Beating people up

One reason I began to work out in the gym is because people took undue advantage of my frail physique and kept beating me up. For example, I had an acquaintance in high school who had a habit of picking on me for one reason or another. One day it would be for criticizing the peculiar walk of his lady friend, the next day it would be because he didn't like the peculiarity of my walk after being beaten up the previous day. It was always something with this guy.

When you are thin and weak as I was and your body is devoid of any substantial muscular tissue, your only recourse is to defend yourself using your wit. I did just that. Those days, the hot new craze in school was to slap the air with a wet handkerchief akin to cracking a whip. The point of this exercise was to derive pleasure from the loud sound it produced. Usually this slapping was not directed towards a human being because early on in the game, someone had come to realize through excruciating personal experience that in addition to the high decibels, this slap also produced a severe welt if applied to the human body.

So anyways, after having been beaten up by this acquaintance for a couple of days in a row, I decided to exact vengeance. I said to him, "I bet if I were to slap you with this wet handkerchief, you would cry like a newborn, notwithstanding the formidable bulge in your biceps". Now because this guy had an ego the size of Mt Kilimanjaro back when it was still covered in glaciers, and also an irresistible urge to disagree with everything I said, replied, "Ha, you think so? Here, take a crack at me, and I'll prove you wrong."

The ensuing moments were quite possibly the most exciting and enjoyable of my entire life. I lovingly bathed a handkerchief in ice cold tap water, positioned myself for the assault and then proceeded to inflict wave upon wave of violence on his forearm, the likes of which would have made Hannibal proud.

I whipped him. I whipped him good. The air was thick with loud cracking noises and flying skin. After the initial maniacal desire for retribution within me had subsided, I then relaxed enough to enjoy the experience and even took the opportunity to hone my handkerchief whipping technique on him. In order to prevent my subject from quitting midway, I kept speaking to him in a soothing manner, saying things like, "I see blood on your arm, are you sure it's not hurting?" And this only made him more determined to withstand the pain and he stiffened his lips some more and allowed me to keep going at him. Finally, I had to stop due to sheer physical exhaustion but by that time, I had inflicted enough mayhem on his arm to last me a lifetime.

Later on in life, I made some more violent friends, for example, zambezi, who, every time I met him, would always beat the crap out of me, although in a friendly manner. It was his way of expressing joy at the meeting. And even though with zambezi it was easier to ward off violence by threatening to do bad things to his face (he is someone who takes inordinate pride in the beauty of the contents of his face), I was still relatively vulnerable to assault. And as time went by, my brain eventually began to weary of this constant responsibility of defending the rest of my body from attack and pleaded with it to do something about it. Therefore, at some point, I began to work out and have been periodically doing so ever since.

Now my body is stronger and better equipped to launch a credible defense against bullies. But now I have a different problem and I don't know if this is a common one, but whenever I go out looking for trouble, I realize that if and when trouble arrives, my muscles will be so tired from today's workout or aching from the previous day's workout that there is no way they will rise up to the occasion. Thereby, defeating the very purpose of working out. Some days I can barely summon enough strength to lift even a mere grocery bag. This leads me to ask the question, how is it that those well-toned people you see kicking all that ass on-screen manage to do it?

My solution to this is the following. I have modified my schedule to work out on alternate days, lets say monday, wednesday and friday, leaving tuesday and thursday free to engage in street combat. I realize that the reduction of gym time will probably retard my muscular growth, but what use are muscles if they never get a chance to engage in battle?