This was an intense weekend: purple belt test in karate on
Saturday and then a half marathon on Sunday.
I had known my purple belt test was coming up. I just didn’t know exactly when it would
be. If I had still been planning to run the
full marathon, I would have asked ahead of the announcement that it not be
scheduled within two weeks of the test.
I did my orange belt test in February a week and a half after one half
marathon and two days prior to another, and that was hard.
The biggest thing I was worried about was how long we’d have
to stand in square horse stance. For my
orange belt test, I had to hold the stand for two sets of probably 10 minutes
and 15 minutes. But to my surprise, he
refocused the testing. We only had three
sets of two minutes, two minutes and five minutes.
I was also nervous about the sparring element of the
test. Sparring is difficult for me. I just don’t seem to have great instincts in
defending, or finding an open shot. I
took about six punches to the side of my head from Bryan S. in our one-minute round. In all of our practice sparring, we had never
been allowed to hit the head, so while I was used to keeping my guards up, I
wasn’t used to having to block shots up there. My ears were ringing by the end of it.
But Bryan S. was testing for his blue belt (the next level
up). His test involved stripping an
attacker of a weapon. Three of us went
in there (one at a time) with a two-foot padded training stick. First, he took it away from Bryan L. in 17
seconds. Third, he got it away from Dan
W. in 24 seconds. But I went second, and
I beat him front and back nonstop. He
couldn’t get it away from me! Finally he
knocked me over and braced my striking wrist with his knee. I was trying to twist around and use my left
leg to slide him off of me (because he weighs nothing), when our Sensei called
it a truce at 31 seconds!
The rest of the test wasn’t easy, but was pretty
doable. We were on the mat for three
hours, and there was about an hour of dead time within that from all the
individual testing vs. group testing. Everyone
earned their next belt. Three were
promoted to yellow belt, about six to orange, seven of us to purple, and one to
blue.
I then hobbled out to my car, stopped at Arby’s for some
sustenance, and then went home to prep for the race. I had never tried it, but I heard an ice bath
works wonders for rapid recovery from intense workouts. I didn’t want to lug a bag of ice home, so I
just ran a cold water bath. I was able
to survive that for about 15 minutes, and I do think it helped. I had some pasta at Amy’s to carb up for the
race, and chilled out the rest of the evening at home.
I also had to set all my clocks back. I was nervous about this. Last year I had a new phone and I wasn’t sure
how it handled DST. My prior phone didn’t
turn back/forward until you slid it open to reveal the keypad, so I always had to
set my alarm assuming it wouldn’t reset.
So last year, deciding not to trust the phone’s ability to handle this
complex time change, I turned off the “auto update item” option and manually
changed the time back. Not a good
move. It still rolled the time back an
hour at two a.m. (but didn’t “auto-update” to the correct time) and I was an
hour late getting ready for the race.
Thankfully I give myself a lot of lead time for races. I recall that I had even set a clock alarm but I don't remember why that didn't help. So this year, I knew I could trust my phone
to handle DST.
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