Arctic Mark in Stanley Park

Happy New Year to one and all!!  I trust that everyone had as enjoyable a holiday as I did. If not, well, it's a new year, and a clean slate, etc., etc.  How many resolutions have you broken so far?  You have to admire the unconquerable human spirit, that each January impels many of us to reflect on the past year, and to try again to set some personal goals as part of the ongoing and ever-renewable campaign to improve one's life. Physical fitness is high on the list for many people, likely due to the midwinter hibernating instinct which coincides with the frantically festive feasting featured at many holiday occasions. So, as I do every year, I resolve to try to become more active and physically fit. In the last two weeks this has translated into the following activities: a weekly game of squash, two runs along the Seawall, twice-weekly kung fu class, and one drop-in "Cardio Cross-Training" class at the local West End Community Centre. Nope, no danger of overdoing it here, my current shin-splints notwithstanding. I do feel like I'm becoming reasonably fit (to be tied), and moving here to Vancouver has been a big boost to my lifelong goal of integrating regular (and enjoyable!) physical activity into my daily routine. It just seems easier to do here than it ever did in Toronto; physical activity, especially of the outdoor kind, feels like part of the air we breathe here. I'd feel out of synch with my surroundings if I wasn't getting out for regular runs, walks, hikes, tennis, etc.  As fascinating as all this must be for you to hear about, for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on kung fu, since I started taking classes in early December, and because I think most readers will be as intrigued as I was by the name of the class: "Praying Mantis Kung Fu." But before we get to my journey on the road to discovering the secret deadly arts of the praying mantis, I'm going to first take you on a trip down memory lane....

Now, as a typical kid growing up in suburban Toronto in the 1970's, I was, like most if not all of my peers, a huge fan of the original TV series, Kung Fu, starring the legendary David Carradine (aka Bill in Tarantino's Kill Bill). I was hooked by the exoticism of the settings (especially the monastery where Caine - aka "Grasshopper" - learns all his amazing martial arts skills from that ancient blind monk), the cheesy philosophizing in every episode, and of course, the great fight scenes, so tame and infrequent by today's standards. I also have a quite clear and gleeful memory of Mad Magazine's satire of the show, entitled of course, Kung Fool. My favourite scene from the Mad version: 1) The Master tells Caine that he may leave the monastery only when he can snatch the pebble from the Master's hand, which will take years of training to accomplish. Caine instantly proceeds to snatch the pebble, leaving the Master stunned and speechless. Quickly regaining his usual stoic composure, the Master slyly asks him, "How about two out of three?"

Anyway, aside from my interest in that show, I was fascinated with Bruce Lee and his famous "one-inch punch," and, inspired by Mr. Lee's jaw-dropping skills in classic films like Enter The Dragon my friends Steve and John and I made our very own nunchaku (aka "numchuck") sticks from pieces of an old broomstick nailed together with short pieces of rope. We eagerly constructed our (technically illegal) weapons, impatient to start practising all of Bruce Lee's moves as the necessary prelude to beating each other senseless in the forest behind my house. In actual fact, however (as anyone knows who has ever tried to manipulate the damned things, swinging them at lightning speed under and over your arms and behind your back) we spent most of the time inflicting painful blows on our own shoulders, arms and heads, and quickly lost interest before we could ever dream of becoming skilled enough to hit someone else with one of those infernal pain-sticks. (We decided instead to invent our own weapon, much less dangerous to others and to oneself while using it, but still capable of raising a nice red welt on the skin of its terrified victim. We dubbed this formidable weapon "The Persuader," and it consisted of nothing more than a long hockey sock with a tennis ball tied inside the narrow end. We would spend hours on a sumnmer afternoon chasing each other through the forest, swinging these stupid socks over our heads, whooping and hollering and lusting for blood (or at least a blood blister) so insanely that we would have scared (or more likely embarrassed) Jack and his followers in Lord of the Flies.

But back to kung fu. In addition to the much more well-known Bruce Lee oeuvre, we also loved the classic Hong Kong martial arts movies, and we would re-enact them complete with stilted dubbed dialogue, all spoken at shouting volume with the words wildly out of synch with one's mouth movements. My favourite line from a little gem called Kung Fu Gold: "Let the girl go! She knows nothing!! All we want is the gold!!" -- at which point the two sides would commence the next installment in the never-ending series of 20-minute-long fight sequences where no-one ever gets hurt or bleeds. How could any red-blooded suburban Canadian boy in the 1970's not love this stuff?

Eventually, in the summer before Grade 8, my obsession with all things associated with the martial arts led me to enroll in a Saturday morning class in the ancient, mysterious and forbidding-sounding art of jiu-jitsu. I continued these classes all through high school, and progressed as far as a green belt (halfway to black) before the demands of post-high-school adult life pushed my studies to the distant back burner, where they've been percolating (or should that be fermenting?) for a quarter century. Despite my later serious dedication to my studies in jiu-jitsu (a combination of the throws of judo, the punches and kicks of karate, and the wrist-locks of aikido), I admit that when I arrived for my first class I was consumed with the burning desire to know the answer to one and only one question, the question that has haunted and plagued teenaged boys for generations, and sparked more passionate debate than any other question, the question to which I am still seeking the definitive answer, more than a quarter century later: "So, like, what do you do if you're surrounded by, like, twenty robbers with machine guns??"

To his credit, my sensei (the Japanese word for instructor) patiently explained to me (as he would patiently explain to every other excited and clueless boy who would join our class over the next several years) that if you were, in fact, surrounded by a large group of armed men, you should probably hand over your wallet, watch, gold fillings and loose change, and then pray that they won't dump your bullet-riddled body in the nearest dumpster. I was stunned - this was HERESY!!  At the time, this was about the most disappointing answer imaginable, but I somehow managed to swallow my disappointment and stick it out halfway to a black belt over the next few years. More than a few of those other boys would immediately lose interest once they disovered that the study of martial arts requires incredible discipline, commitment, and hard work. It is also defined by that most "zen" of paradoxes: that the further one progresses in one's study, the less likely one is ever to need to use those same skills, for reasons which I will explore in my next installment of this post. Now, looking back, I am filled with admiration for my sensei's good sense; his lifetime of experience had taught him the most important lesson of all: To borrow from that other 1970's icon, Clint Eastwood (as Dirty Harry in Magnum Force): "a man's got to know his limitations."

Stay tuned for "Beware The Deadly Mantis!" in which I will share my recent experiences in taking a kung-fu class at age 45 after a long, long hiatus from anything even remotely martial...