Rob's Blog

Beating up children
Dec 6th 2006 18:12

Like all things in life, blogging is considerably harder when you're up against tough competition. There was a time when my blogging competition was fairly relaxed. Now I'm competing with people like Jonny fighting Bears in Laos. I mean... that's quite a tough precedent that's been set. Such exciting things just don't happen in the Somerset countryside. That said, I did beat up a kid last night. And he was probably both bigger and more aptly trained in the martial arts than Jonny's bear.

I've taken up Taekwondo, or TKD as all the cool kids call it. For the Tekken fans you'll probably know it better as “Hworang” or “Baek” style. Lots of kicks and jumps and making yourself dizzy whilst leaving yourself it stupidly vulnerable positions. Excellent stuff.

I have to give credit to any form of exercise that has such conflicting approaches to physical contact: As a warm up we 'play fight' no contact. Just throw lots of punches and kicks. Well, that's easy enough. As a cool down the instructions were “now punch your partner 20 times in the stomach as hard as they can take it”. I kid you not. Except my partner was indeed a kid of about 14 (although very good at TKD), so I did feel a certain amount of guilt when he was nursing his ribs later.