The Other Karate Kid

The other day I was walking back from somewhere when I heard a loud, shouting noise. I glanced around and saw that I was alone on the residential street. Then I heard the noise once again. I followed the sound and discovered it was coming through the open window of a Jujitsu training center across the street. I moseyed over to the building and saw a group of men dressed in white robes with colored sashes tied around their waists. A tall, tough-looking instructor marched around the perimeter of the room, fists balled as he barked out commands.

But the real action took place on a thick rubber mat in the center of the room. There, a group of middle-aged guys were doing frantic push-ups. Well, they were kind of doing push-ups. Mostly they just bent their elbows a bit and then pushed their bodies back up. If a full push-up, where you drop your chest to the floor, is considered 100%, these students were giving it a solid 20%.

I’ve never liked push-ups or pull-ups. As a kid I had one of those bars you’d squeeze between the edges of a doorway to exercise with. You know the ones I’m talking about – the rubber bar-ends always gave way at some point, causing a spectacular wipeout. You can find great clips of this on You Tube. Just search using the phrase “products that should’ve been recalled but weren’t”.

Walking away from the school, I thought about a story I read a while back. Some guy decided to rob a karate school. He waited until it was late, around 11:00 pm, and cased the place to make sure it was empty. Then he broke in and started searching for his booty (what he hoped to find is a mystery, maybe he had a fetish for sniffing sweaty jock straps). The burglar soon found a surprise – there was a back room to the building. And a late-night karate class was being held.

The burglar was quickly subdued by a flurry of chops and kicks.

The moral of the story is that it’s not wise to rob a martial arts school. But the addendum to the moral is that if you still want to do this, you should start with the one near my house. From the looks of things, the students there would gladly welcome the interruption. You’d be their hero.