martial arts are cool. when i started college, i joined the school’s tae kwon do club. strangely enough, i actually got pretty good at it. i enjoyed it. unfortunately, my spine did not. around about the red and brown belts, when passing a belt test involved jump spin kicks to break stacks of boards, my vertebrae had a conversation that went something like this:
S1: ow.
L5: dude. this sucks.
S1: i have an idea. if we pop this disc out from between us, she’ll give up this tae kwon do bullshit QUICK.
L5: uh, dude. if we get all up on each other like that, isn’t that kind of gay?
S1: who the fuck cares, dude? i’d suck a cock right now if it’d end the pain.
L5: fair enough. okay, on the next axe kick. one, two, three, PUSH!
so, after two years of an uneasy truce with spinal alignment, i slipped a disc in my lower back, and i slipped it HARD. i’ve slipped that particular disc out once every couple of years or so since about age 16, and always managed to get it back into place in a few days, but not this particular time. after 6 months of limping on a partially numb foot, many appointments with internal medicine (“you don’t need an xray. you need codeine!”), physical therapy (“oh, the situps HURT? uhhhh… lemme see… yeah, my book doesn’t have a protocol for that.”) and finally a single appointment with an orthopedist (“well, you’re not a surgical case, so quit wasting my time.”) i finally went to a chiropracter. and i don’t swear by chiropracters, i know they can do more harm than good about half the time, but lord, did it ever work like a charm in that case. so then i spent another six months strengthening every muscle in my torso – to the point that i could do some completely impressive ironman tricks, like reverse situps with my torso hanging out off the edge of the bed – and went back to tae kwon do. only a year left to my black belt, but oh lord, it was not going to happen. within 6 weeks, my back started hurting again, my foot was tingling, and i decided there was nothing sexy about being a 21-year-old black belt in a wheelchair.
so i spent the next ten years gaining and losing 60 lbs at a time to crank out some shorties. these are not the best conditions for taking up a new sport. but with my last body-morphing experience nearly two years behind me, and every tube prm and i have between us tied, burned, scarred, or otherwise completely fucked up, it’s (hopefully) safe to take up a new sport. and that sport is fencing!
i had wanted to try out fencing when i first went to college, but at the university of illinois, there was no fencing club, and the one class they offered in fencing was for theater majors only. there was a fencing club in ann arbor, but it was balls-out expensive. i finally lucked out: the university of iowa has a competitive fencing club, AND it’s open to the public, AND it’s affordable: $25 for the 12-week beginner’s class, and $40 a year for “club dues” (ie, access to the armory. weapons, wooooooooooo!) so RadHippie, who discovered the existence of the club and got us signed up for it, and i are now members of the Hawkeye Fencing Club.
as we headed to the first session of the beginners’ class, RadHippie wondered how many mockable sub-types of people would be present. i guessed “fat chicks who want to say they’re doing something athletic so they can pretend they’re really trying to lose weight, but secretly think that fencing will never actually cause them to break a sweat.” RadHippie guessed “fat D&D dudes.” both those subtypes were present. in abundance. (note to the dude in the “stonehenge rocks!” t-shirt: i stare because you’re hot. really.) also, we were both expecting maybe 20 or so people, but there had to be at least 200 at that first class. and though the 6 instructors spent most of the first class talking and demonstrating the three sword styles, luckily, they did have us work on an opening stance for a full five minutes. the opening stance in fencing, “en garde,” involves going into a bit of a squat. 5 minutes of standing with your knees slightly bent was enough to ensure that the second class had only around 100 people in it. most of the chub was gone, as were most of the 40-something-dorky-parents/gangly-preteens combos, of which there had been several.
i have to interrupt here to say this: i don’t know what possesses some parents to join a sport with their children. family fun is one thing. there are lots of things you can do as a family. and when your children are adults, if you’re not too bitched up and old, sports can be one of them. but i don’t want to see your ass on any kind of competitive sports field with your non-adult children and their peers, okay? please. when i was in tae kwon do, my class was all college students, but the same academy also ran childrens, seniors, and family classes. when i went in for belt tests, i’d always see at least one 30-something mommy taking a yellow-belt test at the same time as her 7-year-old son. and lady, let me tell you, you falling on your ass in front of all the other 7-year-olds could not do more damage to YOUR 7-year-old than if you had showed up drunk to his grade school, lifted your hannah montana t-shirt, and announced that blowjobs were half-price for boys under age 10. cringe with me. i’m just sayin. don’t join sports WITH your kids. okay? just don’t.
in fact, it was a couple of weeks before any of the kids even caught me practicing the footwork – mostly because i haven’t told them i’m doing something that, when explained to them, is going to sound an awful lot like “jedi lightsaber training,” and not being invited is likely to really piss them off (when they see me walk out the door on tuesday nights and hop into RadHippie’s car, i tell them we’re going to go eat vegetables.) so SpazMonkey finally did see me advancing, retreating, and lunging across the living room floor. after making sure i hadn’t simply dropped my wii controller, he happily joined in and has now added some fancy moves to his lightsaber repertoire, but he sure as hell will not be accompanying me to fencing club anytime in this life. (we’ll just pretend this is because i’m worried about his rep with his peers, and not because i’m pretty sure he’s about three years away from being able to legitimately kick my ass.)
so anyway, the second class was a bit more intense. we stayed in the squatty, straight-backed, pretend-there’s-a-very-straight-glass-dildo-on-the-floor-that-you’re-trying-to-sit-on-without-tearing-anything en garde stance for a damn-near non-stop 45 minutes, and for at least half of that we were advancing and retreating across the floor (or “piste,” if you want to be all gay about it. which, in case you couldn’t tell from my dildo analogy, i totally do.)
RadHippie, whose job does not involve constant squatting and running around, was a little sore the next day. my job, which involves lots of running up and down stairs, squatting, and standing up with 10-30 lbs in my arms, prepared me pretty well. i wasn’t very sore… but when i tried to practice again the next day, i damn near fell over after 5 minutes worth. running around after a bunch of little turds keeps me in good enough shape that, on an 8-mile bike ride into and back out of waterton canyon in the rockies, i felt fine the next day (unlike some of my homies), so this was one HELL of a workout. RadHippie was sure the 3rd class would be down to about 20 participants; i figured there’d be at least 50. some of those chubby dudes are going to work through the pain once a week to get to the part where they finally put weapons in our hands, and won’t give up until they realize that all that not practicing in between classes has made them really suck at fencing. i won that bet, and there were at least 50 people at our third class. (my final prediction is that sometime around midterms, christmas break at the latest, we’ll hit that 20-or-so number as the last of the adhd crowd wanders off.)
it feels good to be in a sport again, doing something athletic where i’m not only working my ass off, but also learning, practicing, and improving skills. it’s like playing the banjo, only with pain! it’s competitive, it’s fun, and it’s even a martial art (i told this to JokerJitsu, the amateur world champion cruiser weight mixed martial artist, and got about the response i expected: “that’s not a martial art. i’ll kick your ass.”)
okay. so he may be a foot and a half taller than me, outweigh me by nearly double, 3 times as fast and god knows how many times stronger. but i have a sword, bitch!
okay, not yet. but i will eventually! there are three swords, and associated fighting styles, to choose from: foil, epee, and saber. foil was described as being very strategic, like a game of chess. epee was described as being faster-paced, more of a balance between speed and strategy. saber was described as sort of a balls-out hack-and-slash with no time to think.
as you may have guessed, i’m gravitating toward the saber. i may be small, but i have years of mortal kombat button-mashing under my belt! i’ll be unstoppable!
