And Another One

Last night after work was karate. Something I probably neglected to mention is that one of my best friends teaches Shorinji-Ryu Karate at the local YMCA. Starting around November-ish, we signed up for a YMCA membership and started taking my five year old to karate classes. A couple weeks later, I started joining him. Then in January-ish, Mrs Chops started attending classes too. We've tried bringing the three year old, but he's not quite into the whole "paying attention" thing yet. Since I'm blogging my BJJ classes, I should probably also blog my karate classes.

My friend was in "Old Skool" mode last night, so there were lots of push ups and crunches being handed out. Thankfully, we did them in sets of 10, so they all seemed manageable at the time. I'm sure feeling it this morning, though. That's kind of sad for a guy who could do 100 push ups a year ago.

Quick rundown of what we covered - Kihon (sprinkled with calisthenics), then the white belt line and colored belt line alternated doing Kenshuho (and calisthenics for the colored belts). Next was Ananku and Seisan kata. I think my Ananku is more or less fine (meaning I pretty much remember it all, but I think it could look cleaner), but I lost track of what I was doing in Seisan, *again*, towards the end. Ugh. Seriously, this frustrates me. I can learn two Sayoc transition drills and a template or two in a single day, but several weeks in and I can't remember all of the second kata. Ugh. Maybe I need to add a reps goal for Seisan this year. I doubt I'd get 10,000 reps of a kata in this year, but a couple hundred should be doable.

At the end of class, he went over test results (Tuesday was our test). Mrs Chops, Chops 2.0, and I all passed. This means that for the first time in my life, I have a ranking in a traditional martial art. It feels weird.

Lastly, it was mentioned to me that unless you have somebody to crank on, reading the notes from my BJJ class doesn't really make sense. A) Those notes are actually just meant for me. I find that the act of organizing my thoughts and writing them down helps me remember the details. B) Next time I'll try to find a YouTube video that represents what I'm talking about. Also, I might do more in-depth notes on the karate, too. Or maybe not. We'll see.