State of My Arts

My TKD and Hapkido instructor is an 8th dan Grand Master in TKD, and a 5th dan in Hapkido.  He’s an amazing martial artist, and has an amazing amount of energy and personal dynamism.

Unfortunately, he’s also been battling leukemia for the last 17 months.  He’s been in and out of the hospital a number of times over that time span for chemo treatments.  Last year, it was hoped that they knocked the leukemia into remission, but the blood tests eventually proved otherwise.

Today he went into the hospital for a bone marrow transplant.  His donor is a 9/10 match — apparently he’s got an unusual type for one of the markers, so there weren’t any perfect matches.  He’ll be in the hospital for at least a month in a clean room, and afterwards he’ll have to be very careful about avoiding germs, so we’re not sure when he’ll be back.

While we always prefer to have the Grand Master around, we do have an impressive cadre of instructors, and I number myself in those ranks, albeit much lower.  Leading a number of the Hapkido classes is a 7th dan Hapkido practitioner (along with dan ranks in TKD, Judo, and Aikido) who trained under my instructor’s instructor out in Oregon for 30 years, until he met and eventually married one of the female black belts from our school and moved out East.  We also have an excellent 3rd dan Hapkidoist who is an excellent teacher running some of the other classes.

For TKD, we have two 5th dan TKD instructors; one 4th dan; several 3rd dans.  And so on.  In TKD, a 1st dan is considered a “master of the basics’, and really kind of signals the transition into advanced training.  At 4th dan, a TKD black belt is considered a Master, which is pretty much the earliest that one could run one’s own school.

So the fact that we have quite a number of upper belts means that training goes on at a high level.  But we’ll all be looking forward to his return and we’ll be keeping him in our thoughts.

Teaching

This past week I was able to rejoin some of the advanced TKD classes.

• Monday: Class focused on Hapkido-type drills, and I took part in ones that weren’t troubling for my shoulder.  I did a few very low soft rolls on my good side, but I didn’t want to take any falls.
• Tuesday: In teaching the beginner adult class, I focused on one-step sparrings.
• Wednesday: In teaching the intermediate adult class, the focus was on poomsae.  In the advanced class, the focus was again on poomsae; due to the way the class broke down, I worked with three pre-teen red belts on Tae Geuk Pal Jang, the last of the student forms.
• Saturday: This week, the Saturday class was a Kali class.  I actually did some two-stick hitting, though I was very careful of my bad arm.  Not a particularly intense cardio-type of class, but it was fun to be working sticks again.

In addition to the classes, I used the exercise bike (I think) four times this week, for between 35 and 40 minutes at a time.  Things are going pretty well.

Hapkido, TKD, Teaching, Training