On Sundays, the competition team practices. Although I’m a competitor, I’m not on the official team (so I don’t go to their special workouts) but I do wear the team name. It’s a weird arrangement but I don’t have the funds to pay for private training. Also, it’s mainly children, so I just train on my own.
Anyway, after Saturday’s tournament, one of the masters asked me to come to the Sunday training because we’re preparing for the Las Vegas Open (which is like next week??? Omg) and she wanted to run black belt forms. I was like “sure” so yesterday I showed up.
Grandmaster walked in and I immediately bowed and apologized for intruding on their workout time. He interrupted me and said “I’m so glad you’re here, I meant to call you but I completely forgot. It’s picture day and I want some photos of you. Also I want to watch your forms so go get changed and warm up.”
I got changed and participated in a couple kicking drills, then another master asked me to lead them. We did that for awhile until I was called over to take my photos. GM had me do a front kick since I can get it over my head. Hopefully he’ll send me a copy so I can share. ☺️
The class split into color and black belts, so I joined my group and we ran poomsae starting at Taeguek 8. We were focusing on one part of taebeck when GM called me over. He spent the rest of the class time with me and another Vegas competitor. It was nice to have that time because he helped clear up a lot of mistakes and confusing parts of my forms.
At the end of practice, GM and a couple of instructors had gone into the office to talk. I peeked my head in to say goodbye (as per our tradition, if you leave before the masters you must say goodbye). One of the instructors was talking and GM stopped them to talk to me (I was just going to bow silently so I wasn’t expecting that). He told me that I had done really well today and that my forms have improved a lot. The others nodded. That made me feel very special.
