The first of a series of posts in which I will document my journey to becoming Laila Ali (minus the jail time.)

So I’ve decided to try to become an amateur fighter in my spare time.

Photo cred: Cassius Cassin

Some reasons I thought this might be a good idea:

-Chun-Li has over 9,000 fans on her Facebook page. (Only 8,928 more than Cohortons!)

-The only person I’ve ever been able to tackle in Capture the Flag turned out to be on my own team (sorry about that, Josh.)

-I’m tired of tall people being able to leave me stranded on tall shelves and cupboards against my will.

So for the last year or so, I’ve been taking “kickboxing” classes. I use quotes here because the classes have really been a mixed bag of different martial arts styles with varying levels of difficulty. I started out at a local YMCA, where I was the youngest in my class by about 40 years and the instructor forced us to say affirmations together in the middle of every kickboxing class. “Say it with me,” he’d yell, as we stood in a row before the mirror. “I am young… I am healthy… I am attractive. My body knows it, and my body shows it!” Then we’d do some weight-lifting and short jab-cross-hook-uppercut combos while “Everybody loves kung-fu fighting” was blasted into everyone’s hearing aids.

Admittedly, I still attend this class on occasion just for the ego boost.

Then I moved to Israel for a little while, and let’s just say the instructor kicked it up a notch with a krav maga-infused dj’d kickboxing course. The class was composed almost exclusively of post-army jocks and was conducted entirely in Hebrew. On the first day, I had trouble keeping up with the combo, so I decided to skip the ducking part and focus on my kicks and punches. Noticing this, the instructor came over and asked me something I couldn’t understand in Hebrew, to which I replied “yes!” (Life lesson #542: It is not true that when you don’t understand something in a foreign language, you should always respond with “yes.” I should’ve known better than taking travel advice from my friend who refers to herself as “The Enabler.”) Turns out, what he was asking was whether it was okay for him to stand in front of me and punch me in the face if I forgot to duck. I still have a little bit of a bruise on my cheek.

And since I’ve been back, I’ve been taking a slightly more challenging class at the gym, where about half the students are Karate black belts and the other half are retired librarians. So it’s a good mix. I decided to join a proper kickboxing studio though when I discovered one day that I was not the only one in the room with an “Actuaries: Risk is opportunity!” water bottle.

So I’m going to be starting a more intense training regimen at a new place dedicated to real kickboxing training, and I figured what better way to save myself from embarrassment than to blog about it in a public forum?

Just as an aside, this is a pretty entertaining article about why the Canadian Paediatric Society’s call to ban boxing for kids is ridiculous.