I have one. Tomorrow. Everyone is at least a first-degree blackbelt or equivalent. I’m in the top few dozen in terms of belt ranking, but I don’t know how I’ll hold up to the ones who actually study in Thailand. It should be pretty interesting to see, anyway. I’ve been training like fucking crazy for weeks for it.
Wish me Good Luck and probably Get Well Soons in advance.
Take pictures!
That’s fucking awesome - what a cool hobby to have! I second Sin’s motion - get pictures if you can. Good luck!
Can you beat up tanks? Well maybe you should’ve studied Kenjutsu instead.
Good luck, and don’t let them hit you on the head.
I don’t know about pictures during the matches. They might pop-up online, but I don’t know how to directly get my hands on them. I’ll get one as I’m leaving the tournament after being awarded whatever title/honorific rank I’m given. So there will be at least one where you guys can all see how beat-up I got, hopefully.
Ren: I will be hit everywhere except the face, most likely.
Hades: I really didn’t forsee tank assault when I was six years old and started taking Muay Thai. I know, I know, I should’ve thought about it, but it just didn’t seem realistic back then.
That sounds very cool! I’m looking forward to hearing more from you (and to the possibility of pictures).
Make sure you take on Jaa Panom once in your life
but in all honesty, good luck and kick someone’s ass.
I hope you can walk at the end of the day. Good luck!
All right, leaving in a few hours, I’ll be back tomorrow night if I fail miserably, Tuesday night if I’m superfly as all hell.
Don’t get your ass kicked! 
Arac: Good luck with moving your feet with the best of them.
If he can hit the things hard and fast enough, he could crumple them up and be ecological while doing it, since the piece of junk remaining wouldn’t litter the landscape as much as two half tanks. Although that might require studying Hokuto Shinken…
I have two pictures; one of me in front of some window before going in on Monday morning, which is obnoxiously staged and not very good or well lit; and one after my first match on tuesday, wherein my face was horribly abused. It’s some random picture that got taken as I was cleaning myself on my camera, my teacher took it so I couldn’t “tell people I never got hit.” Yeah, the worst of it’s hidden, though, so the squeemish among you will be okay unless you’re really, really squeemish.
Hopefully, I’ll find/get more as time goes on.
First one: Nevermind, too big to store online. I’ll shrink it later and post it, maybe. It’s pretty awful.
Second one: http://xs110.xs.to/xs110/06513/DSC01113.JPG
Ouch!
Did you place or anything?
Places were weird, because it was literally huge. Hundreds upon hundreds of people in multiple organizational divisions of skill. I did well, essentially: I rose two ranks (it’d be belts in Karate), because I was able to consistantly show superior skill to people who possessed the two ranks higher than me. I ended up with a truly ridiculous amount of Draws on my record.
Essentially, a whole bunch of people had really good technical mastery, including on the ridiculous five-strike kick that requires someone to very nearly break one of the laws of motion (the law of inertia), and other such feats impossible for normal people. But, while they largely practiced completing the techniques in isolation, most of the people from my school practiced in sparring matches. We didn’t have that perfection from hours of practicing the same pattern, but we knew how to use them in effect, more. We might only strike four times (most of us can only consistantly pull off three, myself included), in the five strike kick, but then we’d know how to recover from the landing and attack again, or how to block and react in they intercept a kick. One person I was fighting against didn’t know exactly that, is I guess why that specific technique stuck in my head for the explanation. I parried the first kick, but he went on to do the other four, ineffectually, on the air because he didn’t know what else to do with his momentum from there. Didn’t work out well for him.
The two craziest things were the Chinese guy who went for people’s faces on Tuesday, who is the reason I can’t open my eye right now. I decided there was no point dodging it, if somebody that good was going to go for my face, they’d hit it. So I headbutted his fist. The left side of my face is really messed up, but I hurt one of his hands. It was a tactically, if not cosmetically, wise decision, but probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done. I blocked a punch with my face. That’s just stupid. What the hell was I thinking?
Anyway, the other crazy thing was one guy, I think he was from somewhere on the East coast, who I was jabbing at, and he jumped up to dodge one and I almost killed him; I would’ve hit his neck instead of face and probably crushed his windpipe. I gracefully averted it not by pulling my arm back, but by leaping backwards and landing on my ass. I don’t think I’ll punch high in a sparring match for a while again, though. That was scary.
Fucking GG.
Good job though, congrats. I know what you mean by some strikes being scary, I’ve had a few close calls myself (but with head kicks) and had 1 unfortunate victim that ended up in a similar state as the one you’re in.
So you were like the bad guys in Karate Kid, who spent all their time sparring rather than becoming deep in the martial arts, and eventually you got Danieled by a Chinese guy?
Oh, no, I won that match, actually. I lost the next three, due to being unable to see out of one eye (and I have a terrible astigmatism, so can’t really see clearly out of the other, anyway) but that guy lost because, while I lacked depth perception, he lacked the use of one of his fists, effectively. He was also incredibly off balance and momentum after I intercepted the hand before he expected it to hit me. The next guys were all better than me, anyway, and had a sight advantage, with all their limbs working, so I got beat down. Hard. Less ability, a disadvantage, they lack any disadvantage. Bad combination for me. After 2/5 wins from that set, I didn’t advance to the next one (which would’ve been the second set of people three or more ranks above where I was when I came), so I came home Tuesday night after looking around San Francisco for a girl I used to know and not finding her anywhere while waiting for a flight. Which, considering how I look, is probably for the best, but anyway.
Oh, and I won’t lose the eye, forever, which is good, since it’s the one that works. I’m trying to buy a monacle for the couple weeks until it heals enough to see well again, though, so I can read without being unnaturally close to the screen.
Chicks dig scars, it would’ve worked in your favor.