Alasdair Stuart's Blog

I don’t go to Judo on Fridays. I will, when I’m fit enough. When I’m thinner, I’ll definitely go to Judo on Fridays. When my knees hurt less, then I’ll go to Judo on Fridays. Of course I want to go on Fridays, I love Judo. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it gives me confidence and makes me feel better, it’s a crucible wrapped in thick white cotton and different coloured belts. I love Judo and if I could go on Judo on Fridays I would. But I can’t. I’m too busy. I’m too tired. I have things on. I’m not fit enough. I’m not strong enough. I don’t go to Judo on Fridays because I’m not ready. I want to but I won’t. Because I’m not ready. Because I’ve nearly gone a couple of times and things have got in the way. Because I’m scared. Because Fridays might be different and harder. Because maybe all the people who don’t go to Mondays anymore because I go and they all secretly hate me go to Fridays. Because even though I’ve been going for three months, even though I’ve graded, even though I’m officially actually sort of good at this, I’m still actually worthless. Because I’m fat and ten years minimum past the point where I should have started this. Because I’ll just fail. Because the man on the other side of the mat doesn’t think I should go to Judo.

It was Friday. I went to Judo.

Alone, too, as it turns out because Steve had a prior engagement. So I turned up, got changed, headed up to the Dojo and continued the ongoing process of bonding with Ollie, who appears to be exactly the same sort of geek I am. There’s something inherently right in having a conversation about Hellsing, dressed in a Judo gi, waiting for a lesson to begin and it did a really good job of easing my mood. I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t stupid or worthless. I was just a fellow traveller.

A word about warm ups. Ever since the Two Weeks of Blood, as my hilarious tongue injuries have become know I simultaneously don’t and do want that stupid hopping forward roll to come up again in warm up. I’m scared of it because, well, I pile drove myself into the mat the first time I tried it and because it hurt and because, well, I like being able to talk. I don’t ever want to do it again and I need to because it’s a stupid tiny thing to be frightened of, especially when you consider I now do a martial art where very, very large men regularly try, and succeed, in picking me up and throwing me very hard towards the ground. So, me being frightened of forward rolls is a little bit like a dog being frightened of running around. I want this done, I want it out of my head I just…maybe don’t want to actually experience that catharsis but just jump over it to the point right after I’ve done it successfully, never have to worry about it again and don’t actually remember having to do it in the first place. Nonetheless, I bought a gum shield and take it with me to every lesson now. I’m reasonably certain that it’s now taken on talismanic properties too, and as long as I carry it with me we’ll never have to do that warm up again.

This time though, we opened with jumping jacks and coordination exercises because, as Jamie put it, he wasn’t up for running around tonight, and then went it into something a little different. We paired up, one of us on all fours whilst the other had to lean over them, place a hand against their jacket and roll all the way over and then scrabble as fast as possible through the gap between their partner’s arms and legs.

Forward roll. Wearing a moustache and a false hat. I’m onto you.

I did it anyway, and the thing is, it sort of helped. The rolling forward break fall is something I’m quite good at and I rolled off my shoulder, hit the mat and…scrabbled slowly and a bit frantically through the space beneath Ollie’s chest cavity. In my defence, Ollie’s about three quarters my size. Which is why he was able to do this with significantly more speed and accuracy. We did the drill again, sped up and this time we segued into groundwork randori. This was interesting as, in certain situations, being on your back in Judo actually helps. You’ve got leverage and crucially, if your opponent doesn’t close the gap fast enough, you can close it on your terms. This is where those strangles I learnt on Monday came in and Ollie got one on me about two seconds before I got one on him. I tapped out, we stood up and the lesson moved on.

Interestingly, to something that had been covered on Monday. I actually found this massively reassuring for two reasons, the first being I was sort of expecting Friday to be the Secret Wisdom Of Judo That Overweight Men From The Isle Of Man Were Not Meant To Know. This was fostered a little by one of the Friday sessions I didn’t go to basically being How To Pass Your Grading. The idea of Friday being a repeat of Monday not only took the edge off that but also took the edge off the ‘You Are Nowhere Near Talented Or Good Enough To Be Here And Should Be Ashamed’ sensation that was gnawing at me at the start of the session.

The second reason this was massively reassuring was that we got to repeat the movement drill from Monday, where you learnt to control your opponent with one hand, pushing and pulling them in circular motions around the mat. Movement is one of my big problems with Judo because, when it comes down to it, I’m a big guy and if I move at small guy speed, I get big guy tired. However, if you stay still, completely, you either get penalised for passivity or your opponent gets to pick where and when they come at you. This drill addresses that, and the idea of being able to move yourself, and your opponent, appeals to me hugely.

