The Birth of a Challenge

by Crazy Ivan


Of all the fringe benefits of my job, I suppose my favorite is living in the House of Skills.  For most people, the idea of having 6 roommates would be pretty frightening, but when all 6 of those roommates are (a) your best friends and (b) into all the same weird stuff you're into, it's quite a plus.  You just never know when you're going to walk in on an intense MYACH tournament, a 2 ball foosball match or a kendama championship.

And you also never know where the next challenge is going to come from.  It could pop up at any second, so you kind of have to be on your toes at all times.  A perfect example occurred a couple of weeks ago when Maverick and I were playing a little Myachi in the living room.

We were tossing two Myachis back and forth and freestyling a bit.  I would have one and he'd throw me a second.  I'd do a few 2 Myachi tricks and then toss both back to him.  He's shred a bit, toss me one, then toss the other.  I'd shred a bit and then toss one and then the other back to him.  We do this quite a bit and it's usually in these types of multi-person freestyles that you usually see the coolest new tricks done.

This time was no exception.  Mav had both Myachis and made to send them back to me, but he did so with a pass I'd never seen before.  He tossed both sacks up in a Vertical Split and then, while they were hanging in the air, he balled up his fist and punched the lower one so that it rocketed toward me and then caught the other one on the back of his hand.

As soon as I saw it, I had to try the next toughest thing.  So Mav tossed the second Myachi to me, I threw a Vertical Split down and hit them both, one after the other, with quick rabbit punches.  Both careened back to Mav with pretty good velocity and we shared the grin that skill toy enthusiasts wear in light of a new challenge.  If I could do two on the first try, after all, it seemed reasonable that we could a do three with a few tries.

So the challenge was as follows: Toss 3 Myachis up in a Vertical Split (for those not familiar with the basic splits, check out this video).  While they're in the air, you make a fist and punch all three Myachis individually. And weak punches won't do the trick here.  The idea is to make each punch a pass so that another person can catch it.  When we did it, Mav was about 20 feet away from me, so I was trying to get a good 20 feet of distance out of each punch.

This is extraordinarily tough to do.  Your punches have to be quick and accurate.  They have to have enough force to send the Myachi flying and you have to be centered enough to get the Myachi to go forward instead of spinning off to the left or right.  We realized as we were doing this that it would make great practice for martial artists and pugilists looking to improve the speed of their strikes.  We had a lot of time to realize this, too, since it took us a few dozen tries to finally get it right.

Before we were done, Monk and Lucky had joined the game and we'd come up with a ton of variations on the challenge.  We were doing splits where you'd punch one Myachi alone and then two together.  We did ones where you had to hit the first two with straight punches but the third one with an upper cut.  We did pummels where you split four Myachis and then trade off, right fist, left fist, right fist, left fist.  We did splits where you'd punch one then hit the other two together with both fists.

An hour and a half later, we took a break to rest our sore muscles and we did so with the certain knowledge that we'd be revisiting this challenge several more times.  It was just too fun not to do.

We didn't bother coming up with a name for our new challenge.  After all, it wasn't a "trick" technically speaking, since you don't actually catch the Myachis that you punch.  It also wasn't a "game" technically because there was no scoring, no winner and no loser.  So it didn't really occur to us to name it.

But then a few days later I was at FAO and I met a couple of really cool guys that were crazy into martial arts.  I was showing them some of the martial-arts inspired moves that we'd come up with like the Fu, the Ninja and the Mantis.  One guy asked if we had a move called the Bruce Lee, so I showed them that one.  His friend asked if we had a move called the Chuck Norris.  I joked that we did, but nobody but Chuck was skilled enough to do it.  They asked if we had a move called the Tony Jaa, and strangely enough we did, so I showed them that one as well.

And then one of them asked if we had a move called the Ip Man.  Now, for those that haven't seen the movie Ip Man, there are only two things you need to know.  One is that you should really go watch Ip Man (it's on Netflix).  The other is that the hero in Ip Man punches really fast.  So before I could formulate the words, "no, no Ip Man move yet", the challenge from a few days back occurred to me and I said, "As a matter of fact, we kind of do..."

So with that, a new challenge was born and named.  We've been at it quite a bit since then (video forthcoming), but we've been having so much fun with it that I felt like I had to share.  I know we've got a few accomplished martial artists reading this blog and I'd love to see where they could take this challenge.  After all, we haven't even started adding kicks to it...