Your Clothes, Book Cast With 100%

 

At 6:05am I looked at my phone quizzically while trying to wake up.  My SaBomNim (master teacher), who is legally blind, sent me the message, "Your clothes, book cast with 100%".

I sat there befuddled for a few minutes.  I had a good night of sleep, so I felt like I was awake and aware, but this threw me off.  After a few minutes it slowly dawned upon me that SaBomNim's speech to text decided to radically reinterpret what he said.  The text should have been, "your closed book test was %100".  

I celebrated last night based on the fact that I just completed it and really hadn't considered the score it might bring.  I will take that score!  

Class today consisted of form review which can be boring and embarrassing at the same time since I can't remember the earlier forms to save my life.  We finished up class with sparring.  

I got matched with an adult, male, white belt.  The most dangerous of the species and he lived up to that.  Pure attack with no control.  Never have I had to take so many punches and kicks without let up.  It did not matter how much I moved; he was there.  It is no excuse of course, but he gave me some lumps. On our second match I stuffed him away with a front kick, but that give me to two second of breathing room before he started pummeling me all over again.  

We will just say that I got a lot of exercise today and leave it at that.

71 Days!

I figured I would try to jump back in to writing about class (haha, see what I did there?).   It's been ages since I wrote, and many things have changed since then.

Since I last wrote, I met Striking Thoughts author, Count Dante and before I that I met the author of Covert Book Report, Dojo Rat.  I found out that he lives near me!  Well, maybe I wrote about this before, but I'm too lazy to go back through the blog and check.  It was still a big deal for me.  Basically, these two have been pen pals of mine for over a decade and we'd never met face to face.  Between the three of us we have like 60 years of martial arts experience.  

Does that make us any good?  Probably debatable! 

The real reason I started writing again is that I am getting closer to my next belt test.  I'll be testing for Ee Dan in March.  That is the equivalent to a 2nd degree black belt. I am 57 this year and although I am reasonably fit, the test is a bit difficult in areas. I am just scratching the pass line for the endurance part of the test (I have to do 40 jump kicks with both legs in under 60 seconds.  I'm barely making that happen).  And then I need to be able to jump up and do a split kick and break two stacked boards with each foot.  I'm using the easiest boards to practice and not hitting them equally.  I don't have much time though.  Constant practice is tough because I have to warm up a lot, so I don't pull anything.

To further mess with the process, my wife and I are going on vacation for two weeks next month.  Not optimal!  I will be practicing as much as I can and hope that the two weeks I have before the test will have me squared away.  Whoop!