Six Months

Today is day 181 of the test, or a little over 6 months. It feels crazy that these 6 months have gone by so quickly. I want to take this blog post to reflect a little bit on these last 6 months. This challenge is the most difficult thing I have ever done, and it probably will always be.  Six months is a long time, and it feels crazy that there is still 7 months left in the test. If you have ever been on a flight that is 11 or 12 hours long, you know the feeling of seeing that 4 hours have passed and you still have 7 more. I’m not trying to say that this test is anything like a long flight, however I think that that analogy is a pretty good way to show how I see the next 7 months, even though the first 6 months have just flown by. It really shows just how long 13 months is.

I also want to talk about an interaction I had with one of the white belts at last Saturday’s class. I was walking around helping out younger students that were working in pairs. I walked over towards one of these pairs of students, and the white belt(I don’t know their name) says to me, “I remember when you were a white belt,” and I thought to myself, this kid is probably 8 or 9 and probably wasn’t born yet, or was like 1 or 2 and no one remembers that time of their life anyway. So I was very confused, so I didn’t say anything since I was so caught out by what this kid said. I eventually told them that I was a white belt in 2016, and this kid looked at me as if 2016 was ancient history, which pretty much confirmed my beliefs that this kid was probably not born yet when I was a white belt. I get why this kid would probably have though that 2016 was so long ago. I was 8 not that long ago. I probably would’ve thought that 2006 was forever ago at that age, even though it was only one year before I was born. They thought that it was so cool that I had progressed all the way to brown belt, while this kid thought they remembered when I was a white belt. It feels great to see that there are white belts that believe that brown belt is achievable. I probably didn’t even know what brown belt was when I was a white belt, and its great to see white belts that are in basically the same position I was when I was a white belt.

I have been behind on miles for months. I knew I would be a little behind since I wasn’t biking on the weekends. I eventually discovered that I was incorrectly recording my bike rides to and from school. For months I was recording it as 3 miles, however I actually looked at my distance covered on my watch and doubled it and found out that I was actually biking 3.8 miles when I was biking back and forth between school and my house. I’ve known this for about 2 weeks, however I never got to actually changing the values to what they were supposed to be. I had 6 months of incorrect values to fix, but I finally got to it today. Before I changed the values, I had about 380 miles logged, which wasn’t anywhere near enough. After I changed the values, I gained more than a hundred miles, and am now back on track for the miles.

I am now ahead in everything. Not by much in some cases like the pushups and situps, which could use some extras for a little buffer in case I can’t do them due to injury or sickness or just taking a break from doing so many all the time. The category that I am really surprised to see as far ahead as it is are the sparing rounds. Thanks to plenty of weapons sparring, and more than 100 minutes in the last two weeks, I now am ahead by nearly 70 sparring rounds, which is amazing to see.

My current Challenge progress as of December 23, 2024.