I met Trina in the gym after lunch with a couple of my boards. She seemed pretty dejected. "Hey, what's wrong?" I asked her. "You're not still hurting from getting pasted by that stupid monster, are you?" I knew it was a dumb question; if she were still injured, she would still be in a healing coma.
"Only my pride," she said. "There are times, Trevor, when I wish I were a better fighter."
I frowned. "What's that got to do with what happened out there? You got blasted by a high-powered energy shot. It could have happened to any one of us. Shelley got hit, too, come to think of it."
"Yes, I know that. But no one went up to her after her healing coma and asked her whether she was okay."
"Did someone come up to you?"
"Mike did. And Toby, and Shelley."
"Well . . . they were probably just concerned. You don't get hit that often."
"I know, but that doesn't mean I'm fragile." She sighed. "Sometimes I wish I were more . . . well, more like you in some ways. More kick ass."
The way she pronounced "kickass" so carefully brought an involuntary snicker out of me. It sounded as though she were a little kid trying out a swear word for the first time and watching the grownups around her to gauge its effect. As a general rule, I try not to laugh when our non-native English speakers test-drive a new slang phrase -- after all, my trying to speak Russian would be much more hilarious than Trina speaking English -- but there was something so . . . so cute about the way she said it that I couldn't help myself.
Trina stamped her foot. "Don't laugh at me, Trevor! I'm serious."
I slapped a hand over my mouth, covering up my grin, and held up a finger, telling her to wait a sec. I turned my back, took a few deep breaths, and generally got my face back under control. When I turned back around, poker-faced, she was looking hard at me, her arms crossed.
"Sorry about that," I said, and I hoped it sounded as though I meant it, because I did. "I'd be happy to work with you to make you more --" I stopped because I suddenly realized that I wouldn't be able to say "kickass" without giggling. "-- er, to make you tougher if you want. And to be honest, I wouldn't mind picking up a bit of your aikido. I'd kind of like to be able to immobilize someone without punching them in the face twenty times to do it."
That coaxed a smile out of her. "It's sweet of you to say that, anyway. Let's just start with breaking boards, shall we?"
So we did. I won't go into all the details of how to break a board with a knife-hand chop (partly due to space considerations, partly because you might not be interested, and partly because anyone who wants to learn should really find themselves a qualified teacher) but the basic principle is fairly simple. It's mainly a matter of using the correct striking surface. If you strike a board the way Trina thought you should, chopping straight down with a stiff hand, you're likely to hit it with the big knuckle of your pinky, and then it's all too easy to break something that's not the board.
On the other hand (so to speak), if you hold your right hand up with the palm facing you, fingertips pointing upward, then you'll notice a cushion of fat down on the lower left part of your palm (about seven or eight o'clock if your hand were a clock face). Everybody has it, even really skinny people. Simply put, that protective cushion is the part of your hand that should make contact with the board.
So that's what I showed Trina. I broke a board or two to demonstrate that it really could be done, and then I showed her my hand afterwards to give her an idea of what kind of damage to expect. It doesn't hurt my hand that much any more, not like doing it with a punch does, but I wouldn't want to have to break a dozen boards a day that way, either. And then I had her practice her technique by striking some of our punching pads.
We worked together for a couple of hours that day, almost right up to dinnertime. Most of it was about her board-breaking technique, but we wound up doing some sparring as well. I don't train with Trina all that much, although I started thinking that maybe I should, since our styles are so radically different. It was a refreshing change from working with Padma, and I made a mental note to ask her to the gym more often.