Sad Tidings, and New Developments

There have been a few recent developments in my martial arts life; man, things are always interesting and challenging. After the euphoria of getting to pursue Judo again (alongside BJJ) on my lunch hours, it was quite a blow when my Corporate Overlords (good call, Pat) decided to tighten up our lunch schedules at work.

For the past 6 years, as long as everyone got their work done, it didn't matter how long we took for lunch. No one cared. Last week, all that changed. Doing several BJJ classes, and Judo study sessions per week, was taking 2+ hours for lunch (driving time, class, showering, etc). So my work friend and I had to cancel our gym memberships at the BJJ place, which is also the space we used to practice Judo a couple times a week. In a nutshell, my throwing and grappling studies sadly ground to a halt.

I'm not complaining, I know I still have it better than most people do, with the job I have, and they had every right to tweak their expectations. I take SOME comfort in the fact I'll still be able to pursue karate, but that progress has been slow.

The powers that be aren't completely locking down lunches to one hour - we can get a little more, we just have to make up the time elsewhere. But they still don't want us gone for 2 hours.

It was crushing me to have to halt lunchtime martial arts, but there is a possible solution.  There is a Krav Maga school 6 minutes from where I work. The schedule is good, they have lunch classes, and the classes are only an hour, so I can do a few classes per week, and just work 30 minutes late on those days. They also have some classes that start 15 minutes after I get off work so those are possibilities too. The lineage is good too; it's in the "Fit to Fight" organization, which split off from KM Worldwide. The head of the organization was a high ranking guy under Darrin Levine of KMWW.

I've always had some interest in Krav / Combatives / "Reality Based" arts. The only thing I really don't care for about them, is how *in general* a lot of their practitioners pooh-pooh the value of traditional martial arts (some of which is justified, but they paint with too broad a brush for my taste). When it comes to martial arts, I don't get into the exclusivity, the "my art is better than all others" mentality. Of course I had to deal with that in BJJ as well. I learned from Pat, "all martial arts are the same". ;-)    There's something to be learned from all of them.

I'll continue to study karate, but I'm going to a trial Krav class today, to see how it goes. I'll report back here!