This time round, I was partnered with two people, Laura, who’s a yellow belt and about a fifth my size and Alice, who’s my height. It’s interesting working with smaller people in drills like this simply because you have to gear down. You can’t go hard, can’t hurl your mighty wall of flesh at your opponent, but at the same time you have to react to and respond to your opponent. It was useful and working with Alice had a surprising amount of emotional resonance. Alice is very tall, very polite, a bit hesitant and convinced she’s not very good. When I worked with her, I made a point of making sure she went first and went through each drill more than once. She’s…me, in a sense, thirteen weeks ago and the interesting thing about working with her was she was already starting to develop. Her Osoto Otoshi is better than mine and mine was improved by working with her. Like I say, it’s odd, because working with people my size is useful because they’re the sort of people I’ll be competiting against, but working with people smaller than me is a little bit like switching from welding to needlepoint. It’s more subtle but it’s definitely the same kind of thing.

We moved on to Randori next and this is where my Friday phobia kicked back in. Recently I’ve been very gung ho about sparring, I like it, it’s fun and I’m focussed and controlled in a way I haven’t been before. On Friday though, I didn’t go straight out and the realistion I’d let myself backslide a little led to me being the first out in the second wave of people to spar. Not only the first out either but, as I walked to the end of the mat, I realised I was going to be sparring with.

Wes placed fifth in the English Open last year. Wes is a marine. Wes is huge and incredibly good at the sport. Fighting Wes, for me, isn’t about beating him because the chances of doing so are, shall we say, not large. Instead, it’s about what I can learn, what I can do, how long I can last. So we bowed, came forward, locked up and I went for Deashi Barai, a leg sweep I’d practiced with Alice. Didn’t go fast or hard enough so he threw something at me and it…didn’t work. I moved out of the way, went for Deashi Barai again and he literally just pushed me over. One of the interesting things about Judo is that if you’re unbalanced when you try a technique, your opponent can literally just push you over. Which he did. I picked myself up, went for him again, went for the same technique again (This was, in retrospect, a mistake) and this time he just got out of the way and I fell over. I got up again, felt the Alasdair Is Having Too Much Fun siren begin to kick in and locked up again with him. He tried to take me down, I stepped clear and the matches stopped. Wes bowed to me, said ‘Well done’ and left the mat.

My next opponent, Ryan, is one of the club Brown belts. He’s about 19, wiry, tall and fights in an entirely different way. Where Wes just positions you around the mat, Ryan picked at me as I waited for him to come for me, and when we locked up, I turned him sideways and went for a throw. I missed. He threw me.

I got up, we locked up again and began turn, moving, each of us looking for position. I went for Deashi Barai, I went for Uki Goshi, I went for anything I could get and he was stiff arming me. Basically, he was locking his elbows so I couldn’t get close to him. It’s a good defensive technique and Ryan’s very, very good. He closed the distance, threw me again and this time, I retched. I was getting tired, I was too fat and old and stupid and he was just going to keep picking at me and…

He grabbed me. I grabbed him back and yanked and he lost his balance. To be fair, he lost his balance and I basically hit him in the face with my chest. For a split second I was too worried I’d hurt him to react and in that time we’d turned, powered a few steps across the mat and it was time to change partners. Or in my case, leave the mat. We operate a two fights on, two fights off system and I was desperately grateful for being able to leave the mat before I had to be poured off it.

Three things happened in quick succession as I left the mat. Firstly, something percolated up through the desperate quest for more breath and new knees; Ryan was breathing as hard as I was by the end of the fight. Connected to that was the realisation that Wes had thrown me twice but had tried to throw me four times. I’d…not sucked. I’d got beaten, clearly, because I’d been thrown and hadn’t thrown anyone. But I’d not been humiliated, I’d done my best.

‘That was good. Good movement.’ Wes, the second thing that happened. He was complementing me. The fifth best Judoka in his weight class in the country was complementing me. This was unusual. I managed to grin, smile, say ‘Thank you’ in between gasps for breath and settled in to watch the other fights.

A word about spectating, by the way. Whether this is true or not I don’t know but I think it’s at least as important as sparring. You watch people spar, you not only learn what they like to try and how they move and think you also see things you’d never have thought of. It’s also a lot like the language metaphor I’ve used before, one of the best ways of learning Judo besides speaking it is listening to other people talk. So, regardless of the fact everyone is an indistinct pink blur, I make a point of watching people spar when I’m not.

