groooooan

I went to karate last night. It's killing me this cycle because a couple of our moves involve dropping your opponent on the floor, which means that we work with partners and get dropped as much as we drop them. One of the moves involves pinning your partner's arm to your chest, grabbing them by the back of the neck and spinning them around and down to the floor.

Which is just wrong on so many levels.

My partner last night was K, who was a belt ahead of me when I started and who now is about 3 belts ahead due to my maternity leave. She's about my age. Neither of us is as spry as we used to be, so the necks, backs, and shoulders were aching and getting up off the floor was getting harder and harder.

And a 16/17 year old black belt (nice enough kid, just very young) had the nerve to tell us before class when we were griping to each other about aches and pains, "You're not old!" OK, so we're not 60 or 70 or 80, but 40-ish with back problems is a bit older than 17, dahling.

Renshi M, the director of the center and a good guy was making all of us do push ups with our feet up on the base of the Wavemaster which means they were about 18 inches off the ground. Let's just say that I didn't even do ONE. I don't know if anyone else had to other than me, but he said that if we couldn't do it, to put our knees down.

We were also doing sit ups with our feet up there and were supposed to be touching the bag as high up as we could. Well, I could almost touch the bag. Not quite. Unnnng.