Program Review for Matador by Obie, New York Bootcamp, Jan 06

That was a great bootcamp.

In some sense I wish I had taken it a few months later because these guys were literally so good that I didn’t really have a cognitive model at the time toapprecitae what they were doing in the field, even though they had just spent the previous five hours explaining evreything to me in great detail. It was like part of me understood it, and the other part of my brain was just going "HOLY SHIT!" the entire time. I remember I was watching JDog sarge the two coat check girls and I had to hold my jaw to keep it from hitting the ground. Awesome.

I wish I had taken even more advantage of the field time by getting more feedback from the coaches, but overall a great investment, and a great time.

As for Matador… this man is just beyond. So alpha, so cool, so charismatic and just plain fun to be around… he pulls you into his reality, and that’s a damn great place to be. More than all the routines and everything, Matador made this bootcamp a real success for me on the second night. I was struggling a bit with hooking sets, which I had been doing consistently the previous night. I was feeling a little frustrated, and Matador gave me some quick tips and guided me through a set to get my energy back up. The real magic, though, came when he pushed me into high energy "kamikaze" sets… I really started going nuts, I stopped thinking about what I was doing and just started doing it. Opening, stacking, multiple threading, kino escalation, locking in, qualifying, I was doing the stuff we had talked about and to my own surprise, I wasn’t thinking about it, just doing it. For those minutes I got my first taste of what Pickup can be like when things come together, and it only happened because Matador took the time to give me personal attention, figured out what was wrong, and solved my problem without me even knowing what it was. Now that I know that feeling, I will be able to search for it during my own time in field, but had I never felt it I think I would have searched for it on my own for many months. Plus he opened a really hot girl by giving her the finger, which was terrific.

The bootcamp has given me a great head start in learning pickup, and somehow without even realizing it, has given me a kick in the ass to improve all areas of my life. When the hell did that happen?