Pain & Krav Maga

I like pain, it reminds you you're alive. I like krav maga, it's fast, efficient, brutal and devastating. (I'll explain what krav maga is at a later date.) I'm training to be an instructor; this means an 11 mile run, a 13 mile bike ride and an ass kicking every day. But during tonight's class I paired off with a kickboxer with whom I hadn't trained before. Now I can't walk.

I was too polite when it came to sparring, and I let him state the rules. He said “no headshots, not takedowns”. I said “cool”, and regretted it immediately. My high right kicks are spot on and my takedowns are the best in the class. As soon as you drop a shoulder to me i'll be behind you with my fingers in your eyes, and you'll be staring blurrily up wondering what the fuck happened. I was in a kebab shop at 2 am recently, sober, and an idiot picked a fight with my best friend. He raised his fist to punch, but even before he'd finished recoiling his arm I had tied him in a knot and his friends were laughing at him.

But not tonight.

Tonight, that asshole kickboxer took shot after shot at the insides of my legs, each jarring kick perfectly placed, until I felt like I was standing on jelly stilts and the very effort of simply being in agony was more than I could bear. It was like trying to fight an army marksmen with a catapult from 500 yards and with my hands tied behind my back.

It was full-contact sparring, and all I wanted to do was give him a shin kick to the side of the head followed by a right hook, but I had to settle for shitty body shots instead because i'd given him the advantage (or more accurately, given myself the disadvantage). He was bigger than me and I like it that way because big guys are slow and full of confidence, and they can never keep up with my speed, but after the 7000^th kick on the inside of my knee I hit the deck and couldn't get up, and when I did it was only long enough to dump my bruised, sweaty ass in a chair and feel embarrassed.

Next time, we play by my rules.

And that's all I have to say about that.