So Katherine and I entered a karate tournament this weekend. It was a cross-school/organization tournament, held in the lovely Niwot High School Gym (about a hour north of us).
The kids competed in the morning. Katherine (entered in the 7-8 y.o. bracket, 1-2 years experience) did a solid performance for her kata. I was actually surprised that she didn’t get a 1st/2nd/3rd place medal in her group, she was that good.
I was in the afternoon. Which turned out to be late afternoon. Which turned out to be “we’re running about an hour late and your group is the highest age bracket, thus some of the last to compete” late afternoon, starting about 4:30p and ending around … 5:30p. They were already stacking up the chairs around us …
Long story short, I thought my kata was pretty solid (I actually have little memory of it, but think I did reasonably well). I knew after the first few guys in my age/experience cohort led off that I probably wasn’t going to get a medal, but I thought I did a decent job.
Annoyingly, I ended up as the 5th (point-wise) in a group of 6. I really don’t understand why, but I’ll be asking at least one of the seniors from my dojo who said she was watching me and that I did good what about what I did was likely to have garnered the low score.
Part of what took so long is that they were doing both kata (the formal movement sequences) and kumite (sparring), and the sparring in each group took for-evah, and each group had to stick around for whole thing, even if we were just doing kata and not kumite (it’s a politeness thing).
Neither Katherine nor I went for sparring this time out. They were doing free-style sparring, even among the kids, which is actually not all that good a thing for the young’uns. And since I’ve never compete in a karate tourney before, I decided to take one in, sparring-wise, before actually leaping into it. (I’ll probably do it next time.)
At any rate, we got out of there very late, too late to make it back to the house, get changed, make a salad, and head off to the church dinner party we were scheduled for. So we called with our regrets, but since we already had a sitter lined up, Katherine hung at home, and Margie and I went out to dinner (to the Old Blinking Light).
Margie deserves special mention today, as she basically sat in the bleachers for, oh, eight-plus hours, much of the time watching after Katherine. Thanks, love!
One of the interesting things about the tournament was that there were other schools of training there, not just Shotukan Karate. As a result, it was like seeing how other “families” interpret the traditional katas differently from how we do. I like our way (which is much more self-defense oriented, not pretty dancing/movement kind of stuff) better, but it was still very interesting to see.
Anyhow, long day, somewhat disappointing, but also a good experience. Glad we went.
