Leslie Rohde . com - Hobbies category

A do jang scene

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 22:00:00 GMT

Here I am (at left) with some good friends and workout partners helping and cheering a fellow student at testing.

Tesing Committee for my 3rd dan test

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:04:00 GMT

In August of 2005 I tested for -- and passed :-) -- my 3rd dan promotion test in tae kwon do. Here is the testing committee.

Left to right are Master J.K Kim, Grand Master B.C. Kim (my instructor), Master Lim, and Master Park. With all due respect to tkd instructors the world over, I believe that a finer collection of TKD talent you will not find anywhere.

Waltz Across Texas with you in my arms...

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:12:00 GMT

After two and half years of planning and scheming we are finally "back home again" in central texas. For primarily equine-related reasons, we chose to drive the horses from Oregon to Texas ourselves -- what an education that was. To mitigate some of the problems we expected our older horse to have with the long transport, we took rest days throughout the trip, thereby taking 13 days to complete 7 days of driving.
Jane has a pretty complete pictorial chronicle of the trip in her blog at www.janerohde.com.

Some special friends

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 13:02:00 GMT

A fine picture of just a few of the many fellow students whose friendship and mutual support I will always cherish.

This was taken before our promotion test, so this is the last picture of those belts. By evening there were brand new belts with another stripe!

Boards actually do hit back

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:09:00 GMT

Bruce Lee said "Boards don't hit back" -- which made for a great movie line, but it ain't quite so: Newton's laws assure us that boards hit us back with a force equal to how hard we hit them. Fine as far as it goes, and not much help either. The trick ultimately is to fast and let the derivitives do work on the relatively inflexible materials we break while doing little or no damage to the highly flexible body structures we use to break with.
This esoteric description is neither necessary nor ultimately particularly helpful in actually breaking stuff -- that's purely about doing it, no matter what your brain tells you ;-).
Here are some samples of my breaking from my 3rd dan promotion [click'em to take a closer look].

This is one of the easiest hand techniques to get right -- which this isn't a very good example of :-( -- because I just walked up and smacked it with little or no finesse. I can break three if I do it right, so sloppy was good enough for just the one.
Most newer students are awed/scared by breaking with knuckles, but it really is not all that bad so long as you go fast and don't flinch at the point of contact. Again, only a single board, so no big deal. Two is a bit harder and requires good alignment to keep from skinning the hands and raising bruises. Three requires (of me at least) very good holders and some serious psych to get 'er done.
This is an easy way to get a big pile of wood chips out of multiple boards so long as you nail the aim. Speed is easier to get out of the legs than it is the hands because the muscles are sooo much bigger and the distances you can reach significantly longer -- V2 = 2as really does work!
I do this one a bit different than most people because both big toes are so screwed up (from jambing them in tkd) that I have trouble getting them into the right position for breaking with the ball of the foot like is taught. I use the top of the foot, the instep, and have no problems breaking two boards this way. But speed is absolutely(!) critical.
The hilight of testing at all black belt ranks is concrete breaking. I have struggled with this off-and-on when required to do knifehand strike, but I have never failed to break with palm strike. The two breaks require radically different technique. Shown here are the three 8" by 16" concrete patio pavers still tumbling to the floor as I withdraw from the strike.