I survived the first night. Surprisingly, I have the full use of all of my limbs and my face is not (yet) hitting my keyboard, although I see a search for caffeine in my near future. Since I typically head to bed just after I get Little Man off to dreamland, 11 pm is obscenely late for me to be out on a school night. But as I said, it’s worth it.
Last night we spent a large portion of the two hours working on technique, which is far less glamorous than it sounds. It just means we do the same move over and over again until we get better at it. I must have done 8 dozen round kicks, but the improvement is already starting to show. Whether I can lift my legs to do them again tonight is another story.
The other thing we did last night is learn the first several moves of our forms. There are beginner, intermediate, and advanced students taking this Rank Camp, so our lucky instructor gets to learn (or brush up on) and then teach three different forms. The form I have to learn is called Hwa Rang (pronounced Hwa-wrong, with an audible h and a rolling r).
What’s that you say? I get to learn a form with the same name as one of my favorite characters on one of the (very) few video games I enjoyed playing as a kid? Geeky coolness!!
If you’re a child of the 80’s (like me), you probably played some Tekken growing up. Maybe you played Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat, but if you were really cool, you played Tekken. If you are indeed cool, you probably remember a certain young TaeKwonDo master named Hwoarang. Yes, pronounced exactly the same way as the form I’m learning. I suspect they got their name from the same entity. The Hwarang were a group of youth trained in martial arts in the Silla kingdom of ancient Korea.
Therefore, I am geeking out. I might have to practice saying the name of my form in the Tekken-announcer voice.
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