Baby Bear Steps

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I came back from a trip to Brisbane late last year having made the (admittedly, rather obvious) observation that fencing – while one of the most inherently awesome sports on the planet – is the least useful martial art in the history of martial arts.

It is so useless as a martial art that I think we can safely say it isn’t a martial art at all – even if books about fencing are filed in the same place as books about karate and tae-kwan-do in most public libraries.

It is so useless that I actually think the cross-country running component of a pentathlon offers a better set of skills for surviving dangerous situations.

It is so useless, in terms of fostering real combative skills, that in a truly combative, life-or-death situation, I would not put money on a fencer to win a sword fight.

If you were actually faced with another human being wielding a sword and intending to do you harm, almost everything you learn in fencing would get you killed within seconds.

I was standing in a poorly lit, sparsely populate train-station car park one night, waiting for a lift, when this observation occurred to me.  I was not, thankfully, attacked – but if someone had tried to attack me I would've been, well, attacked.  All I have is the ability to run away – which is a good ability to have.  I’m now at the stage where I could run flat-chat for 30 seconds and then keep up a steady (if slower) pace for 10 minutes.  If they wanted an easy target, that would hopefully give me an advantage.

However, I realised my ability to survive long enough to run away would be greatly increased if I had the ability to incapacitate any attacker first – and this is not part of my current skill set.

I decided that I needed to pick up a proper martial art – one that would enable me to be the most dangerous person in any given car park.  As I said back in October, the best way to protect yourself against bears is to be scarier than the bear.

I started trying out a few things.  I went along to a karate class, a kung fu class, a goshin-something-or-other-actually-I-don’-t-even-know-what-that-was class…  One thing led to another and I joined a softball team.

That doesn’t make any sense to me, either.

Anyway, my studies kicked up a few notches and I had to stop playing softball.  Quite frankly I don’t have time to fit in more than one sport.

Which is why I’m still not sure how, this week, I managed to start two new sports. 

I’ve taken up Tai Chi.  This was actually so I could convince my mother to take up Tai Chi.  I’ve been trying to convince her that some sort of exercise would be good for her arthritis.  It’s been an uphill battle, but I managed to talk her into coming along to a slow, gentle movement based activity with me.  At our first session, last week, the instructor pointed out that Tai Chi was a martial art. 

I had to keep a straight face while trying to envision the circumstances under which Tai Chi would be your best form of self-defence.  Perhaps if you were attacked by a low-flying tortoise.  Or an 80-year-old with poor health.

I think it was some sort of subconscious psychological response that drove me to go back to trawling the internet for real martial arts classes the next day – and I discovered something that I hadn’t noticed last time.  The PCYC I never remember exists (we have three PCYCs in town, one of which I attend regularly, one of which I used to attend as a child, and one which I’ve driven past once and never remember) has Japanese ju jitsu classes on Wednesday and Friday nights.

I blew off fencing that night and drove over to check it out.

There were various reasons why I didn’t take up any of the other classes.  Some were too awkward to attend regularly.  Some were too expensive.  Some were taught by wankers.  This one doesn’t seem too wankery and, if I alternate between fencing and ju jitsu, I can still make sure Friday is my only night for sporting things.  Most importantly, classes are $4 a pop.  That is unspeakably cheap.

So, (in addition to doing Tai Chi until my mother is ready to fly solo) I’m going to trial doing that for a while:  alternating between fencing and ju jitsu on Friday nights, and possibly (if study time permits) throwing in an extra Tuesday night session for fencing or Wednesday night session for ju jitsu once a month.

Baby steps, but I might end up being scarier than the bear after all.

And, unless I’m very much mistaken, I think my Friday nights just went up a level of awesome.