First permission to test

Even though I am still not healed up with my back or knee (I'm used to having the bad knee, but the back is usually healed up by now), I went back to leadership class tonight, just to be sure that I was still in the swing of things. Fortunately, Mr. A was teaching, and he's usually pretty understanding when it comes to injury. One thing that was a good exercise was we were put in teams where we had to think about how to teach something from our forms incrementally. Alex V was back (Yay! he's a good kid, and I like him) from a trip to Bosnia, and being that he had an injury and he was the other color belt, we were paired up. We were responsible for teaching how to do a jump side kick, like in our form. We broke it up into two main parts. First we established practicing the #3 side kick, but then we also practiced just stepping up into the jump. Mr. A thought we did a good job. We then could practice form and weapons. Alex and I mostly yakked and caught up during weapons, because we really have ours down.

Then, it was the moment of truth. In order to get permission to test (or graduate), starting with the purple belt level, you have to break a board-- "real wood!" as we are reminded. Well, I always feel that breaking wood is easier than breaking those damn plastic boards. I knew I could break the plastic, so the wood should be a snap. I hadn't broken a board in about 2 weeks, so I did a slight warm up on the BOB, and then did about 2-3 practice hits before attempting to break. So, the board was set up, I asked for permission to break, and then....WHAM! I broke that baby straight through on the first try. "Piece of cake!" declared Mr. A. I was happy, to say the least, but he was right. I've put the work in, and it shows. I like breaking boards too. :-) So, tonight I got two stripes-- one for breaking my board, and the other for showing that I have my form down. So I was happy. Graduation/testing is about a week and a half away, so if my back and knee can just cooperate, then I can get through and get my blue belt! It was a good night, despite being injury laden.