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Size, strength aren't everything in self-defense
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Published: November 20, 2008
Growing up in New Orleans, a city known for its crime as well as its good food, I was always on the alert.
You'd hear the stories on the evening news about carjackings, robberies, rapes.
While I don't feel nearly as on-edge here in North Carolina, it's still always in the back of my mind — if someone tried to attack me, would I know what to do?
But the idea of taking a self-defense class has always freaked me out. Having someone come at me, even for pretend, was way out of my comfort zone. But I figured if I was scared of a self-defense class, then I was probably exactly the kind of person who needed to take one.
So I signed up for a women's seminar last weekend at the Gym Company.
Instructor Pete Napier started to go through the moves with a male assistant, and I admit, I was skeptical. What chance would a much smaller woman have against a male attacker?
But as Napier explained, it's not all about strength and size. I'd always envisioned a class like that teaching women how to fight — and there are classes that do just that, very effectively — but the main idea here was to use a few simple moves to buy yourself enough time to get free and run.
The hardest part of the class was overcoming my aversion to physical aggression. When Napier encouraged me to hit him as hard as I could, well — I couldn't really do it. And each time I'd knock him to the ground, I'd apologize. A natural-born fighter, I'm not.
Then Napier posed a very simple question every woman has to focus on when she finds herself in a dangerous situation — "Am I going to live, or am I going to die?"
If you're attacked, there's really not a lot of room for in-between.
I'm certainly not an expert at self-defense, but I did learn a few valuable lessons and got the answer to a very important question: If someone tries to attack me, I now know what to do.
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