The Task:
Part 1
Jump Rope for 2 minutes straight including 5 doubles
Kick a hackey sack 15 times
Hit a volley ball 8 times
Juggle for 15 seconds

Part 2
Walk 5 miles on a beach blindfolded
Run ¼ mile on the beach
Walk 1 1/2 miles in the surf
Spar in the surf for 10 minutes

The week after I passed Part 1, I received my Part Two: The Test of the Body from another black belt, Mark. This test came in two parts: a test of coordination and a test of stamina which he called "A Walk on the Beach." The coordination part consisted of jumping rope for two minutes and including 5 doubles (two swings with one jump), kicking a hackey-sack to myself fifteen times in a row, hit a volleyball to myself 8 times and juggle for 15 seconds. I spent the next month working on this circus act of a test. When the day of the test came along, I banged out all the tasks. I juggled for about twenty seconds on the first try. I kicked the hakey sack on the first attempt. My volly ball hits were adaquate enough to pass. The trouble came when I got to the jump rope. From my practice, I knew that this was going to be the wild card. Jumping rope for more than a few seconds required a skill that I simply didn't have the time to develop. In practice, I typically tripped after every ten seconds. Now, for the test, I kept tripping on the rope before the two minutes was up. My Master gave me several tries, we worked for an hour to see if I could get two minutes of jumping to no avail. He finally called it a night and informed me that I passed this phase but there will be a penalty for the jump rope.

The following weekend, we met on Long Beach along with a small posse of safety monitors. My task was this: starting at the center of this stretch of the beach, I had to walk to the west end, a distance of about one and a half miles blindfolded while carrying two small eight-pound medicine balls. They were the size of a large softball and I carried one in each hand. My safety monitors and I were not allowed to speak to each other. Before I started my walk, Mark informed me of my penalty for my poor performance on the jump rope was that I had to keep one of the balls above my shoulders at all times. I was lucky with the weather. It was mid-September and it was clear and in the upper seventies. The yin for the beautiful Saturday’s yang was that it brought out sunbathers by the busload. I pulled on my baseball cap, put on a pair of grippy gloves, put on my blindfold and headed west.

Since my monitors were not allowed to speak to me, I instructed them beforehand to have one monitor in front of me by a few paces and another to the rear. Whenever I needed to turn, they used “clickers”. One click for turn left, two for right and three for an unavoidable obstacle to be cautious of.

Guided mainly by the sound of the surf to the left, I headed in a straight line towards the west end of the beach. The occasional click adjusted my course. Every minute or so I would switch which hand held the ball above my shoulder. Since it was too difficult to retain a good enough grip while letting the lower ball hang completely down, I had to endure the walk without a proper blood flow into my hands. The occasional tingle had to be massaged out by rolling the ball against my stomach as I walked. Every twenty-one minutes my watch alarm beeped. Time for a break. Breaks were allowed every twenty minutes but I added in an extra minute to allow for transitions and any other event that took up time to start again. To begin my break, wordlessly, I kneeled down in the sand and held both balls up high. The first time I did this, the monitors did not know what to do and stood there for a few moments until they realized that they can take the balls away from me. Sightless, I took off my back pack and took out my water bottle to re-hydrate. After drinking and placing it back in my pack, I let my arms hang and get some blood back. My two minute break ended and I was off walking again.

As we walked, I started smelling a stronger scent of coconut. The murmur of activity got louder. Shrieks of children, cheers of Frisbee players, and the occasional radio dotted my black landscape. My monitors’ clicks came more frequently now. The beach was crowded. Two steps, click, left, three steps, click-click, right. I was weaving a blind maze between the towels of sunbathers. I could sense people shifting their positions as my shadow crossed their sunny faces. Every few minutes, I heard my lookouts fielding questions from the curious. I wandered a path from dune to surf and could not imagine that the beach was so packed with people that I had to detour all the way down to the wet sand to avoid getting painted into a corner.

I noticed that the terrain started to get strange. It was uneven and I felt as if the land was forcing me to the left. The clicks were erratic. A series of three. Heeding the warning, I took baby steps, feeling each spot before placing my foot down. A barrier blocked my way. Surprisingly early, I had reached the stone wall at the west end! By now my monitors were clicking like machine guns because they didn’t know what the code was for “turn around you reached the end!”

The return trip to the starting point was much the same. The smell of sun block, people chatting, kids playing. Occasionally, I would hear someone chase a ball or Frisbee running in my direction and I would brace for a possible impact. I immediately, centered myself, bent my knees to absorb a possible bang and squeezed both of the balls against my head to hold them as tight as possible yet keeping one above my shoulders.

When I reached the starting point I heard the quiet commotion while fresh monitors rotated in and the old guard brought them up to speed. I had reached the half-way mark of my walk. I now needed to walk to the East end of the beach where I will begin another phase of the walk. The first portion of this leg was a straight walk along mostly deserted beach and was uneventful- until the ground disappeared from under my foot. I was moving along at a good pace and when I took one step, there was no sand beneath my foot. I felt the emptiness deepen as my foot reached for the bottom of the depression in vain. I cursed to myself as I felt my balance slip away. My only thought was not to drop the balls- immediate failure! Time slowed. I made a dozen adjustments during my free-fall. I pulled the balls tight into my chest as I started to twist my body. I rotated my leg so that my knee would not hyperextend against the far side of the hole that I assumed was there. I completed the spin just as I landed on my back, my right foot still hanging in the hole. Without hesitation, I began the predetermined penalty for every fall: I held the balls aloft, my monitors took them off my hands and I did ten pushups.

