The crew from the last class of the winter 2023 kickboxing session.
There've been some things I've noticed this session in kickboxing. I think I've leveled up somehow.
I like the start of the session because there's a little more "back to basics," a chance for me to refocus on things like body mechanics and stance. We go back to breaking down the warmup drills and checking our technique: sparring goes back to "one attacks / one defends" and you can really think about combinations, blocks, and moving defensively.
And also, there's that chance to help introduce new people to this new level, to say "hey, welcome, this is fun." I feel like I got a crash course in sparring and getting hit with the guys in Siling Labuyo Arnis, and that means that I can be the one that says, "hey, look: aim for my face, you're not going hard and it's my job not to get hit, honest to god, I'm okay with it." I'm willing to take a kick, or a punch. I've been knocked down, I've been hit in the head, I've been hit with sticks and shillelaghs, I've been taught how to fall.
Early in the session, for our opening drills I paired up with one of the new students: she'd studied capoeira before and had come up through the beginner class but hadn't really had to aim her fists at anyone's face yet. "It's so scary!" she said after I told her to aim for my face.
And then there's a weird thing I have been feeling in class lately. Maybe it was the effect of having some new intermediates in the class, but when we started through a round of "everyone spars with everyone else" - in a simple "one person attacks, one person defends" format, I started to see what I had learned in the last couple of sessions.
I've learned some things about range: there's that one girl who's tall and has really long legs, but wasn't using them enough (I told her that, though, and she took it to heart, so damn, there goes my advantage). There's another little, intense one who is naturally great at coming in low and ducking back out. The senior student has great combinations, so when I work with her I focus on reading them. Almost all of them have learned that if they do a big ol' haymaker I will get inside it, clinch, and either sweep their leg or knee them.
I have started learning to read an opponent. I've started being able to think beyond punch, punch, crap I just got hit, back off, block, block. And I've started being able to decide "okay, this round I want to work on chaining up kicks" or "this round I'm going to slip, dodge, and weave" or "this round I'm going to think footwork."
I love it. It feels like a level up. I feel, right now, like I'm learning something in every single bout.
This weekend at kickboxing class we did a bit of fight practice, with a small square of mats, and two of us at a time going in to do some light-touch sparring while the others watched, with a few competition rules in mind for the hell of it. Me, I got myself schooled by two of the senior students in a row: fighters who are really good at timing and combinations, and who I really need to learn from. But that's not the thing. The thing was when my friend Robyn, who's also in my judo club, went up against another woman, who I'll call TKD.
TKD, as the name implies, studied taekwondo when she was a teenager. I paired up with her a couple of weeks ago, and yeah, she still kicks like it: high, fast, accurate, and powerful. When we sparred, she was throwing double kicks at my head, and she's a little thing: several inches shorter than I am, I think.
We'd done some work on throws earlier in the class, and obviously Robyn and I are both a lot more comfortable with takedowns and falling than most of the rest of the class. TKD in particular seemed sketched out by it, having apparently never done breakfalls before. I gave her some tips when we were practicing breakfalls just prior to learning the throw, and in the drills I had to work around her unconsciously edging away from me, and make sure to just let her down gently onto the mat instead of actually flipping her. But then it was time to spar, and she and Robyn got matched up. And Sonia had said takedowns were in (because we had mats for once).
It was fascinating to watch. Robyn's fight all comes from solid legs: her most powerful punch is her uppercut, and she puts her thighs into that thing. In judo she's a talented grappler; in standing fighting she's very grounded and hard to throw for her size. I knew she was going to try closing and going for a sweep, since we'd been given permission - it's actually fairly easy to go in for a leg sweep against a relatively new kickboxer, I've done it while sparring when I spot a big Popeye haymaker coming in. (They do not expect you to move in on them, grab for the swinging arm and nape of the neck, and kick a leg out from under them.)
But the real beauty of this match was watching the range game. TKD started the match out bouncing back and forth on the balls of her feet, and you could see as soon as the bell went that she was keeping her distance. Robyn stayed more grounded, and you could see she was trying to figure out how to close.
TKD had a trained-in range that was much further out than Robyn's - and she maintained it with rapid long-range kicks, really demonstrating what you can do with the reach your legs give you. But a couple of times, when Robyn could get inside her defenses, she'd go for the judo leg sweeps - at least twice she went for an o-soto gari that I think just needed conviction (we were doing light sparring, so it's hard to fully go for a throw while trying to hold back - and she also knew TKD wasn't comfortable with the potential fall).
The match only lasted a minute but it was really fun to watch - one fighter aiming her feet at the other's head, while her opponent aimed her feet at. . . well, the other's feet. Both doing kickboxing, but you could see their other training influencing their styles so clearly. It was super cool.
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.
