No pain, no gain
I have been stepping up my commitment to Tae Kwon Do lately. For a very long time, almost a year, I’ve only gone to 1-2 classes a week. One of those was a kids class where I helped keep the kids in line. Two of the rug-rats are my own. The sporadic attendance did very little to keep me in shape and my technique was not fairing an better.
Over the past year, a lot of the younger students have matured quite a bit and are now, more or less, fully grown and fighting strong. They all compete regularly in about 6-8 tournaments a year. By comparison, I compete on average once every other year (though I placed Gold in each for sparring).
Recently, we had 16 students go to the regional championship from our two schools. All of them placed first or second and I think 13 of them are going to the nationals in July. By the way, if you win the nationals in an olympic year you qualify for the US Olympic Team. Pretty cool.
With all of the excitement in the school I decided to try and work out a different work schedule, one that sees me leaving the office earlier to make class and finishing up work later in the evening over my VPN connection to the office.
We spar a lot at my school, since that’s our specialty. We have about 5 sparring classes a week and the teenagers go to all of them. In fact, they go every day for about 3 hours a day, plus an inenst Saturday clinic in Bayside Queens. That’s a little nuts for me. These days, I’m making it to 3-4 of these sparring classes which is really good by my standards. I also benefit from sparring with so many people that are better than me. The workout is great and I finally feel like I’m starting to improve again.
The additional classes take a toll on my body, however. I am currently suffering from a blow to my thigh; kind of a multi-day charlie horse. I also got kicked in the hand (should have been making a fist) and, today, I didn’t stretch my calves properly so I have an acute tenderness there and it has left me with a pretty severe limp. Before class we do an elaborate stretch routine for about 5-10 minutes, but I came in late for the first of a two-class session and missed the stretching. I stretched on my own but I was not thorough enough.
The smell of tiger balm is in the air and I’m hoping I’ll feel better tomorrow but I know I’ll only feel worse.