I glanced down the mat at one point and a blue gi-clad blur I knew was Jamie looked back at me, grinned and gave me a huge thumbs up. ‘It was good, that, well done.’ he said and I, again, smiled, nodded, thanked him and managed some kind of response that suggested I was an adult sentient human being.

Two black belts. Two instructors. Two complements. Two minutes.

I don’t go to Judo on Fridays. I don’t go because, in the past, I’ve been scared to, or I’ve not trusted myself. I don’t go to Judo on Fridays because on some level, I used to feels like I didn’t deserve to, and the real martial artists deserved a day off from the fat guy. I don’t go to Judo on Fridays because the version of me on the other side of the mat told me I wasn’t allowed to.

I’m not going to Judo this Friday. Not because I’m scared, not because I don’t trust myself or don’t deserve it. No one needs a day off from the fat guy and the version of me on the other side of the mat is looking increasingly resentful. I’m not going this Friday because I have other things to do and because I want to build my fitness sensibly. After all, I’ve got to be ready for the Friday after next.

There’s a motion that lies at the heart of a lot of Judo. It looks, for all the world, like ballroom dancing, both of you holding on with both hands as you turn and turn, pull and push, each leading and following. It looks completely graceful and easy, right up until the point where one of the two people dancing picks the other one up and throws them into the ground. Which, let’s face it, is not the sort of thing you tend to see in a ballroom dancing lesson, at least never more than once.

The interesting thing about this motion is that it’s incredibly adaptable. The first third of the lesson this week focussed on this exact movement, learning to turn and be turned, transitioning your opponent from left to right. The idea is to get used to not only shifting your opponent around but moving and contorlling someone from multiple angles and directions. We built this up step by step, first with one hand, then two, then blocking out a throw, then completing it. This ‘Lego’ style of teaching is something we do a lot and it works beautifully. Get the first motion right and add another, get the second motion right and add a third, get them all right and your opponent’s on the ground before you are. Even better, you learn to throw people on the left and the right, moving forwards and backwards and crucially, you start to learn, physically, about motion points. It is, odd as it sounds, much easier to throw someone backwards if they’re moving forwards, easier to throw someone to the right if they’re already moving to the left. This principle, of applied and refocussed force, is, as near as I can tell, something close to the heart of both Judo and Aikido and it’s fascinating to see it in action. Jamie spent a long time not only walking us through this but also showing us exactly how versatile this looping, circular motion is. You can literally drop an opponent into four forward throws and a couple of backward throws from this motion, provided you’re in control. Most of throws are Goshi variants, or, to put it another way, another triumphant week of the Pussycat Dolls. Hip throws are really smart, very hard techniques because fundamentally what you’re doing is lifting your opponent, turning them through ninety degrees and throwing them at the ground. There is little or no way to do this softly or nicely because you’re basically falling three feet. Throw in the fact that I have a lot of mass and that I’m being thrown by someone with a lot of mass and the end result is a throw which genuine recovery time from. Most throws, at least in class, I can bounce straight back up from but the Pussycat Dolls throws? They take about three seconds to get back up from and, in competition, that’s an eternity. Something to remember for the future, or at least try and defend against.

The interesting thing about this is that all this section of the lesson did was put me in mind of the Judo tree from last week. Thinking about it now, I wonder whether the trunk of the Judo tree I’ve talked about before isn’t a specific technique, but rather, this motion. Move them around, position them, take them down in any one of half a dozen ways.

We moved onto Randori after this, and were given the choice of shifting to Newaza randori, or groundfighting, from Tachiwaza, or standing throws, if we wanted to. This led to three interesting observations, the first of which came just before we were told we’d be sparring. I was getting, focussed, calm. I found myself standing on the edge of the mat, very aware of how my feet were set, where my hands were and how much they weren’t wrapped around the collar of someone else’s gi. Eight weeks ago, hell, six weeks ago, Randori made me want to be sick because it was a fight, it was impolite, it was a physical confrontation. Now, I look forward to it.

I was up against Steve first, and, to be honest, was a tiny bit intimidated. Steve trains twice a week, has two inches on me and is technically a very gifted Judoka. He’s rapidly gaining an instinctive understanding of how to use his mass as a weapon, he’s fast for a big guy and he’s got some really nice techniques. So I was a little nervous, which of course means that being put across the mat from Steve was the perfect thing to happen. The advantage of Judo is you get to face your fears. The advantage of Judo for me is that my fears tend to be out of focus even when I face them.

