Since the beginning of the year, I have been taking student attendance records. Not that they know and not that I care (about their attendance that is), but OCD is telling me to do it. Nah, I don’t think I have OCD although some might think otherwise, Google Drive simply has the option to allow users to easily add an attendance chart thingy at a few clicks of the button. (Can we become anymore lazier in this ever-constant automated world?) So another session has just ended for the night, and here I am glancing at the screen checking out how many days students have trained throughout the year.
So, let’s turn our attention to one of our most dedicated students, Paul. It seems like I see more of this guy than I do my own family since he is forever in the dojo. There’s no getting rid of him, just a nasty smell in the air, and boy does he actually reek – sorry mate 😊. Always wanting to learn and asking questions I had never really thought of, he has challenged me as a teacher and made me question what it is I am truly doing on many occasions. It’s a pleasant situation to be in when teacher and student can learn simultaneously. Myself since day dot have always naturally just let my body and hips do the work without requiring too much thinking, on the other hand, this student coming from a Neuroscience background and possessing more brainpower than all my mates combined (ahhh crap, that’s not saying much about the level of my mates), relates better when there are exact rules, numbers, and angles involved. If only my Uncle Bruce were here to tell him to stop thinking, and to start feeling.
Anyway, from the first training day of this year until now, he has attended 105 sessions, and on average 2 hours each time. If you do the math that equates to training a little over twice a week every week for the entire year without break. That’s quite remarkable for a karate student if you ask me, considering work and partner commitments, in addition, a whole month of training missed due to covid restrictions earlier on in the year (Though he was training on his own at the time). To add to that seems even more impressive when countless karate clubs/schools out there appear to take every school holiday term off – that would amount to 3 months of training per year gone !! But who cares when the sensei of all these full-time karate clubs are making a killing from their students right..?
(Ok I’ll save the rant for next time…)
Sorry let’s continue with some more calculations – 105 sessions x 2hrs = 210hrs (Duhh!)
210 hours divided by a complete 24-hour day = 8.75 days (Hope I’ve calculated that right…) Ok maybe that’s physically impossible for someone to train 24 hours a day so let’s alter that to 5 hours (The average length of time spent training each day whenever we are in Okinawa) This equates to 42 days which is almost 1 ½ months. WTF – are you serious, ONLY 1 ½ months of training?? This Paul guy practically knows every angle of my house and every spot my dog has ever pee’d in from training here so much but he has only trained for 1 ½ months? That can’t be right.. Wait wait… let's change 5 hours a day to 2 ½ hours every day, a more realistic figure considering most of us have work and family commitments.… So we can double the number of days which now bumps that figure up to 84 days which equals just under 3 months… and still, a WTF emoji deserves to be inserted here.
Ok, that’s enough of my maths calculations, but the age-old question of how long have you been training for often comes up…. How are you supposed to respond? For me, simply not long enough!
A better question would be how long do you spend talking and chatting away in the dojo? (Zzzzzzzzz)
Anyway, it's getting late, off to the dojo I go (oops, I meant bed). So how long have you all been training for?
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