Eliminate the threat, change the focus...

My friend came to me one day and invited and me and several of our other friends to her new gym so we could try a kickboxing class. I am always up for trying something new and I am in relatively good shape so I thought it would be fun. I had never kicked something before and had never put on a pair of boxing gloves. I had no clue what I was doing.
(I often have no clue what I am doing if you have noticed…I just do it now.)
The class was fabulous and the instructor hilarious. My friend also invited me to another class there, Street Tactics. The gym is called The Defense Institute, Street Tactics class is where we learn VeArnis JuJitsu, it’s a form of self defense. I loved my first class and kept coming back for more.

I figure I am a single woman with no man to ‘protect me’ and if I ever meet a man I want him to know I can take care of myself.

Sensei puts us in real world scenario’s: muggings from all angles, someone just bumping into us and trying to start a fight, to someone pulling a knife or a gun on us. When he has someone mugging me in a choke hold he often yells…
“CHOKE HER!” and that they do. It’s not ‘fun’, it’s realistic.
We learn to defend ourselves, to eliminate the threat and change the focus, all the while we have to watch out for multiple attackers. We attack each other with force and you better get out of the way or you WILL get hit. I can’t tell you how often I feel like a retarded wombat in class. I’m only a beginner and I feel so STUPID.
I also feel very powerful and feminine, yes, feminine.
I’m small. The majority of the Instructors and Students are men. I get thrown around like a rag doll when I have to play the part of the attacker. I get my hair pulled hard and when I end up on the ground the Police Officer Students inevitably put me in some lock with their knee in my back. Once a guy threw me across the room by accident when I was the attacker. (I like being the attacker.)
…”What the fuck bitch that’s my fucking parking place!” That’s only one example of the way we speak to each other, real world.
It’s not a nice fight that he teaches us and I have found that I don’t mind getting hit or having bruises on the strangest parts of my body. When I get hurt I say, “That was awesome!” When I say it I mean that I can take it, bring it ON!
I also like knowing one day I will be able to defend myself…
We laugh often in class and my Sensei always changes it up so we don’t get in a rut. He even has us do one minute ’smack talk drills’. It’s hard to talk smack for a whole minute. I keep a notebook of HIT drills and patterns…that I should probably look at more often.

After the first couple months I attended belt testing. I had only been a student for a couple of months so I was not up for a belt but was told to attend anyway. No one told me what to expect except that it was three hours long. It was three hours of balls to the wall pushups, jumping jacks, sit ups and attacks. NO bathroom breaks and NO water breaks…there were buckets placed out just in case someone needed to puke.

You can ask my friends and my Mother how much I love Street Tactics. I’m always talking about what I learned and encouraging others to take the class.

Belt testing is this month. I was really looking forward to it, ridiculous I know. Who would want to put themselves through three hours of hell?
I would.

I was looking at my schedule for the month this morning knowing I had some conflicts but I knew I couldn’t remember them all. I realized there was no way I was going to make belt testing. I have my children that day. I thought maybe I could switch with my Ex. I thought I had only two things for the children that day. I opened our shared calendar (my Ex and I share an on-line calendar so we can keep track of things) and saw that my Daughter has her Holiday piano recital at 3pm. There is no way I can do both.
I was upset at first. Then I came to the realization that Street Tactics for me isn’t about the belt. It’s about the real world knowledge my instructors teach me, the empowerment and the discipline.