This past Sunday I went for my Krav Maga Yellow Belt Test along with 15 other Level 1 students from the Owings Mills and Columbia Krav MD schools. This was my first attempt at a belt test for any discipline, and from talking with students of multiple martial arts disciplines, it is supposedly the most difficult by comparison. More than just testing your technique and physical fitness, it is about testing your mental toughness. In order to test you require approximately 5 months of training or 30+ classes. You also have to pass a pretest and get instructor permission.
The test was 5 hours long. Broken down into a one hour warm-up and workshop to loosen up and get rid of the pretest stress followed by 4 hour of nonstop grinding. There were a lot of fellow Columbia students there. It was the first time a lot of us had come up to the Owings Mills school. We killed the few minutes before test time comparing stories about how brutal the testing process was. I had spent the past 4 days resting up and hydrating, hydrating, hydrating. I just hoped it would be enough. I was most worried about being able to maintain the necessary level of intensity and focus throughout the test. I knew I could push through the pain but was much less sure of keeping the techniques anything close to clean and correct.
Once the testing started, it was game on. It's hard to compare it to anything. Maybe a triathlon, but that's not quite right. Unless you spend the entire race sprinting while people jump you. Basically the instructors wear you down with a combination of pushups, situps, squats, etc until you can barely move your arms or legs. THEN you get to demonstrate your combatives, punches and kicks. Luckily, you get a short break holding a pad for your sparing partner - if getting punched and kicked relentlessly is your idea of a rest. I was glad to at least be paired with a guy I knew from Columbia and had sparred with in the past. Being of similar heights and builds, it at least made it a little easier.
After going through the various Level One combatives - straight punches, palm strikes, elbows, hammer-fists, front kicks to the groin, front kicks to a vertical target, and round kicks (I struggled most with these) - we moved onto to defense techniques. This was simple a matter of willing our burned up limbs to deflect or block various upper body blows. Next up was wrist releases, choke defenses, and headlock defense. By this point my sparring partner and I were pretty toasted, and had to dig for everything left to get it done. The windows of the testing room were completely fogged up and it felt like fighting in a sauna. One student had to take a quick break to throw up in the bathroom before getting right back to it.
Finally we were passed all the standup fighting and just had the last hurdle to complete, ground combat. In Krav Level One there are three kicks from the ground, the round-house, front kick, and side kick. We ending up only doing the round kick (the most difficult of the three) and lots of getting up and going right into combatives. And of course we had the popular drill of being circled by our partner while keeping yourself curled in a ball and foot pointed towards your attacker. This was actually the hardest part for me, as by this point my traps and levator scapula were locked rigid and I struggled to keep my head up. When the bell rang I dropped my head, arms and legs gratefully to the ground. It wasn't quite over yet though.
We had one last challenge to get through, the caterpillar crawl. We lined up on the mirrors in plank postion (basically the top of doing a pushup) and held it. The first student all the way to the left dropped down and crawled though the tunnel of bodies all the way to the end, then back to plank. It seems easy, but the simple task of holding your body upright at this point took a monumental force of will. We repeated this process person by person until we had circled all the way around the room and got back to were we started. Finally we heard the magic words "One line!" and the test was over.
We were saved from several days of agony waiting for test results as everyone had passed. There was much applause and handshaking (with shaking hands). It was very surreal to have it done and over after all the buildup. It was also completely awesome.
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