June of 2012, I signed up for the Muay Thai program at Black Belt Martial Arts (BBMAC) in Kensington, MD. My daughter Claire had been doing Tae Kwan Do "Little Dragons" program for a while and I was really liking what I was seeing in both the kid and adult program. The thing was that, although I had done a variety of martial arts back in eighties and nineties (culminating in several years of Aikido), I was out of shape, overweight, and worried about looking like a complete fool. When BBMAC offered a June "Father's month" (where all the dads could do a month of classes for free), I screwed up my nerve and signed up.
I would love to say that I was instantly in my element, and though I enjoyed it from day one, I was really not good, not good at all. I was game though and the staff and students were unrelentingly (and unironically) encouraging. Here is a shot from September.
Its actually kind of uncomfortable to post this now since I was 30 pounds heavier and hardly able to tie my belt at this point.
Time passed and I started into sparring and other somewhat more advanced stuff, but it was still clear I had a long way to go. Here's a picture from not long after I started sparring in my gear.
Turned out I really enjoyed the sparring, but more on that down the line.
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