Back on track? Time only tells.

September was a month of colds and holidays, but now I'm back from holidays and feeling healthier and am back at training as a result.

Of course, it's also FALL now, in Central Canada, and since our region had a snow advisory for today (it's snowing right now) I figured I'd do some raking yesterday, and the 45 minutes of cleaning up the front yard (not including the boulevard) was a very good workout for my upper body.

Then, I went to karate last night at the kyu rank club and did a whole whack of basics and a few kata, which were a great workout for my lower body.

This morning, I'm feeling the pain!

At any rate, back to karate ...

Our kyu rank club generally has a wide variety of belt levels training at any one time, and at the beginning of the season like now, we can have up to 50% white belts in a 30 person class.

This season, our new white belts are all under 13 years of age it seems. Thankfully there are very few under-7 trainers (ie: those who fidget like crazy and can't stand still or pay attention for very long), so dealing with the new people hasn't been all that bad in terms of having to bark at them about staying in position.

Our main Sensei is unavailable for a while as he deals with personal matters, so the assistant instructor is relying more heavily on the senior belts (brown and black belts) to keep the club running smoothly this fall, whether it be teaching occasional classes or merely helping to demonstrate what a good karateka trains like and helping keep the kids focussed.

So, a fellow senior belt, Bill, and I are going to be handling the class next Tuesday while our assistant instructor is out of town. I guess that means I'll handle the warmup, and then we'll see how it goes from there. Maybe Bill won't mind taking on the kids (he's more experienced with dealing with kids) and I can take the teen-adult belts and work with them on one of their kata that we normally don't get to go through during the first class.

I haven't had very much experience instructing or leading groups of people, so this will be interesting :) I am looking forward to the opportunity, but will probably be a little nervous as well!

Jill