Hit It!
Demonstrating a flying side kick in Loretto. Note that I failed to break the board.
Lorraine and I recently binged the first three seasons of Cobra Kai, the Karate Kid sequel series. It’s a fun trip down memory lane and also an examination of how choices and our reactions to those choices affect everything. There are no clear-cut heroes or villains - every character gets to be both at one point or another.
It revived my interest in martial arts to a degree, and I’ve been scouring YouTube to find videos to re-teach myself my old forms. It’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten and yet still have muscle memory for some of the complicated moves.
Another aspect of martial arts that Cobra Kai really emphasizes is the fighting. Yes, I learned life lessons and how to breathe and meditate and find balance. But I also learned how to fight. Fortunately my school emphasized it as self-defense first. There were severe penalties for our younger students if they got in fights at school. We were taught to avoid dangerous situations and to run first if we ever were confronted.
I have zero desire to ever get into a fight in the “real world”. But I really enjoyed sparring in the studio. Especially as we all got better and could move faster and still be safe. A good sparring bout becomes a chess match, trying to set up your opponent to let their guard down for just a split second. It’s also incredibly exhausting. We’d have sessions where we’d do a sparring carousel: two minutes against the first person, then rotate until you’ve faced everyone in class. At the end of these classes we’d all be totally spent.
Sometimes Master Kwon would join in and you’d have to face him, too. That was always eye-opening. He would barely move and the kick you were launching at him would whiff harmlessly through the air and his foot would be connecting with the one small area you left open near your ribs. He’d also bring out boxing gloves and we’d spar only with punches. When he would connect with a punch with huge gloves on, it would feel like you were hit by a truck, And then he’d let you hit him back, and it even through the gloves it would feel like you punched a concrete wall. It was amazing.
My favorite, though, was when I’d have to face three or four opponents at once. The trick was to get to a wall so they couldn’t circle behind you. Because I was so skinny and quick, I was very good at slithering through the weak point of the attacking circle (oh, yes, we always started surrounded in the middle of the room) and finding a wall. From there it was a matter of staying calm and moving with purpose. Turns out that it’s almost impossible for more than one person to actually attack without getting in each other’s way, so it became an exercise in defending attacks coming in rapid succession.
The other fun aspect of sparring was getting hit. Weird, I know. For me, getting hit and yet being able to continue fighting was eye-opening. I always assumed getting hit would be impossible to recover from, the pain would just paralyze me. This is an aspect of martial arts that Cobrai Kai gets right - Johnny makes new students get hit. Once you realize it’s not as bad as you thought, you can move on to other parts of training.
I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt, but if you know it’s coming it’s incredible what you can absorb and recover from.
That is a good lesson for all aspects of life, I think.
