One month has passed since the last post and already so much has changed. When I last left off I was diligently attending zoom based Karate. After my month of class I realized, after thinking out loud with my wife ad nauseum, that this wasn't a good fit for me.
I absolutely loved the guy teaching the class, but he definitely had a different focus compared to my old school. My old school in the Thorn city had a very dedicated path towards testing. Certain classes were specifically for test prep and others were basics. If we didn't work on basics, we'd learn something different to break up the potential monotony.
The zoom based class was forty-five minutes long (my old school was several hours per class), with the addition of a warm up the actual learning time would be reduced to 20 minutes. It was absolutely infuriating to me. I realize attacking the basics only serves to make us better and this teacher was fantastic at doing this, but it finally dawned upon me that I really wanted to focus my next exam. My wife continued to check my desires and in the end I was looking at my satisfaction and enjoyment. Neither were there. I'd come out of the class frustrated and angry. Not good.
I ended up called Reed (my sensei from Thorn city) and talking about how this path had ground to a halt. We talked for an hour and ran through the whys and wherefores and I came out with the comfortable feeling that I had made the best choice for me and he was supportive as always.
All this brings me up to last night. The small town we have moved to has a Soo Bahk school. I'd called them several weeks back and never heard anything from them. I'd assumed that they had closed due to the plague, but they called me on Monday and explained that their phone system had died. After a little chatting I got a schedule and last night was my first class.
My first school (in the frost) was Tang Soo do and was taught in Japanese even though it was a Korean art. My second school was Shudokan and taught in Japanese and now I'm moving into Soo Bahk which is very Korean. Thankfully in school one we used Korean names for the forms so not everything is alien, but I have a big learning curve coming up. The only English is when we are working on technique. Yeek!
After plenty of handholding last night we ended up working on wrist locks as part of the self defense curriculum. Thankfully it's all pretty standard fair, but they add in follow up strikes. Getting my feet and hands to work together was difficult, but what a joy to be back in the game and getting to grab on people!
A few notes: everyone wore masks even though everyone was vaccinated. I was the youngest person there at 54. One guy was going to be out for a knee replacement so the class was only three students and two instructors. Awesome. They let me keep my black belt - nice respect there. They talked right away about me testing in their school in about a year! I was like, "I just want to train", but still super respectful of my background.