We locked up, and he pushed me back and went for a throw and I turned him. We went back and forth, each launching attacks and defences and at one point, as I bulled Steve across the mat he looked at me, laughed and said ‘You’ve got BETTER’. We went back across the mat and just like at the top of the lesson, I turned him, let him move to my side, locked myself in tight and pushed, sweeping his legs over my right leg and down to the mat. Osoto Otoshi, one of the two techniques I’m genuinely very comfortable with. It wasn’t pretty, in fact, it was scrappy as hell but that didn’t matter, I got him on the floor. Steve was a syllable into congratulating me when I dropped on him, locked him into a chest hold and pushed down hard. He tapped out.

I’d won.

This doesn’t normally happen. For weeks I’ve been aware that in Randori I’m either passive or content to try something but know that I’m probably going to lose. Here’s the thing; I am. I’m a red belt (Two weeks in now I figure it’s official), I’ve got some time under my belt, know some throws but I’m regularly fighting yellow, green, brown and black belts. It’s very easy to let them use me as a training dummy you can have a conversation with but that’s not what I want to do. The fight with Greg a couple of weeks ago confirmed that, and talking to Steve about this lesson afterwards, I realised something about both the fight with Greg and the fight with Steve. I was absent, mentally, for a lot of them. I remember Greg’s foot being dragged across my face, I remember being kicked, I remember Steve laughing and telling me I’d got better, I remember locking the chest hold in. I remember absolutely nothing else. My brain had taken a step back, my subconscious had taken a step forward and my body just moved, just acted. It wasn’t aggression, although the actions were certainly aggressive, it was focussed, direct. I was going where I was going, doing what I needed to and anyone who got in my way was not going to be there for long. As Steve put it later, the politeness wasn’t there anymore. In fact what Steve said was that ‘I know how to kill the bunny’ but I like the politeness going away better. Besides, I like bunnies

After fighting Steve, as always, we moved up one opponent, which in my case meant fighting Florien. Florien’s a small, polite, softly spoken French black belt who eight weeks ago threw me in a way I didn’t know how to counter and knackered my shoulder. Florien’s a lovely guy, but, again, fighting him had a certain emotional payload to it. Which is probably a good time to talk about Amy Dumas.

Amy Dumas was best known in the 1990s as Lita, and was, along with Trish Stratus, entirely responsible for the legitimizing of World Wrestling Entertainment’s Women’s Division. At least part of the reason for this was her background in Judo and Kickboxing, and I remember reading an interview with her about her Judo background, and how she’d always end up fighting the same woman at regional competitions. Her opponent was always better than her, she was always under no illusions about beating her so she changed her victory conditions; it was no longer about winning, it was about seeing how long you could last, whether it was longer than last time, what you learnt before you got beaten.

This strikes me as a remarkably sensible attitude to fighting higher grades and it’s one I’ve had a lot of success adopting. Florien was almost certainly going to beat me, so it was no longer about beating him, it was about learning. We bowed, I walked out to the centre of the mat and stopped, setting my feet. When I fight smaller opponents, I make a point of doing this now. If I try and match a smaller fighter’s speed, I’m essentially helping them beat me up, so I stand and I wait as they bounce off me, we lock up and someone gets a throw in. This time, of course, it was Florien, who dropped me with a spectacular throw that involved him throwing me over his shoulder as he knelt on the mat. I hit, hard, but not badly, rolled, smiled and thanked him. I think what I actually said was ‘That was really cool, thank you.’ He smiled, stood up and it immediately became apparent he couldn’t put much weight on his ankle. He tried to walk it off, was clearly unable to do so and finally bowed to me and left the mat. Karen came on, after taking a break and we just started sparring when the drill was finished. Two fights, one victory, one new throw that I’ll be faster off the mark with next time. It was my best Randori session so far.

I’m in an oddly confessional mood this week. Not content with telling you that one of my martial role models is a female professional wrestler, I can now reveal something a little awkward; I love strangleholds. We’ve done a couple before and the lesson finished off with Jamie showing us three more. To be fair, the lesson actually finished with Jamie talking us through the chokes as Sandra applied them to him, meaning most sentences started well and ended in wet, gurgling noises. This was just absurd in the best possible way, watching my instructor calmly walk us through how to choke people as he was being choked and the fact Sandra was clearly enjoying it only made it more amusing. Only in a Judo lesson, and I suspect only in a Judo lesson in Yorkshire, could ways to strangle people be funny but it really was.

