Hapkido Success! Sort of...

It's been a while since I graded at hapkido. In fact, it's been about two and half years. There are several factors involved in this: work was fuck awful, I picked up injuries every time I was preparing to grade, and I fell out of love with hapkido for a bit and I wanted to do more BJJ.

But with work no longer an issue (hurray!) and with my ongoing injuries currently sort of manageable, I graded a few weeks ago and passed. So my black belt now has a brown stripe on it. Make your own gags.

I thought my sparring at the grading was pretty decent, but the rushing techniques I was being tested on felt a bit ropey. Some of this was my own stupid fault. I was knackered by the time I came to demonstrate because I'd been volunteering to be an opponent at every opportunity when I should have been conserving my strength. 

But some of it was also the fact that I'm still not really feeling these techniques yet. I can do them to an OK level and I have a decent grasp of the mechanics, but they don't feel ingrained in the same way that other skills sets did at that stage.

But that happens at hapkido. There are certain technique sets on the hapkido syllabus that I really like, such as the judo-style throws, the punch blocks, the kick blocks, the choking defences, and a lot of the standing joint and wrist locks. But it's fair to say that rushing skills are not my favourites. In fact, they may well be my least favourite. 

On the plus side, I have time to ingrain these. I don't think I'll be grading again until the back end of the year as I have 20 knife defence skills to learn for my red stripe. 

Then, after that, it's grading for my second dan. 

It will be pretty cool to get my second dan. When I started hapkido in 2003, a black belt seemed like a far-off and very unlikely thing. But doing hapkido has seen me diversify and box for two years, train and compete at BJJ, and now do no-gi BJJ. 

So if I never make second dan and if it it all stops tomorrow, I've had a blast doing hapkido and all the other martial arts I've sampled or trained in on the back of it. 

I obviously hope it doesn't stop. I want to be training up to my 60s. This, obviously, is the new goal. I promised myself I'd be training into my 50s and in seven weeks I'll have achieved that. It's a small milestone for a comics-loving geek who never really did sport.