There have been a lot of changes going on in the household. As Wife and I look at them, they’re all very good things towards taking us individually closer to where we want to be and also as a group/family taking us where we want to be. Here I want to talk about one big change that I’m making in my life:

My martial arts study.

Getting Started

Let’s take it way back to when I was a kid. I loved watching the Saturday morning “Kung Fu Action Theater” stuff on TV. I had an uncle that enjoyed martial arts so seeing things like the “Basic Nunchaku Kata” poster on his wall, various fancy weapons in his room, was just too cool to a young dumb kid. 🙂  So that probably set the seed for “someday I’m going to study this stuff”.

What finally got me to study was having the time and gumption to do it. In my K-12 studies I always had something to keep me active (at least P.E. class). In undergrad and grad school, if I wasn’t doing some specific physical activity (e.g. racquetball), at least I was walking everywhere I went on campus. When I got married, life changed: job, driving to/from work, software developers don’t exactly have the most physically strenuous job… and as the saying goes, “use it or lose it” and since I wasn’t using my body I was losing it. I didn’t enjoy making (my father’s) noises when I got off the couch. My first job out of grad school was in an office on the 3rd floor of a 3 story building, and since I thought it was stupid and lazy to take the elevator up 2 floors I walked (and often beat people that waited and took the elevator). But I found myself having a rough time with just a couple flights of stairs. I didn’t like having troubles just rolling around on the ground with my then infant son. So I stopped smoking cigarettes (haven’t smoked one since then), and started exercising. Back in high school I got into weight lifting, so that was a natural place for me to return. While I love the results of weightlifting, it became boring to me because there was no mental stimulation. Some people exercise and enjoy the lack of mental stimulation, e.g. some people jog because it lacks mental stimulation, using it as a time to clear their head and have some mental downtime. That’s all good and I respect that, but it’s not for me. I tried to find other avenues for exercise, but most every other form of exercise had the same thing: great physical results, but zero mental stimulation and I was bored to death. I found myself finally thinking about starting martial arts.

I did my research, looking in general at the styles out there and seeing what appealed to me. Then I looked at what was available within a reasonable driving distance. I came across this art called “Kuk Sool Won“. In fact, a friend of mine had studied the art for a few months and had a textbook and showed it to me. The more I read about this art the more I thought it was a great fit. Prior to learning about Kuk Sool I was leaning towards studying something like Hapkido, which I liked because it was a well-rounded art. There was punching, kicking, joint locks, throwing, and weaponry like staff and cane. I viewed Hapkido as a practical art, because I didn’t want sport (e.g. WTF Taekwondo) and I didn’t just want new-agey health-fitness stuff. I wanted something that would provide physical activity, mental stimulation, and being able to have physical skills of fighting and self-defense was certainly a welcome benefit. So with no Hapkido schools near me and given Kuk Sool’s obvious shared history with Hapkido, I thought it’d be a great choice. Furthermore, Kuk Sool has forms practice and the forms are very Chinese in nature, which held appeal to me. While Japanese arts didn’t hold much appeal, Korean arts did (due to my ethnic heritage) as well as Chinese, due to the beauty of those forms. I viewed this as an activity that I could start now but find myself still doing at 80 years old to maintain my health and use of my body. Sounded like a win.

I visited a Kuk Sool school, liked how they taught and handled things, and I signed up and off I went. However, it actually didn’t start that quickly. At the time Wife and I knew we were going to move but we did not know where. I did not want to start something, get 6 months along and a blue belt, then have have to stop and who knows what could happen if we moved. I will credit one thing to Kuk Sool Won, that being worldwide and standardized you can easily transfer to any school anywhere in the world and continue training. That’s a big strength of Kuk Sool Won. But of course, no guarantee I’d move to somewhere with a Kuk Sool school so…. I didn’t actually start until we had moved and I was sure of things. Why does this matter? Because I was determined that once I started, I was going to get a black belt. I’m notorious in life for starting things, getting almost done, then stopping for whatever reason. While in many respects that’s OK, there are some larger things in life that I got “this close” to getting and regret not getting; for example, my Eagle Scout (got to Life, then was 16 years old and discovered how a car gives you a real life and so Scouts fell by the wayside). For myself, I needed to get that black belt. While I understand that getting a black belt isn’t an end, truly is just a beginning, it was still a big milestone to accomplish so if I was going to start I had to “finish”.

After 4 years of study and training, I received my 1st degree black belt from the World Kuk Sool Association.

While I stuck with it and was enjoying what I was doing, it wasn’t all roses. Continue to Part 2 by clicking here.