Who the hell are you?!

 I guess I best introduce myself, before I get above question.

My name is Koos Fockens.......  (yes, I know....) 

I was born and raised in the Netherlands, and have been living in Devon, UK since 1999.  

I've been involved with martial arts, one way or another since I was about 11 years of age and I started my journey in Taekwon-Do, I did this for many years and had the good fortune to have an excellent instructor, who now is a grand master in this art and currently lives in Italy. I am still in touch with him from time to time.  I've had a busy proffesional life and the move to the UK meant that training suffered from time to time, but I always managed to do at least something, train for myself or read up on a topic.

I saw my first Bruce Lee movie at the age of about 13-14 (I can't remember exactly), it was Fist of Fury.

(In the US this movie was released as The Chinese Connection, later renamed to the above), and since then I wanted to do what he did.  Like many an unkempt teenage boy with too many hormones running through his systems, I ran around making Bruce Lee noises, made my own home made nuchaku's (of which the cord or chain often broke, sending the other half flying off in an unpredictable direction, sometime meeting my face along the way with predictable results....).. 

I watched many a Hong Kong Kung Fu movie, some better than others, and generally was enjoying most of them, but by far Bruce Lee's movies were in a different league.  Where I lived however it was not possible to find anyone that taught or trained in Jeet Kune Do.  The same was when I moved to the UK, so for a long period of my life I had no training in what I now train and try to teach. 

However sometimes life throws you a curveball and that happened around 2011, when my employer appointed me to run their office in the Netherlands, requiring weekly commuting to my country of birth. 

Whilst in the Netherlands I wanted to spend some of my free time doing some form of martial arts so I used Google to see what there was in the area, and that's when I found a school that taught Jeet Kune Do. 

I checked out the website and quickly found that the instructors were very close to the source (more about them in another post).  That was that, deal done, I had found Jeet Kune Do and I was going to make the most of it, only my work pattern in those early years was erratic to say the least and I ended up missing more lessons than I attended, until end of 2012, when things calmed down and I managed to attend pretty much every single one since.   

Then in 2016, the Tax man decided that commuting between two countries for work was not business travel, but commuting, and therefore flights etc were taxable as a benefit in kind.  This lead to a reorganisation and I started doing the same job , but based in the UK at our headoffice.  I still travel to NL but not nearly as often.  

This presented a challenge, how on earth do I continue my JKD training!   My instructors encouraged and supported me to start my own local training group, try and find some like minded people and just train.  That's what I did and here we are in 2022, 5 years later and my training group is still going! 

When I'm in NL, one of the more experienced guys take over the class, whilst I try to catch a session with my instructors,  occasionally they come over to the UK to run a workshop, and I travel to each seminar that I can to further my knowledge (including a week long summercamp in Poland which was a great experience).  So now you know my journey, my background.   

Lets see what the future brings, but I think I'm just going to follow some advice by Bruce Lee, and will use this as my sign off from now on....

Walk On!