From the last two subchapters, you might think that learning to fight is the obvious answer to your defensive concerns. No easy answers here, though. The advice that you should just learn to fight instead of getting a gun or running away from fights is at least as flawed as the other ideas about conflict. After helping hundreds of students with problems, and navigating more than my share of fights and conflicts — largely on behalf of others — I can tell you that if your study ends on the mat, at the range, with running and jumping, or with all of the above, you’re still stopping short. But we’re getting there.

First, to give fighting a parallel assessment to running and gunning, let’s take a close look at some considerations involved in the study of fighting.

I went and fought some serious competitive fighters a few months back, just casual sparring a couple times a week for a month and a half. And, you know what? Generally, I could still hang. But I had to take it a lot easier than those guys. Most of them are half my age. They don’t have as many injuries behind them, and they still bounce back like rubber. They tend to lift, like, a lot. I work at a desk, eat too many carbs but not enough food in general, drink too much coffee and an appropriate amount of beer and whiskey — for a person who doesn’t fight twenty-somethings recreationally — and I get irregular sleep. In case you weren’t aware, that is the perfect opposite of the Get Swole Formula. It’s more of a writer’s lifestyle than an elite athlete’s. Yeah, Blake of Today makes it work. Bully for Blake.

In the rest of this chapter I cover the two reasons it doesn’t bother me to not win competitions with twenty-something athletes after more than thirty years of training. We’ll also explore how to leverage either classical martial arts or combat sports to your advantage in personal safety, and how to leverage other pursuits as well. Given that I’m not just trying to sell my own system, how are you supposed to choose a discipline? I’ll also address that pretty thoroughly at the end.

The rest of this chapter will become available following the success of this Kickstarter campaign.

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