TKD Weekly Update

TKD this week was a lot of fun. It also kicked my butt. Let me explain.

The first fun thing is that one of my high school students is apparently a black belt and has decided to return to TKD classes at the dojang. Unfortunately, he’s one of my second years whose English is a little iffy. Still, I appreciate his presence. He has brought a friend along who is just starting TKD apparently. I was actually teaching him a form the other night. (Laugh it up.)

The second fun thing is that I’m actually starting to learn the forms in some kind of semblance of order now. As it stands, I can complete Form 1 by myself and Forms 2 and 4 if I’m in a group.

The third fun thing is that I started learning hanja (Chinese characters) this week. I now know how to write mouth, sun, four, and five. At first I was working in a generic ideograph workbook I brought from orientation. I was just copying from the wall charts. But the sabonim gave me an actual TKD/hanja workbook with letters to trace and everything! With each hanja is a factoid about TKD, which is unfortunately in Korean and thus impossible to read.

Add these four to the hanja I can recognize from exposure in Korea and Japan (water, fire, moon, big, mountain, one, two, three, and stop), and I’m well on my way. I feel like it’ll be good to learn hanja for a couple of reasons, or one big reason and two sub-reasons—grad school, the sub-reasons being Chinese and Japanese. I may not know how to pronounce the characters, but at least I’ll be able to read them, and that’s a start. I figure it’ll also help improve my Korean category by degrees.

The fourth fun thing is that I finally met the kwanjangnim. Here’s where the butt kicking starts. With him. Basically, he arrived, he set me up on a target dummy by myself (I’m the only yellow belt), and had me do dulachagi with my left leg for about half an hour. That’s 30 minutes, one leg. Man, I was pooped. Later on in the week for movement drills I had to go against the sabonim. I’ve got the popped blisters to prove it. The good news is my body is recovering faster and faster from fatigue and soreness, and I’m losing the weight my doc said I needed to lose to avoid getting diabetes. Two hours of TKD a night is a lot of exercise, plus all the walking/bike riding I’m doing everyday anyway. I sleep well and long these nights.