My Life and Karate, Day Four

My dojo, Sun Dragon Martial Arts and Self Defense, is running its major yearly fundraiser. We're a nonprofit martial arts studio, which is something of a rare beast, and we raise money every year for our scholarship fund and the free self-defense classes we offer in the community. For my part, every day until the day of the Kickathon, I will write a random amusing anecdote about karate and self-defense - enjoy!

Last weekend I was in New York at Honbu, the home school for our particular style of karate. Our head instructor was testing for her next black belt rank, and several of us decided that it was a great excuse for a vacation. We did take some classes while we were there, though, on the logic that it was easier to get used to the formality (and the accents - at Sun Dragon we get Japanese spoken by Texans who learned it from a French-Canadian, which is... not the same) when we weren't trying to take a high-stress belt test.

Saturday morning we took a kata class. (For those of you who haven't watched The Karate Kid III recently, kata are choreographed series of movements performed solo - like a dance, but with more punching.) Other than having to do OMG TOO MANY pushups, it went just fine - until the very end. All the students of my rank and above were instructed to perform Sanchin - a kata that I had fumbled through maybe twice, and don't really know at all. I'm not completely hopeless, though, so I figured I could just follow along. It wasn't something I was expected to have down cold or anything.

On my right was the other Sun Dragon student of my rank. She didn't know it any better than me, so she was no help. So at first I tried to watch the green belt ahead and to my left. She was a rank above me - she should know it reasonably well. But after the third time she did something, made a face, and switched her hand position, I looked to the green belt ahead of me instead.

I hadn't been watching him through most of the class, because the green belts were always doing a different kata than the one we'd been assigned. (Trying to figure out how to dodge three students throwing punches and kicks in different directions, plus a support pillar and the door to the girls' locker room, was its own challenge.) But he looked perfectly confident, so I tried to follow along as we went through a sequence of slow, deliberate blocks and punches.

I was concentrating so hard on not screwing up that it took me three or four moves to figure out why I couldn't seem to sync up with him. The guy only had one arm.

I spent the rest of the kata just making sure my feet were in the right position and thanking whatever provident spirits had stuck me in the back corner of the dojo where the instructor couldn't see me flailing.

That guy does better pushups with one arm that I can with two, and on my knees. One of the neat things about our style is that it is consciously intended to be usable by everyone, not just high-testosterone 18-year-old boys. Help us reach out to more people by donating $5 to our fundraiser!