More Fight Club....

How I'm going to be spending next Saturday....

Fight club

How I spent my sunday morning....
First a live cane fight (with a real stick, and more padding)... I'm the clown in the blue...

Then a couple of regular padded stick fights... (theoretically less painful, still equally tyring)











Interspersed with bouts of quiet sweating... (Flattering photos by Mary)

Sweat Angels....

Went to Arnis training yesterday. Am still doing three sessions a week, have a tournament in a few weeks, so we have an extra training session on Wednesdays. The tournament training is more like some crazy kind of boxing training (think Rocky I-VI). Lots and lots of crazy variants of push-ups
(Clap, wide-narrow,
switch, vertical... don't ask, they all hurt lots). After about 15 minutes I was making sweat angels.... Snow angels are when you lie in the snow and wave your arms and legs to make an angel shape. In my case, it was a bit like that but with sweat.

Fight Club....

You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive at fight club.... Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There's grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn't about looking good. There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 6

I've been doing an exra training session of Arnis every week, which is dedicated to sparring. It is essentially an hour of conditioning (doing situps and pushups) followed by a three round fight (soon to be two fights). I was looking around for a quote from Fight Club (book or movie) which I remember. This was the closes I could find to it.... Essentially Ed Norton is at work, reflecting on fight club and observes 'at some point it starts taking over your life, your at work, and you're thinking about fight club, you're thinking about your next fight'.

I'm getting to this point now, the day after sparring I seem to spend a lot of my day wandering down the corridors thinking about things I'd do differently, moves I'd try next time. I also find myself swinging my arms and imagining I'm holding a stick.... Don't worry, I'm perfectly safe, just a bit absorbed... Another consequence of this is that I'm usually wearing three weeks worth of bruises of different colours and shapes... all part of the fun.

Round 2

Just me getting my ass kicked some more....

Didn't get to do any sparing today, not enough time. But what I did get was the movies which Marcus recorded of my fighting (getting my ass kicked) by Yang (a guy who I swear can fly)... I also discovered from watching the movies that the rounds are only one minute long... You can tell how knackered I was by then end of the first round because I'm wandering off to the wrong corner...

Round 1



Will try and upload the other two rounds tomorrow, this one took ages...

Gladiator...

Had great fun at Arnis last night. Went to both classes again (in a fairly suicidal way), but I was allowed to try sparing for the first time, which was lots of fun... Got dressed up in a huge helmet with a cage on the front an lots of neck padding, also got a groin guard and I was given a 'padded' stick. I have discovered the following:
1. The term 'padded' is relative, it still hurts when you get hit, although I was too knackered to notice.

2. Fighting is really hard work. We did 3x2 min rounds with 30 seconds break in between. I now have much more respect for boxers... It was one of the most tiring things I've done, much harder that the 45 min workout which we had to do before it (which probably didn't help).

3. Most of what I have learned during the lessons vanishes in the first 15 seconds and the whole thing rapidly degenerates into two 6 year olds with sticks (at least in my case).

4. It is surprisingly fun. I'm looking forward to doing it again. (once the bruises have gone down and my muscles have recovered).

5. Its really hard to take pictures of yourself to illustrate bruises...