September 20, 2008

Back to Karate and I Survived

I went to bed last night at 10:30 p.m. I couldn’t deal with staying awake and stressing about going back to karate in the morning. I spent the night dreaming about blowing my other ACL. It was a pleasant night’s rest.

I woke up this morning, got my gi and obi together and headed out for class. As I was driving to the dojo, it was like a flashback of the last year. It was only the end of August last year when I returned to karate after my whiplash injury. This week marked 11 months since I blew my ACL out in the first place and 9 months since surgery. I was scared to death of stepping back on the dojo floor; but I knew it was something I just had to do and get out of my system.

I arrived at a quiet dojo. One of my instructor’s saw me walk in holding my wrapped up gi and obi and my ACL brace. Her mouth dropped open with surprise as she asked me "What are you doing here?" I told her I was there to try and she was thrilled. We went into the locker room and I strapped my brace on and tied my gi. . . the wrong way.

"One of us has her gi tied the wrong way," my instructor said. Obviously, it wasn’t going to be her. She’s a Kyoshi after all. We both laughed and I retied it before tying on my obi. It felt good, weird but good.

We walked out into the main area and Hanshi was standing there, having recently emerged from his own locker room. He looked physically shocked to see me in my gi and he took a few staggers backward.

It was time to start.

The class today was small. A young green belt, a new adult white belt and me, the gimpy girl. Hanshi did me a favor and we did the rei in standing up today. We spent most of the class working upper body self defense.

For the second part of class, Kyoshi had us work on bunkai for Nai Hanchi Shodan. We ran through the kata once before we started. I won’t lie. It hurt. Nai Hanchi stance is really rough. Any time spent in stance brings a shaking leg and a knee that starts to protest. The leg lift part made me wince and it became quite obvious that I’m going to need to accept the fact that my kata now is not going to be my kata of last year.

When we were finished with Nai Hanshi bunkai, we worked on Sanchin. It’s a second degree black belt kata in our system and I think I know it now. Hanshi and Kyoshi stress this breathing kata for its healing properties and I believe that is one of the reasons they wanted me to learn it. I made it through that slow moving kata just fine, although the turns were a bit rough in the beginning.

Throughout the class today, both Hanshi and Kyoshi kept reminding me to "take it easy." They didn’t expect me to be the same karate-ka as last year. Knowing that they’re not expecting me to come back and be perfect is making it much easier to return.

I left the dojo feeling a little sore (I think I put my brace on too tight), but very proud of myself. It feels good to be back. I just have to put realistic expectations on myself and not push myself to do things that just don’t work the way they used to quite yet. I’ll get there, one class at a time, but the "there" might be a bit of a different place than where I was before my injury. It’s just something I’m going to have to accept.