New Year’s is a time for setting resolutions and goals. I thought I would share a recent goal that we finally achieved!
Twelve years ago, Brian and I were dating and living in Houston, Texas. It was a place that was a huge culture shock for both of us – I had never been in the US prior to moving to Texas, and Brian had never lived anywhere but central Michigan all his life. It was the first time either of us had been away from our families. We had to learn to depend on each other for everything and to help us learn to work as a team, we sought out an activity we could work towards as a couple. We entered in to a dojang in Houston to try a class of Kuk Sool Won. This was my first experience with martial arts and as it happened, a young man misplaced a kick and as a result, his opponent received a broken nose. I looked at Brian and said “no way” but he encouraged me to stick it out and try. As it usually happens when you try something new, I liked it. The more I participated, the more I came to love martial arts. It became our dream to obtain our black belts together. Brian and I began attending as many classes per week as we could and we rose quickly to the level of brown belt but then, life intervened.
We moved to Michigan, had children, I went back to school and then finally, we moved to Calgary some ten years later. We discovered a Kuk Sool school in Calgary and we began attending classes again. This time it was different – we had three young children, and I was pregnant so we couldn’t spend as much time training but we were determined to fix our number one regret – that we never stayed in Houston long enough to earn our black belts. As it tends to happen, life intervened again and we moved from Calgary when we were just 9 months away from earning our black belts. But, we were determined so we practiced at home and traveled to Calgary to test every three months.
On November 28, we tested for our black belts in Calgary under our instructor JIKN David Williams – a 6th degree black belt, and we finally achieved what we set out to do 12 years ago. It felt fantastic! To mark the occasion, we photographed ourselves with our shiny new black belts on. It is a challenge to do a self portrait, but doing a self portrait while throwing your husband over your shoulder into a flip goes beyond challenge into extremely difficult! We had fun though and manage to capture some of our favorite techniques on camera!
The Vermilion Standard did an article about our black belts, click here to read it.