On a combo of topics between my last discourse on exercise and my earlier discussion of how weird it is to see people being famous, I'd like to mention this: I took kickboxing for maybe 9 months or so in college, up in San Luis Obispo. The teacher was really cool and really pushed you, but not in a rough way - he was totally understanding and wanted to make sure nobody passed out or got hurt, but wanted you to work to what you could accomplish. It was really like the ideal coaching situation, which was great, because at the same time I was signing up for that, I was getting horror stories from my sister's kickboxing class, where it was more like something you'd see in a Van Damme movie - they threw medicine balls at your stomach, made you work yourself into oblivion, and tied your legs to pulleys to yank them apart into the splits (that one may actually only have been in the movies...). Anyway, this nice guy who did the coaching, we always knew he did kickboxing for real too, and sometimes he'd be gone for a few days and another guy would take over (possibly even a cooler coach in a general sense, but I think he wasn't as good at watching out for peoples' limits... on the other hand, he wasn't as hard about pushing you, so it evened out. But he taught us some cool extraneous stuff, like street self-defense things. Wish I remembered his name), and he'd come back with bruises and things, and maybe saying he'd won and stuff. Well, his name is Chuck Liddell, and I mention all this because in my directTV bill today, I found an ad for a big
pay-per-view event of him versus Tito Ortiz in the UFC. I knew he did UFC stuff even when I was in his class, but it's been really weird since then to see him in video games (really!), and on TV ads all over.
I guess I never knew how good I had it! I should've stayed in SLO and gotten into my kickboxing studies more - I was being trained by a world champion (well, something like that, anyway, don't know what titles he holds), who was a damn good coach!
And for the record, I'm not trying to name-drop with all this stuff. None of these people are ones I really 'know', I don't think a one of them would recognize me if they saw me. I'm just sharing my feelings on the weirdness of unexpected celebrity.
And duh, no, I was never remotely good at kickboxing, but it was nice to be getting exercise.
