test Kata and was hoping to meet up with him to check my progress.  I really didn’t want to be moving on and have him rework a bunch of my stuff.  I’m not terribly smooth with the few things I have so to have major changes would be a bit anxiety producing.

We met early yesterday and I went through my starting sequence, one long pass and second sequence.  Teacher corrected a few pieces and changed around the entry and substance of the second pass.  I feel kind of bad because he’s such a part of it and won’t have any surprise, but I’m guessing he wants me to look good in front of the other Teachers. 

Needless to say I’m getting rather excited by the test, but not having a clear idea of when it’s going to occur makes me a bit anxious.  Preparations for something nebulous make me nervous of course, so I’m just focusing on the kata and my cardio.  Currently I’m using my rower every other day to grind out 5000 meters and that pushes my endurance to it’s limit.  It’s roughly around 25 minutes at 160 bpm.  I follow that with kata work and I can burn 500+ calories in a hour.  I’m hoping the alternating exercises will pay off in the sparring and whatever they throw at me. 

Dave has offered to take me on a running date, but I’m not much of a runner.  However, I’ll try to make a mile on Friday night on his normal 3 mile cross country course.  It’ll be a good measurement of muscles and fitness.

As usual, the ramp up to testing brings Teacher Slim out of the woodwork.  It felt like a year since I’ve seen him in class, but he was in his regular jovial mood and still applied a wonderfully painful twist to everything we did.  I mention his presence because for my Brown Belt test he simply asked me to spell Tang Soo Do.  I was grateful for the rest break, but I couldn’t spell to save my life.  At the end of class he asked me some basic Karate terms in Japanese.  I only know a few of these, but wondered if he was going to ask me that on the test.  I just made my flash cards!