I’ve got a gun in my face and a steely-eyed 21 year old at the other end of it roughing me up and barking orders. My t-shirt’s ripped and I’m sweating like a pig. He shoves the gun harder between my eyes, I grab, twist and lock his arm whilst dispatching 3 quick kicks to his groin…and nobody bats an eyelid, for I’m just another self-defense virgin having their intro session to the ways of Krav Maga. ‘What the fuck’s that?’ you say, ‘sounds like a Vietnamese sauce or some vengeful Hawaiian god.’

I’ll tell you. Here’s the skinny. Krav Maga is a is a martial art and self-defense system developed for the military in Israel. It’s a practical set of moves to help you get out of shitty situations like a gun being shoved in your face or some crack addict / pyscho / assassin bearing down on you with a knife…or any other scenario you can think of. The key is the ‘practical’ – you don’t need to be wearing silk pants and a rope belt, wheeling roundhouse kicks and flinging metal stars, or doing triple back-flips and running up walls. Krav Maga is practical, so practical that it hurts, and that’s what it’s designed to do, hurt alot and then incapacitate / break / kill your attacker. There’s nothing fluffy to see here folks.

Skip forward 30 mins and I’m starting to feel pretty handy. I’m disarming the 21 year old more often than he’s shooting me or I’m shooting myself and I get to thinking why it is that I’m doing this. I’m 41. I’ve never been remotely interested in  martial arts (not to be confused with marital arts which I’m not very good at either). I like to keep in shape, but I’ve not got a violent bone in my body…so I try to tell myself that I’m doing it simply to keep fit in a more useful way, which is kind of true, but sitting, niggling just below that veneer is the very real thought that one day, in this country I love dearly and have moved my family to, I could very well need to know this stuff. The stats are plain to see. South Africa is a violent place and enough of my friends have been touched by that violence for it not to be an abstract concept or simply stuff that happens to other people. I don’t ;like admitting that because that means I’ve accepted that I’ve put my family in a more dangerous location than we’ve been used to…and now it feels real enough that I need to do something about it, like get kicked around around by a 21 year old who could kill me with a flick of his wrist.

Looking around it’s a mixed bag – there’s no one type – women in their 30’s are tossing around men in their 40’s – Gen Y is well represented and seem to be quite nifty at it all. Early stage beer bellies flop against chiseled abs and forearms. The instructor has full control of this motley crew.

Anyhow, that was yesterday and today I hurt, and hurt a lot, but feel slightly less defenseless and a bit more useful than the day before, although I’ve never thought of it that way. I’m going to sign up. I enjoyed it but now feel obliged. Knowing that there is this super practical defense course available to me; something that will give me more of a chance to protect my family and me if one of those shitty, but not too rare, situations finds me / us. It wouldn’t feel right not to verse myself in it’s ways…and I don’t need to buy silk pants to do so.