More Shameless Bragging

Last night I passed my brown belt test! I now have a brown belt in shito ryu karate!

The test was grueling. It lasted over an hour and a half. We started with some brutal across-the-room kicking exercises. Then we did across the room multiple move exercises, including some techniques we'd never done before but that I imagine will be featured in the kata in the next level. Then we did kumite, sequences of counters to punches and kicks that we came up with ourselves. Mine were fairly creative, and I think he liked what I came up with. A lot of mine were inspired by kata. And then we finished up the evening with kata. He omitted the kata from the yellow belt level, but we had to do the orange, green, and blue levels as well as the brown belt kata. I flew through the orange, green, and blue belt kata, and did fairly well on the brown belt kata. Then we had to do a favorite kata. I chose one from the green belt level, Pinan Sandan, which reminds me of square dancing.

I think that my karate teacher was really impressed. He remembers my lack of body awareness when I started karate about three years ago, and he knows that I have really come a long way from that. Last night he expressed how impressed he was with my progress. He was amazed at how much I had overcome in the time I've been doing karate, and he said I did a good job on my test.

I'm really impressed with myself, too! I'm amazed that I was capable of learning all those kata, of doing a flying front kick, a spinning back kick (with some force), not to mention a three kick combination. Heck, it's kind of amazing that I can walk across the room without tripping over my own shadow. I joke that if I were a D&D character, I started off with a DEX of 8 or 9, and thanks to karate, I now have a DEX of 11 or 12. Maybe if I get a black belt, my DEX will rise to a 14!