In what seemed like a short time and after a few meanders around sunbathers I was stopped by one of my monitors right in the middle of a particularly dense group of sun bathers.

“I’m allowed to speak to you now,” she said. “I am going to take your blindfold off. You have reached the end of the walk.”

Intense light blasted right through my closed eyelids and forced tears to squeeze through the corners. It took me a few seconds to be able to open my eyes and then to look around and orient myself. My next task was to “run for about a quarter of a mile to the rock jetty.” Upon spotting the jetty, I started running holding both balls above my shoulders to remain symmetrically balanced. The running was exhausting and I was panting after only thirty seconds. I could barely lift my feet out of the sand between steps. As I neared the jetty, I saw another about a hundred yards beyond.

At this point one of my fears during preparation for this test came true. During my research using maps and satellite pictures of the beach, I saw three jetties and didn’t know which would be the landmark I was looking for. I was hopeful that it would be indicated somehow for my test, but it wasn’t. My legs burned. I could not get enough air into my lungs. I made a very hard decision: I was not going to fail by turning around at the wrong jetty so I decided to run to the last one- still two jetties away! It was close to a half mile. Meanwhile, an observer from the school was walking with Mark not far away.

“Should I go tell him he’s gone too far?” He asked Mark.

“Nope, he’s doing it to himself. But he’s doing great. Better than I thought.”

My entourage and I finally reached the last jetty and I collapsed against the sharp rocks fighting for breath. I was given a twenty-minute break in order to prepare for the next phase. I took about ten minutes to just lay on the rocks, slow my heart and breathing and get some energy back. My pulse pounded in my ears. I drank some water and ate some candy for energy. I took off my sneakers and replaced them with SCUBA booties from my pack. I knew I would be walking west in the late afternoon so I brought polarized sunglasses to cut through the glare on the waves. The last leg of my walk was to be out in the water back to the starting point about a mile and a half away. I had to keep my feet submerged. If the tops of my feet come out of the water, I have to do ten pushups. If the balls get wet, ten pushups.

I grabbed the two medicine balls and headed down into the water. The late summer waters were pleasant and comfortable, but that was the only redeeming factor. The drag on my legs was tiring. I had to find the best place to walk so that the receding waves did not expose my feet while not walking too deep that I have to fight too much drag. This put me right in the zone where the waves were crashing- threatening to splash onto the balls. Fortunately, I had taken this into account when I planned the exact time of my walk. I planned to reach this phase during the slack tide between high and low tides. The slack tide would have slightly lower waves- or so I hoped. After a few minutes of walking in the surf, I reached the first jetty. Forced to get out of the water, I walked up on the beach, handed the balls to my monitors and completed my ten-pushup-penalty for getting my feet out of the water.

The walk was one of those mildly annoying, but not too difficult, things that just seem to go on forever. The expanse of sand stretched off into infinity obscured by the haze of sea spray and dried salt on my glasses. My shoulders grew weary from the constant lifting of the weighted balls. Every six seconds a wave reached me and I lifted the balls as high as I could to avoid getting splashed. After energetic waves, I checked the balls’ surfaces for any stray drops of water. With luck, timing and some learned skill as I went, I only had to do a few rounds of penalty pushups- which was fine with me because my arms were like lead and lacked all strength.

After two hours of walking with these balls, I reached my goal. Mark was standing on the beach at the finish line- the point where I first began. He waved me out of the water where I had a short break before beginning the final portion of the test- sparring for ten minutes in the surf.

I took out a few sets of goggles from my backpack in case any of my opponents wished the eye protection. One of the stipulations of my test was that I could use anything I wanted, but needed to carry it all with me. My backpack had water, some snacks, the goggles, sun block, sneakers and an overshirt. After my short break, I headed into the surf and Mark called in my first opponent. We sparred for a minute or so and he called in a fresh fighter. One after another, they conga-lined into the water to fight me. I had to conserve energy and be effective against their attacks. I chose to go for quality over quantity. I spent most of my time avoiding and moving to neutralize attacks. When the time was right, I launched a counterattack which often distanced or temporarily disabled any attacks. I used the waves that I’ve become so familiar with as part of my strategy. As large waves crossed me, I used them to hide kicks that I threw below the water’s surface. I purposely missed kicks and strikes in order to hit an incoming wave and to splash water into my opponent’s face. I even ducked under some of the larger waves and attacked while submerged. I lost track of time as each fresh sparring partner cycled in. Was it three minutes so far or ten? The next partner came in, then another- two at once! The last aggressor was a blackbelt and well rested from watching. He came in like gangbusters, double-teaming me from both sides. It was too difficult to move quickly to avoid blows so I adapted by manipulating my opponents. I redirected them into each other. One blocked me from the other so I only had to fight one at a time. Finally, Mark called time from up on the sand. It was over and I made it.