imaBALLER,
Awesome! I did a little martial arts along the way also. At the home for boys they paid for Kenpo Karate classes that I attended for about 2 years, but I quit the pit-a-pat light contact get-a-belt thing and joined a full-contact group. I had been working out with this group part time and decided to pour myself into it full time. It was very much like Muay Thai but we wore full safety gear. We were mostly poor students so we shared major components of the equipment, but swapping out protective gear after short rounds cut into our full-contact sparing time, so we eventually came up with 10 minute bouts for fully dressed partners... can you imagine that -10 minute rounds?
At first we would go full out for 1-3 minutes and then be so exhausted that watching us lift legs that now seemed to weigh 800 pounds was like watching water ballet -- I'm talking extreme slow motion here. But after 6 months of this intense training we could go full out almost 8 of the 10 minutes.
It was really fun to have new prospects come to our meetings and they would always inquire about our 'style' and our belt rank - we'd just laugh and say 'On the mat you won't be dealing with a colored belt or 3000 years of history -- you'll have to deal with me!" Very often we would get 'umpth' degree black-belts and wind up mopping the gym floor with their sweat. Haha! We would explain about our 10-minute rounds and they would say 'yeah yeah ok no problem' haha -- but they were dead on their feet or keeling over after the 3rd or 4th minute.
I said 'mat' above, but we met in many locations and practiced on beach sand, grass, cement, asphalt, gym floors --and mats.
I met some Koreans back then, but didn't speak any at all. For the most part we found them to be a little overconfident in their ability, proud with good reason, and very stubborn. My favorite bout was with a 18-yr old new arrival to the U.S. named Ed Pak -- he said it was pronounced 'pak' but spelled his name P-a-r-k, anyway I like to stir things up a bit before a bout so I made him angry by teasing him, repeating his name, insisting on pronouncing the R in PaRk.
I expected he would be another easy mark, another of the many 'factory black belts' from Korea... I planned to just toy around for 2-3 minutes and wear him out --puhahaha I barely survived the match! After 9 minutes we left the floor stumbling, arms around each other's shoulders --both of us gasping for air. "You pletty good." Ed said. "I need someone oolike kyu to plactice." To me that was the best martial arts related compliment I ever received.
To get back on topic -- I have met a number of people learning Korean because of martial arts and I think that's just great. Any reason is a good one I think. I should get back into the art for health reasons.. but now I bruise easily.
