Is big just big?

How do I know that Robyn really knows me? She can tell that if I grunt when I hit the mat, I'm not hurt - I'm frustrated. 

This Wednesday at the end of class we did a bunch of randori. Mostly against a kid in the class, Eloise, who was headed to a tournament on the weekend and needed some practice time - and who, incidentally, was outweighed by everyone in the room. But once she'd fought three or four rounds, Sensei Gary got Bruce up on the mat, and then raised his eyebrows at me. 

Which is fair: Bruce and I were the two biggest people in the randori lineup. But Bruce is 6'4" and weighs something like 250 pounds. And he gets paid to work out a lot (he's in the military). And he has a brown belt. And I have a green belt. 

It was like trying to fight the Whomping Willow. After the third time he dumped me - and the sensei shouted out "He just got you three times with the same move, Kate!" - I did start to get angry. Determined to get something, I managed to yank him around a couple of times, but getting him to move and having a sweep or trip ready just wasn't coming together, and then I'd hit the mat again. At which point I burst out with an "UNGH!" as I hit. 

"Are you okay?" Sensei Gary asked, as I got up, and I said I was fine, shook my head, and tried again. Robyn said that was when she knew: I was angry. 

The bout lasted about a minute and a half. I probably went down six or seven times. Bruce didn't break a sweat: I felt like I was throwing myself at a boulder. I went back over to the edge of the mat and knelt down. I closed my eyes and told myself not to be upset. I told myself to calm the hell down before I stated crying. I took a couple of deep breaths, and then a few minutes later Eloise called me up to fight and we fought and I landed a half-decent tai otoshi on her before the clock ran out. 

But I still felt fragile, emotionally. I wasn't mad at Bruce, but he tried to give me some advice about my body positioning and I tried to tune it out so I wouldn't get angry. I didn't really want to meet his eyes when we were stacking the mats after class. And even after we'd all headed home, I found myself still brooding about it, and still upset. At myself, mostly. I felt like something, anything, should have clicked somehow. I should at least have been learning something. But I wasn't, I was just getting repeatedly dumped, and getting angry, and I didn't know if that was my fault. 

I also wonder - because this has happened before, me getting frustrated to the point of shoving down tears - if there's something about the physicality of getting yanked around or thrown to the floor, that makes my emotional response more volatile. If I could control my emotions better if my body wasn't being physically jarred at the same time as my mind. 

I ended up messaging my friend Alan, who said, basically, that hey, big is big and physics are physics and you can do everything right and still sometimes just lose to superior size. Which did help (thanks, Alan). The prevailing idea in a lot of martial arts - that if your technique is flawless it won't matter if the other person is bigger than you - is fine as far as it goes. You can do things to compensate for a size difference: Eloise, who's a 95-pound child, picked me out, and fought hard, and dumped me a couple of times. But you're carving out margins on the essential advantage the bigger person has. And this was a size difference, and a skill difference, and a strength difference, and the futility of getting back up, trying something, and knowing that Bruce was just letting me twist for a bit before throwing me again, was really frustrating. 

And so now I'm turning over in my mind - if big is just big, is there anything I can do about it? If so, what is it? And what - other than a flawless ippon, which is not going to happen - can I set as my benchmark for having scored something, anything, against a much bigger opponent? 

Shomi ni mokuso

I meant to start this blog ages ago, to talk about how, to my own utter surprise, I found myself involved in martial arts. I didn't start because I didn't know why anyone would want to read about the thoughts of a not-particularly-gifted and newly-minted judoka. But there's a value in trying to learn something that you don't really have an aptitude for, and discovering how that can be satisfying instead of frustrating. I'm not good at this stuff, but I love it, and being bad at it means I can see, sometimes, when I'm getting better. Hence the title of the blog, "Shomi ni mokuso," which is the phrase that cues you to close your eyes at the beginning and end of your judo practice and meditate on what you want to focus on, and what you have learned. 

So, [record scratch]

You're probably wondering how I got here.

About four and a half years ago, a couple of friends and I were looking for some kind of fitness class to get into: honestly, we were looking for yoga. But none of the community centres were offering classes we could all get to, given our schedules. Then my friend Robyn sent us a link. Someone she knew from a local moms group had posted about a judo class her husband had just started up, that was held at a nearby Canadian Forces station and had just gotten approval to let civilians sign up as well. We could sign up for a trial month. Robyn said she'd always wanted to try judo. 

