How to Hurt People 101

I'm in so much pain, my aches have aches.

The reason for this can be summed up into two words: Ilkka Hartikainen. That's the name of the Finnish instructor that I've been training under for the past week. He's from our sister school, SESH, up in Finland.

At 24, Ilkka probably knows more about swordplay, body mechanics and unarmed combat than any 10 average blokes off the street. Watching him in action, I can understand why knights and men-at-arms were such terrors on the battlefield.

I deeply appreciate Ilkka's attempt to teach us even the basics of his lifetime passion. In a week, I probably forgot more than I learnt in 6 months of regular training. This is casting no aspersions to Greg and Chris, who are wonderful instructors. It's just the sheer volume of what we had to go through that made the experience...unique.

Being able to see the entire system in action and not just bits and pieces that I picked up has helped me immensely, even if I don't grasp the full importance of it all. For one, I can stop thinking about the system in terms of individual tricks and start thinking of it as a system. That is worth more than any move or set of moves I can learn from this week.

By the end of spending 22 hours last week training with Ilkka, I was seriously ready to collapse. I don't think I've ever felt this tired since BMT. At least in BMT, I don't have to worry about being conscious for work the next day.

There was an evaluation and grading at the end of it. It was our regular grading, except it wasn't. I was so tired I was practically going on auto-pilot. The results of it weren't horrible, but I know that if I were actually focused, I'd have done some of the things much better. I still passed and I think I deserved that pass more than any other evaluations I did, even if I did a worse job.

And as promised, here's the keen picture of me in my coif, as well as 7 other keen looking guys. The Compagnia grows!