My Nidan Grading

Not too bad. Silly me thought I'd get away with an easy grading; it was by no means easy. I also envied Morana (a 3rd degree bb at another club/different style) who did the "spiritual" test (joined the "1000 Club") because she was finished by noon and my grading didn't start until 1! So I started at 1 p.m. and it went until 5 p.m. We did all our kata together (at least 13 different ones, some twice) then had to do our favourite kata alone and then Sensei picked a kata for us to do (by ourselves). We did other drills but the toughest part came with sparring.

There was Paul, Brian and I going for nidan but only Paul and I had to spar continuously for 45 minutes. There were 5 others, 2 of which would be sparring each of us, the other 3 waited. When a minute was up a fresh, rested person sparred us. That continued until everybody went around 8 times each, so in 45 minutes we both did 40 rounds of sparring. My legs are rubbery, my arms the most sore because I had to try to keep my guards up (kept getting hit in the head otherwise). My right bicep is literally popped out. At rest, without flexing it feels hard. Same as my left calf. I felt close to tears (drained, tired, exhausted, pushed) at one point, part way through but it occurred to me that I wasn't allowed to be stopping any time soon so I had to find it in me to continue. That was the biggest spiritual test I had to do, more so than the 1000 club (1000 of each push-ups, crunches, kicks and punches). By the end my mouth was so dry, I couldn't swallow my saliva (I had to spit it onto my arm, on the gi, literally) as we weren't allowed a drink until after the next drill which was, Brian and I had to defend Paul while the other 5 had to get past us and carry him to the other end of the dojo. If I scored on someone, they were out. However, if someone else scored me on, the other person could come back in.

It was tough. They ended up dragging Paul down the dojo, not carrying him. We started again but stopped the drill before finishing. Then we had the belt ceremony, which was cool. I got a nice certificate, some kanji of a special set of 8 poems we use in karate written and signed by our Sensei Meitetsu in Japan and a special gift from him for Janet & I, a little 3x4 cloth picture of a Geisha. Very nice, I love it. OF course, the ritual sake drinks came at the end before we went to dinner. We each had to answer questions correctly or otherwise take a shot. When we finally answered correctly, we drank once more but our sensei did too. One of my questions was which beer does Sensei (in Japan) like best. I said Sapporo but it is only the Japanese beer he drinks when in Canada because Orion (his fave) is not available. Ugh! We actually call Brian "Orion-san" because of this beer (since we visited Japan).

Anyway, I was on a real high afterwards, at dinner I was talking like I was drunk. I did have some wine but not that much. It was just a really cool day, and we all bonded with each other having shared this special event. Now tonight I'll go to a class to train with some new black belts! Should be fun.