A guide for self-improvement — minus the report cards, plus some bruises.
Think you’ve mastered adulthood? Think again. Smarten Up is a guide to doing life a little better — or at least, a lot more interestingly. From testing your comedic timing and sword-fighting finesse to weaving your way toward mindfulness, we’ve rounded up dozens of classes, workshops and weirdly satisfying ways to flex your brain.
Go on — learn something new, bruise your ego a little and come out smarter for it.
Before I was a journalist, I wanted to be a pro wrestler. Makes sense in a twisted way: both jobs revolve around storytelling — one deals in truth and the other in truth-adjacent body slams. In my hometown, the latter had way more cultural currency. Stampede Wrestling came to our local rink often enough that “wrestler” seemed like an attainable career path.
I started training young. My cousins and I filmed matches on the family camcorder, then rewound the tape to critique each other’s Sharpshooters. I survived my brother’s Tombstone more times than I should. I had my gimmick (Big Poppa), my entrance music (also “Big Poppa”), and a backyard wrestling league that collapsed the moment someone took a plywood board to the head and needed stitches.
Eventually hormones arrived, and with them a girlfriend, which wiped out my childish fantasies. I stopped watching wrestling altogether, adopting the common stance that it was low-brow nonsense — bathroom-stall graffiti with better stage production.
Then I had kids. Looking for cheap entertainment, I started taking them to local indie shows at the Legion hall. That’s where I rediscovered the magic — everyday Edmontonians moonlighting as spandex- clad caricatures, committing fully to the bit. I tucked a flyer for wrestling school into the diaper bag and waited for the right moment to chase the dream. Naturally, that moment arrived after my separation.
My trainer, Stampede Wrestling legend Michael Richard Blais, kept his first-day instructions simple: Bring kneepads and soft shoes to the Clandestine Wrestling Society school. I showed up in wrestling boots and signed up for four months.
On day one, I impressed everyone — including myself — with my cardio and agility as I ran the ropes, shoulder rolled across the mat and hopped the turnbuckles. “It feels like you’ve done a little bit of training before,” said my future opponent Taryn from Accounting (actually an elementary teacher). But my confidence shattered once another body entered the ring and the training became high-stakes choreography. Every move required communication — a subtle squeeze of the arm, a whispered cue — because if two wrestlers aren’t aligned, someone gets hurt.
My biggest obstacle was my directional dyslexia. I often hear “left” as “right” and, worse, “duck” as “jump.” This led to Taryn and me clashing skulls mid-air. Blais gently asked if this was something I dealt with in daily life. It was. We worked around it by leaning into my strengths: slams, rope work and my beloved hurricanrana, a move that looks like I’m flipping someone over my knees but is purely sleight of hand — or in this case, leg.
Finally, it was showtime. I debuted as “Fake Nooz Neville,” a smarmy journalist in a newspaper-print singlet whose signature move was spreading misinformation about his opponents. Our match devolved — as all the best ones do — into an all-out brawl: wrestlers flying into the crowd, props shattering and a folded chair shot to my back.
Incredibly, none of it hurt — part good training and part adrenaline. The rush was indescribable. And when Taryn finally pinned me, the audience exploded. They got their villain’s comeuppance. I got catharsis, closure and a headrush I’ll be chasing for years.
Everything about wrestling is performance art. And somewhere in all those theatrics, a surprising little truth sneaks in about good and evil and the pleasure of letting yourself get knocked down for the sake of a good story.
$250/month membership, clandestinewrestlingsociety.com
