This past Wednesday, I took Ed Lam (also known as Grainyrice on the Internet) with me to martial arts to take a taekwondo class. According to Ed, this was the second time he had ever gone to a martial arts class. During his first class, all he did was play leap frog around the gym. So basically, this was his first real martial arts class.

The mass chaos started even before we arrived – on the way there, Ed got an epic foot cramp that inca­pac­i­tated him for over a full minute. According to Ed, the experience brought him enough pain that he felt he was “giving birth to his foot.” Apparently, some of his toes were stuck together, and he was arched over in misery for quite a while.

Upon arriving, Ed sat off to the side while I instructed an intermediate and advanced children’s class that takes place right before the adults’ class that Ed and I were going to take. I’m pretty sure Ed got pretty jealous at the intense skills the kids had.

When the time came for Ed to join in, we started with some warm-ups. A part of the warm-ups included everyone in the class counting off ten jumping jacks. Ed was last in line, and he started counting. He seemed to be doing great: “1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 …”

At this point, I realized what Ed had done and stopped mid-jump to start cracking up in laughter. The remainder of the class started giggling as well, and our master (who is the equivalent of the head instructor) started at him with a “…” expression on his face.

Ed finished counting up, “8, 9, 10,” then acted as if nothing silly had happened. I notified Ed of his error, then realized that Ed most likely had no idea that he had even forgotten the number 5. He stood in confusion for a little bit, did one additional jumping jack, counted it as “5,” then smiled in contentment.

Normally on Wednesdays, we do sparring drills – that means, we put chest guards on and kick each other around to practice combat techniques. Unfortunately, today, we didn’t have enough people who brought their own sparring gear, so we ended up doing cardiovascular exercises instead.

A little over half-way through the 45-minute session (about 15 of which were used for stretching and warm-up drills), I noticed that Ed was missing. I looked around and saw him hunched over in the corner trying to catch his breath. He disappeared for a little while again, most likely to take a bathroom break and get some water, then came back looking as if he just experienced the most terrifying thing in his life. Moral of the story: Ed is weak. If you ever have to fight him one-on-one, just let him run around for five minutes and he’ll get exhausted, then he won’t have any endurance left to keep fighting. Also, we need to keep making fun of Ed so he starts exercising more.

The day following the work-out, Ed let me know that he was barely able to get out of his bed in the morning, and was unable to climb up the stairs without the help of his hands.

Earlier today, we had promotion testing for our taekwondo program. You might remember from last year that there are two promotion tests over the summer; I posted a few pictures from one of them. Our grandmaster brought his camera and took a bunch of photos, but they haven’t been uploaded to the Internet yet; when they do get uploaded, I’ll share some on my website in a future blog post.