I am a man who has been punched a few times.

I am a man who has been punched a few times.

I guess not really is a man who has been punched a few times. I guess not really as a man. All the times I got punched were as a kid.

But I felt it. I know what it feels like to get punched. None of it was from like a family member or anything.

It was just kids at school. You fight with people and it's just how life

goes and they hit you and you hit them back and eventually you respect each

other and you work it out. Then I've been hitting sports a whole bunch too. I

played all the sports, all the contact sports, I really like contact,

seek out contact in the sports that I play and it means that there's a lot of give and take.

And whether you're talking about getting hit with somebody in a fist fight or more often for me hit with like a shoulder or a hip or whatever in the course of playing a sport. There's still a really neat division in my brain between two types of hits.

You get the hits that you take where you knew it was coming, and then you get the hits that

you take where you didn't know it was coming. The first one's not fun, but you can

roll with that because a billion little things in your brain say you're about to get hit, you're

about to get hit, you're about to get hit, and consciously you might have time to do like one or two things

throw an arm up turn a shoulder whatever but subconsciously oh my goodness have you

ever watched that kind of thing in slow motion your body just knows what to do. There are a jillion ways that it adjusts

and moves and tightens and relaxes and rolls to absorb that hit and minimize the damage you take from that contact, but when it's freaky is when you don't know.

And this is the stuff that you see in sporting events where somebody just doesn't see a hit coming and they get

lit up or somebody is out they get hurt and they're not in control of their capacities

when they hit the surface and the ground the turf the ice whatever it is. of their

ground, the turf, the ice, whatever it is.

And you're like, oh no, that that person wasn't guarding themselves at all.

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