The Test of a Lifetime
Eight and a half years of my life had led up to this point. The ups and downs. The wild ride that was my career in Tae Kwon Do. Then, finally, the moment I had been waiting for. The test for my black belt. Squeezing eight and a half years into three and a half hours was a grueling experience. Constantly on the move and out of breath, our task was to remember every single thing we had learned since our first class. The test started with the basics: single kicks, punches, and blocks. From there, it got progressively harder with spinning kicks, jumping kicks and spinning jump kicks. The phrase “fake it till you make it” was the only thing going through my head. When I forgot a specific step, I would anxiously try my hardest to make it look like it was on purpose. My first mistakes were forgetting a couple of combos. A combo is several kicks, blocks and or punches in a particular order. Each time I forgot something in front of my family, friends, and teachers, the pit in my stomach grew. However, I knew I had to persevere and pretend I knew what was coming next instead of showing how flustered I was.
Then came Forms (five-minute combos compared to 20 seconds). We went through ten forms, each one unique and progressively more difficult. Just like the combos, owning my mistakes was very important. Every time my move order or timing was off, I had to keep going.
Finally, we moved on to the part that I had dreaded the most: sparring. I was never good at sparring, in fact, I lost most of my fights. I was scared to be hit by people despite all of the required protective gear. Unlike in regular class which was just one-on-one matches, I knew from the past tests I had seen, the student had to start with a five on one fight and every two minutes a fighter would be removed until it was one on one. Luckily, I did not have to go first and I was given time to breathe and mentally prepare myself for the hardest part of the test. Ten minutes later, my name was called. I stood up, stepped into the ring, and bowed.
As soon as I knew it, I was hit by punches of five black belts whose job was to attack me with no mercy. I ended up in a corner trying my hardest to defend, putting in my fair share of punches and kicks. While I knew I couldn’t win, I also knew that I had trained for eight and a half years for this moment and I wasn’t about to give up. After what felt like two hours it was down to a four on one, then three on one, then two on one, and finally a one on one. I was so close yet so far but I had to keep going, despite feeling on the verge of tears. The sweat plastered my hair to my head, I struggled to see because of the condensation in my face mask. I had two minutes to go, and then I was done. I could feel every muscle in my body screaming at me to stop, but I had to keep pushing, each punch put another five pounds onto my arms, keeping my feet moving.
Two minutes later, I was done; I had finished the test.
