The Best Class Ever

A little background... Summer of 1979 or so. I was roughly the age of Princess, and my Dad had gotten a deal at the local Karate school to sign us both up for three months free. After the three months was up, I was due to go back to school and wasn't enjoying the class at all. I didn't like to sweat, didn't like pushups, and just wanted to play with my toys. So I quit. He stayed. Fast forward ten years. I am now a junior in high school, on the football team, and have my eyes set on going to a military college. I like to work out. I like martial arts. My Dad, who never stopped, is now a 3rd degree Black Belt and one of the head instructors of the school. I go back. For the next two years my Dad and I became very close. I made it to Green Belt, roughly halfway to Black, when I had to go to college and they moved away from Massachusetts. Both of us stopped Karate and never went back. Shortly after my first attempt at Karate, my Dad started training with Nunchakus. He passed a pair of foam-covered ones to me to play with, showed me a couple of drills, and never asked me about them again. In my imaginary world of my bedroom I became Bruce Lee and swung the sticks around constantly over the next ten years. I never really thought much of it. When I came back, the school decided to put together a demo team when I was an Orange Belt. They had each student pick a weapon to try out. I obviously picked the Chucks. When our first class began, the instructor's jaw dropped as I was spinning them around my body. He went and got the school owner. I was confused, as I thought I was relatively a beginner, since I had never gotten any instruction in how to use them. When the school owner came up, he turned to my instrcutor. "Give him another set," he said plainly. I had never handled two at once. I started doing symmetrical moves around the training floor when my Dad came up. "Where the hell did you learn that?" he asked. I just shrugged and told him that I had been playing with them for my entire life. They made me the demo student for chucks on the spot. Fast forward to last night. Finally, an amazing class. The whole family has been under the weather recently and neither SW or I were very enthused about going to class. We started by doing 100 sidekicks--#1, 2, 3, and 4. About halfway through a light came on. I was feeling comfortable. My balance was still way off, but the kicks were good. Then we did our forms for a while, and learned the rest of our form. Lastly, we did our one-steps, and learned the third one. By this point I was in the zone--it seemed like everything I was doing was going smoothly, I was feeling great and hitting my moves well. At the point that we normally do ground fighting (which has been conspicoulsy absent for a couple of weeks) Mr. N had us all go pull some weapons off the rack in the lobby. Sahng Jeol Bongs. Hells yeah. My adrenaline rushed once I was holding that weapon again. He started by showing us some basic moves, which I flew through like I had never stopped using them. It was the most pumped up I've been since we started Tae Kwon Do. We finished up with some jump kicks on a heavy bag. By the time class was over, the emotion in that class was so charged I could have gone and run five miles. For one night, it was the class I've been dying to go to for six months. CHALLENGE STATUS PUSHUP: +129 SITUPS: +99 MILES: -28.6