The year at our karate club traditionally ended with the belt tests, followed by just a few extra training before the winter holidays break, which provide the best relief for yearly retrospectives and, more importantly, new plans!
I have to admit that I am a sucker for planning. Since I was a child I've been very good at making plans about everything, and even better at not living up to those plans ever! So, I just have to make some plans for karate training too, of course.
But first, I'll take a look at the closing year as a whole, and the main events.
The main theme of the year has been for me simply to prepare for the green belt test in December. That's right, I started to think about it and train for it practically the next day after the previous belt test. As customary to probably the vast majority of karate clubs around the world, we have reference lists of techniques, exercises, kata etc. that we are very likely to be requested to do at each belt test. Therefore, training for a belt test usually means to pay special attention when that target material is done during classes, have some training on our own practicing the list, and in the meantime bomb the teachers with questions and requests of clarifications, giving anything that is not on the list a lower priority. However, I see that it is quite usual for people to start following this pattern in the last month or two before the test, while I wanted to be more prudent and started straight away, i.e. a whole year before! On the other hand, this hasn't prevented me to still find out during the test that I've been doing a couple of things in the wrong way all the time... but at least I had no regrets, and when I stepped on the tatami for being tested, I felt confident and proud to know that whatever the outcome of my test, it would have been right.
The year also proved useful to learn something about fitness. I trained at my usual moderate pace (two classes a week plus a solo training once or twice a month) from January to the end of summer, but in September I got a combination of bad luck with an unusually long flu followed by a broken toe, resulting in a 6-7 weeks without training, just when I had planned to increase solo training to a weekly basis for the last two months before the test. When I came back, I really felt my legs have lost all their power built in the previous months... I was almost tempted to postpone the test, but now I've learned that enduring for just a week or two is enough to regain your full strength, even after almost a month of no sports.
But then how about that planning I've been talking about? Well, one year ago about this time, I was laying down on a piece of paper my first yearly karate plan (before that I really didn't have a plan of my own, I was just following the others). It was not much more than a bulleted list added by pencil on top of the real reference list for the test, printed on a piece of paper. That piece of paper followed me to every training for the whole year, so that after each class I could spend half an hour at least with my own tasks. At the end of the year, the piece of paper is literally falling apart... a good sign that it didn't just sit in my bag all the time!
It's not really much of a plan, but I thought it's interesting now to take a look at it in retrospective, and see how much I've been living up to it, and how much I have fallen short!