I thought at the time that I didn't want to learn a martial art: I'm not a "combat" person, I thought. I imagined martial arts as a space full of strict rituals, harsh attitudes, and competition that would make me uncomfortable (movies and TV haven't done the field any favours). But I thought I'd give it a try, just for the month, because Robyn wanted to. Then, I told myself, I could quit, secure in the knowledge that I'd at least given it a go.

A year and a half later, I headed into the pandemic shutdown thinking I was a breath away from my green belt, and crushed that I wouldn't be getting my twice-weekly hit of throwing other people around and locking their heads up with my legs. I had stumbled into the Uplands Judo Club, headed up by Sensei Sebastien Godin and full of strange, fun people who rapidly became my friends. The jostling and wrestling and trash talking and tripping and throwing was a regular seratonin boost. I sucked at it, but I started to need it. And when Robyn got injured and had to drop out I found myself, despite myself, packing up my gi every Monday and Friday evening, and getting my ass to the dojo anyway, on my own.  It was good to be throwing myself, regularly, at a thing that was hard to do. 

Then came the early spring of 2020, and all the gyms closed. Dojos too. 

That's where the other martial arts came in. As part of the extreme social isolation of the early pandemic, I wound up in a "pod" with a couple who are among my very best friends. One of them, Alan, has been doing jujitsu for ages and was also going nuts with the dojos closed. We started meeting up to train in parks, although we couldn't do a lot of judo or jujitsu in the park - earth is harder and messier than mats - so he introduced me to some joint locks, some striking, a little Filipino stick fighting, even some Japanese sword work.

Then, in 2021, they moved to BC, and I was without anyone to train with again. I complained about it to a friend and mentioned the Filipino stick fighting we'd been doing. "Oh," she said, "is that the thing that looks like poi spinning, except with sticks?" 

"Yep," I said, and she said, "I've got a friend that does that! He has a bunch of people that get together in Strathcona Park on weekends to practice. I can introduce you on Facebook." 

So that's how I met Badger Jones, who teaches Filipino martial arts and is a member of Dog Brothers Canada. He sent out a message on Facebook about getting together in the park, and sight unseen, I grabbed my kali sticks and biked out there one Saturday morning. 

I don't do that. I am not good at going out on my own to meet people I've never met before. But it was for martial arts. And it meant I met the guys in Siling Labuyo Arnis. There's a whole story about my first day out with them but it's probably for another post. But I will say that it's hard to find more generous and kind and fun people, even if they are trying their best to hit you with a shillelagh or a staff or a Cossack whip.

We trained online and sparred in the park and eventually started meeting in backyards for classes. And now I had even more friends that practiced a sort of fraternal violence, a sort of closeness that comes from trusting each other to hit, but not too hard, to test each other because you're friends, to look out for each other while fighting, to give and take the openings. 

As restrictions eased, my judo club started meeting in one member's garage. Then they finally opened the gyms at the Military Family Resource Centre, and things started to come back to normal. Now we meet Mondays and Wednesdays, the classes have gotten bigger, and we have a whole new crop of white and yellow belts. The children's class is booming. I've got my green belt: at least one other that started at white with me is up to blue. I'm starting to think about getting into competitions. 

And most recently, someone I know from the Ottawa writing community, Sonia Carrière, posted something on Twitter about how she was looking for students for a women's-only kickboxing class she was teaching on Saturdays at Carleton University.

Well, why not? So I asked the original three, the ones who came out for that first judo class, if they wanted to come do some kickboxing - and we came and gave it a try. Turns out that kicking the shit out of things is a hell of a lot of cathartic fun, and an all-women's class is an interesting and kind of joyful dynamic. I think it's been about a year now, and I'm now in the intermediate class (which means we get to do some fun sparring) and I've also started sticking around for the traditional kung fu class that comes after it, because it involves swords, and I've found I can't resist learning more weapons.

So, for those keeping track at home, that's judo, Filipino martial arts, kickboxing and kung fu that I'm currently into. Throws, grappling, striking, and weapons all represented. 

And here I thought I wasn't going to like martial arts, four and a half years ago.