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?
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