I am now a second Dan blackbelt!
The test went well. The test consists of forms, fighting, self defence, Olympic counters and board breaks.
I got through my form without messing up. Big relief.. I hate forms.
Then the fighting... the part I go to TKD for...... went very well. My opponent, who was also testing for 2nd Dan, seemed to have a bit of a bad night. I on the other hand had a smokin' night! The poor guy got his a$$ handed to him. He took it with a very good attitude though. Nice fellow. He had an odd style and it didn't seem to be working for him today. He would attack, attack, attack. Just wouldn't stop coming. I hate that! I hit him in the head 5 times with roundhouse kicks over the 3 round fight. We don't try to knock each other out at tests... it's considered bad form so I wasn't hitting him all that hard.
I used my smaller size to my advantage. He was over 6 feet and I'm 5'8 so I stayed inside or jammed him when he attacked so his kicks would land "behind" me so to speak. Worked beautifully. The fighting is the most important part of the test and your score is weighted with more importance placed on that part.
The Self defence is a demonstration of how we would handle an attacker. My parter attacked me and I disarmed him and then subdued him. We've been doing these drills for 7 years so it went pretty smooth. The techniques we use are from Hapkido.
Olympic counters are also demos of little pieces of fights to demonstrate that we know the proper counter measures for various attacks. (TKD is an Olympic sport)
The final test was board breaks. Not the best part of my test. Several of my boards remained unbroken. But the masters appreciate the technical difficulty of the kicks attempted and I scored 3 out of five. better than I thought I would get.
So that's what I did today. I'm now totally chuffed and will retire to a hot tub of water and epsome salts.
Oops...I forgot the part at the beginning of the the test where the masters test our conditioning and stamina. My legs were getting close to the jello stage by the end but I held on. I may take tomorrow off.