Fred Flintstone Feet

There is a little known affliction of martial artists from hard style schools – it’s called Fred Flintstone Feet.  Most of them have experienced it one time or the other, but didn’t realize that it had a diagnosis. 

We had a personal record of cases last night; four in total.  Trucker is still recovering from a broken toe, Teacher broke or dislocated his pinkie toe in the first 10 minutes of class coming off the ground and catching on his pants. 

I smashed three toes into Truckers shin and later had a kick or fall on to my other foot.  And then later Dave through me over his leg, but had trapped my slap hand so my elbow and all 200 pounds of me when straight down on his foot.  I could tell by the his face that that was going to leave a mark. 

Teacher called me today to commiserate about his toe (completely black today) and I related my rather disrupted sleep due to pulsating feet and general sensitivity.  Strangely, none of us complained about any other pains in our bodies when the toes are mangled. 

Teacher has occasionally added a touch of reality based fun stuff to our classes.  This is based on his tireless collection of altercations in our towns small number of bars.  Some he’s heard about from the players, some are from what he’s witnessed and some of them are from things he’s participated in. 

A few weeks ago the bar near where we hold classes had a fairly epic brouhaha.  Eight fellows from a boat took umbrage to something the bouncer said and it was on.  Unfortunately there was only three bouncers.  Said altercation led to one of the bouncers on the floor on all fours while his opponent took an impressive kick right to his face; rearranging his nose at an unfortunate angle. 

So our exercise was to start off on all fours and see what we could do before he showed us a few neat ideas.  Basically, we needed to remember to get one hand up at the very least.  Moving is awesome of course, but we managed to plant an inside hammer block/strike or a punch down strike/block.  If done with good timing and power the kicker is spun so that their back is to you and then they are sad. 

Great class, but throbbing leading to FFF syndrome is nothing to laugh at; unless it’s the other guy.