Yesterday I took a late, long lunch for the workout in the figure eight park. The kids and I met Sensei and several of the youth who will be promoting tomorrow. We spread ourselves out on the green and wore masks.
On Sensei’s order, we ran relays, in sets of ten, to a marker in less than twelve seconds, I think. Then he lowered the time to about nine seconds. Anyone who needed more time would have to run another lap. We ran to the mark, then walked back. After each timed run, we had about thirty seconds to recuperate. During the second set, we had somewhat more time but could not stop moving until we’d reached the marker and returned to our starting position. In essence, he’d doubled the distance we had to run without doubling the time. Our starting position was in line with a tree where a lady sat with her dog.
Sensei noted that the dog looked like Benji. The kids had no idea what he was talking about, but the few grown-ups there, like me, knew exactly who he meant. Just in case you don’t:
Apparently, according to this video, it’s been remastered and you can purchase it! But for some history, Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benji
Benji is totally seventies. And I must admit that the dog next to the lady under the tree did look just like the famed Benji from the seventies.
But back to to running relays: so the longer distance required a slightly different strategy: I took maybe two more seconds to run to the original mark and then jogged back.
It was really hot in the afternoon sun, which made the whole workout all the more strenuous. He started us out, by the way, with sixty tricep push-ups, sit-ups and squats, done as quickly as we could manage. We did the exercises before running relays. Afterwards, we practiced high rank kata, then ran the basic ones, including the kicking kata. Finally, we went over shodan and nidan syllabi. He asked for requests, so we ran Kanku for Senpais N and B, our highest ranking members. Here’s a video of Kanku published by the école TajRif de Karaté kyokushin Tetouan:
It is a beautiful kata, and one I do not know. I kept my distance and stumbled along. Also, given all the kata I do need to know for Saturday in a week, I resolved not to worry about it. But once I have the shodan test behind me, I’d love to really learn this kata.
We also ran the bo staff katas without bos, so that was interesting! And challenging.
In the evening, I went back to work and worked until about 8:45pm. I really did not want to do my remaining forty exercises. I even went as far as asking my daughter F, who is actually my Senpai in karate since she started over a year earlier than me, if I could skip.
She asked if I’d had enough water, worried I might be a bit dehydrated after that workout. So she told me to drink more water and dodged the question. I persisted. She suggested tackling the easier exercises first, and leave off push-ups if I was that tired.
F was willing to let me off, but her hedging and the fact that I even felt like I needed to ask permission were all signs that I really should do the exercises. I was about nine days out from my own test. I took her suggestion, had a bit of water, and tackled squats and sit-ups first. Once those were done, I felt good, and tackled the remaining chest push-ups. Funny how much resistance the mind can put up to something that really took little time. Forty is, after all, less than half of one hundred!
This morning, I did exercises right after making a coffee. I went out and bought bottled water for tomorrow’s junior promotion, and I texted Jessica.
We have karate class tonight. The junior promotion tomorrow will be early in the morning.
