My martial arts experience...

I'm not all that good but I've been doing it for quite a few years... Ever since I was twenty-one, as a matter of fact. That seems like quite a while. All that time I've been with the UK Chinese Karate club doing Shao Lyn Ryu Chinese Karate (which could also be called Si Lum Kung Fu, if you want to get picky about it.)

To show that persistance is a virtue, I have recently become the head instructor. I also run the web page. If you want to know more about the system,  I encourage you to visit it. Or if you want a little light reading about violence you can go  here 97 ways to kill a man... or read a (hopefully) humorous list detailing why sparring is better than sex.

So why did I get into the martial arts?

Sometimes I feel like I have spent most of my life recovering from my childhood.

Once, in the boy scouts, I got into a physical encounter. Had I been more effective, I might even refer to that event as a fight. As it was, I incapacited someone with laughter. I was punching them as hard as I could, and though it did get the desired result (they stopped picking on me) it left me changed. It was an odd experience for me, on one hand almost everybody in the troop (ironically including the other kid) praised me for attacking the other kid, on the other hand, I was full of fear. I had proven that I couldn't effectively defend myself should the need arise.

Also, I was always a big clumsy kid... the kind of kid who was clumsy because my body was growing faster than my brain could keep up. (and it probably didn't help that I was a total couch potato.)

So now I'm grown up, I'm fairly kinesthetically aware, and I'm not very afraid...