No one ever talks about the sometimes even more difficult second step on a journey of one thousand miles.
Tonight, this wasn't the case for me. I'm honestly shocked at how not difficult class was for me tonight. We started with a high energy warm up; a mix of calisthenics, shadow boxing, shoulder tag, more calisthenics and then knee tag, before a light stretch. I looked at it like running, and tried not to "sprint" through it. When I was in my 20s, I could go into this sort of training full bore, and still have a lot of energy left at the end of the class. My second night back is not the place to try for this gain. In fact, it has crossed my mind that I may never be in that shape again. Certainly not on the training schedule that I am currently working off of. Maybe that's not a bad thing - I don't know. I'll worry about that later in my training, when the test gets closer.
We parlayed from warmup into line drills. Today I made sure to chamber high - as that was the major takeaway from last week, when I was told I was chambering everything too low. I was tired and dragging last week though - this week I came into class having driven more at work than walked, and actually eating my former pregame hockey meal of spaghetti with some light sauce before class. I felt good coming in.
Then we hit forms, and oh boy, was it an awesome way to get back to forms work. We started with forms by count. Holy crap, I never expected that - what a great tune up! I could have literally stayed there and worked all 24 though I recognize that would have taken hours. In the end, we did about 4 forms this way, and then went into the more traditional small group forms practice to work our highest.
I killed my highest form. I felt really strong, even keeping my balance on the first one legged stance kick in Tong-Il. We train on some really "sinky" mats, so one legged stances are hard to pull off with 100% success. My next time out on the floor it was So-San. At this point there isn't much time left in class, and it wasn't until about 65 moves into that form that I started to feel like I might puke. That's progress!
We finished class doing some prearranged but more in a teaching capacity. The first dan I was working with wanted to work 2-steps, so I showed him how to effectively catch a round kick (because you certainly don't use a circular block to do so).
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I feel really good about this decision to return to class. I felt stronger, by an order of magnitude. I'm still no where near where I want or think I can be, and I'm a little alarmed at how horrible my hips felt by the end. My kicks simply didn't want to come up near the end - so much so that I totally lost my concentration thinking about it through Yon-Gae, and blew the ending. Still, I'm playing the long game this time. I'm 38, and very much so not in martial arts strength. I think it helped me that my hockey games were one time a week, and that's the schedule I'm starting back with in TKD. My body is somewhat used to a major stress, and then having my Tuesday night class to really stretch out and loosen up again. I'm excited, and I'm falling back in love with training again.
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