9th Kyu - on our way

 So a little while ago I started going to a Karate class with my daughter.

She's very busy, in band, glee club, drama, and so on - but last year she gave up ballet, which she'd done for five or six years at this point, and with that, gave up the only physical activity in her roster of things-shes-busy-with.

Given that I prioritize physical activity -- I work out most days, either running, spinning, weights -- and know how important it is to take regular exercise, I was adamant that she needs to at least do something that would raise her heart rate a couple times a week.

So I suggested Karate.

Now, I've been waiting to suggest Karate for almost a decade. My daughter is ten now, but I've wanted to study Karate seriously for much longer than this.

When I was my daughter's age, I did a few years with the South African JKA. My sister and I were in an after school care programme, as both of our parents worked, and in both of my primary schools there were Karate classes that we could access because we were at school anyway. I didn't get particularly far in, and I can't quite remember why I stopped, but that definitely planted the seed, and over the years I've always meant to revisit it.


In fact, I did, briefly, when my daughter had just turned one years old. We'd moved provinces for work and I went to a couple of lessons at a Goju Ryu dojo. They were great, if I'd continued with them, there's a good chance my life would look quite a bit different than it does today. Something happened that made me feel a little uncomfortable, so I stopped going -- but I enjoyed it enough to know that this was definitely something I should be pursuing.


Fast forward 9 years to 2024 and my kid ending her ballet career, I suggest we start going to Karate lessons together.

Of course, I don't simply straight up suggest Karate. First things first, we do what inspired practically every kid in the 80s to learn Karate, and we watch "The Karate Kid".

She loved it. After that, the next bit was easy.

I reached out to a couple of dojos and the first that got back to me, a Shotokan dojo a short drive from my house, was the one we ended up visiting.

This first little bit has been really interesting. No massive narrative, so I'll write some bullet point observations:

  • It's more intimidating training with children than with adults. Although there's a fairly decent mix of ages, beginner Karate classes will, I guess, always trend towards younger students. The awkwardness of it is mitigated by the fact that I have my kid in the class, but I think that there's a good lesson in humility training next to literal children, and a lesson in beginner's mind, in the strongest sense.
  • As I mentioned above, I'm pretty fit. Not fighting fit though, that's something completely different. A recent conditioning class taught me this. Being able to knock out a middle distance run without too much trouble doesn't equate to being able to do a stupid mock fighting exercise with someone half your age (this is one of the adults I was training with, not a kid - still, half my age. God.)
  •  There is a lot to learn, however, the kyu system is generally really well thought out. Every step introduces one or two new techniques, and there's a constant revising of the same moves, but with more depth. This is the way to really learn something.
  • I need to desperately work on my flexibility. Cardiovascular is good, but flexibility is not good at all.
  • There are so many complexes of muscles that I don't use regularly that need training in Karate. This is a great thing.

 Most interestingly, and perhaps importantly, I think Karate is one of those activities I've recently been trying to prioritize that has a real unifying effect. That is, it hits multiple aims/goals/activities/ends all at once. This is like, say, spending time studying stats rather than formal logic (which I adore). The former just has a wider surface area, it helps me understand a broader range of phenomena and/or has wider applicability _in my life_. Karate mixes interesting history, graceful and powerful movements, fitness, clear progression, social interaction, and time with my kid - this hits a number of important points for me that something like, say, running or spinning just doesn't.

So I'll try give regular updates. Mostly, though, I'm going to focus on showing up.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

JCE's Gifted and Talented Center

Image
Back in South Africa, in the early 90s, I was invited to take part in programmes offered at the Johannesburg College of Education's "Gifted and Talented Center". I can barely remember much about it. I recall that I did courses in electronics, drama, programming, and study techniques. Further, I remember the buildings and the general feeling of the place (massive buildings, alcoves with chairs and windows in the long passages between primary blocks, etc.). However, I couldn't remember very much around the nature of the programme (if, indeed, I ever knew anything about it) - who funded it, how were pupils identified, etc. I tried searching online but to no avail, there was one hit on someone's personal blog, but that was it. I did, however, manage to find the director of the JCE Gifted Child Enrichment Center from the time I attended and took a chance, asking him if he'd be willing to provide me with some information. He response was both generous and massively
Read more

100 Go Mistakes 10-16

Here we go through the rest of Chapter 2  10 - Not being aware of the possible problems with type embedding Go allows you to not only include types as fields in structs, but also to embed them. Essentially this makes the fields of the embedded/base type part of the "containers" interface. Harsanyi points out that this can lead to exposing more than you might want to, since all of the base type's fields and behaviors are exposed as part of the container. If there is reason to hide the base struct's details, rather simply include it as an unexported field and write accessors. 11 - Not using the functional options pattern I'll admit that I hadn't heard about, or consciously noticed, this pattern before now, but it's quite brilliant. An issue with positional arguments in complex functions is that having tons of arguments that are either null, or unused along certain paths, etc. is a real PITA. My own preference, when factoring out the functionality into mult
Read more

100 Go Mistakes: 1-9

So I'm pretty much looking for a place to write up notes on things I'm reading - which, right now, includes Teiva Harsanyi's "100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them" (does anyone else get confused when writing title-case? Let me look up the rules quick ).   Anyway, I'm at a point where I want to write down some of what I'm learning so I can refer back to it later, so let's go. 1 - Unintended variable shadowing Go's short variable declaration operator (:=) can introduce unintended effects if you're making use of it within nested blocks. Here's a simple example . The workaround is really to explicitly assign the value to the variable declared in the outer scope, either by using temporary variables when using the declaration operator, or simply assigning directly. 2 - Unnecessary nested code This provides a fairly useful heuristic with regards to code complexity. Essentially, Harsanyi wants us to try, as far as possible, to keep the "happ
Read more