There are three basic chokes that we were shown, thumbs in, thumbs out and one sided, none of which are the correct names. The basic principle is the same; you’re fighting from your back, your opponent’s between your legs and trying to pin you. You cross your hands and lock them into your opponent’s jacket as high as you can, then pull them down towards you, cutting off the flow of blood in the arteries and closing their throat on the cross of your wrists. Thumbs in means thumbs in, thumbs out means…well you get the idea.

First off, this is a drill which has a healthy dose of the absurd to it. Lying with your legs open whilst your partner ‘menaces’ you is just a little silly and the seriousness of the matter wasn’t helped by Steve yelling ‘Rah! Godzilla!’ as he descended on me. Nonetheless we worked through the chokes, first me, then him and we both got them down.

The one handed choke though, was the stand out. As Jamie pointed out, it’s quite rare for an opponent to obligingly let you get a double sided choke and this works around that problem by putting both hands on side of your opponent’s gi. The bottom hand is fingers in, the top hand, as close to the top of your opponent’s gi as you can get it, is thumb in. You drag your opponent sideways, kick their leg out and thread the thumb in hand over the top of their head, trapping it between your hands. It’s incredibly effective and has a massive effect for relatively little effort. It’s also massively uncomfortable and feels a lot like your head is about to be popped like a balloon. Interestingly though I appear to have a natural defence to it; my enormous noggin.

There’s a moment in So I Married an Axe Murderer which, the first time I saw it, made me laugh so hard that I couldn’t see. Charlie, played by Mike Myers, has gone to his parents for a meal and at one point we see Charlie’s dad, also played by Mike Myers cheerfully berate his cousin. It’s an unending stream of conscious tirade of pseudo-Scottish creative insults, all centred around the size of his head and includes the deathless line ‘THAT’S AN ENORMOUS NOGGIN! IT’S LIKE AN ORANGE ON A TOOTHPICK!’

My name is Alasdair Stuart, I have an enormous noggin and I am proud of it.

We worked through the chokes last and when the lesson finished, Steve talked about how the politeness has gone. He said that a few weeks ago, when I fought Greg in what Steve calls ‘The Battle of the Ages’, he kept yelling ‘CRUSH HIM!’ every time I got him on the mat and that tonight, for the first time, I did.

Polite violence. It’s a ridiculous dichotomy but when you look at it, that’s exactly what Judo is and what I seem to be starting to get. Every week I take a step forward, every week the man on the other side of the mat takes a step back and every week I get a little more comfortable, a little bit more confident, more willing to try, to compete. It’s not about anger or aggression, it’s about focus and determination and, in my case, having an enormous noggin. I always knew it’d come in useful.

It works like this; in order to practice Judo properly you need to be insured. You are, after all, both being thrown and throwing people to the ground with tremendous force in a variety of different ways. Do it one step wrong you break a limb, do it two steps wrong, you break a neck and nobody wants that. So, in order to practice you need to be insured and in order to be insured you need a licence and in order to get a licence? You need to join the British Judo Association and when you join the British Judo Association? You get the grey book and the black book.

The black book is the heart of your life as a Judoka and the grey book is the brain. The black book is your licence book, detailing every tournament you compete in, your placing, your belt gradings, your path through the art to your eventual black belt. Which is probably as good a time as any to talk about my big plan. You can grade, up to a certain level, every three months. Past that level you can grade every six months.

So let’s talk about my plan for a moment. Doing the rough maths and assuming the best case scenario, that means that if you pass every grading first time you can make black belt in three years. I’m giving myself five years, because the idea of closing out my third decade on the planet with a black belt in Judo really, really appeals to me. More on that, what comes after it, and what I’m planning to do to mark my 35^th birthday in a future Judo Diaries.

The grey book, meanwhile, is the syllabus everybody is trained from and it contains detailed breakdowns of every move you will learn. There are diagrams showing you how to do each move, its name and how to pronounce it. This is the book of wisdom, the thing you frantically check in the run up to a grading. It’s also filled with inspirational quotes from world class Judokas, at the top of most pages. It sounds cheesy I know, but there’s some very useful advice in there, and it’s all delivered in a very pragmatic, matter of fact way. One of the real standouts is a comment about how it’s possible to build an entire array of techniques around a single central technique, creating a ‘Judo tree’ with multiple branches all leading down to the one central technique which in turn ends with your opponent on the ground and you welcoming the adulation and hard-earned respect of your peers. Or something like that.

I haven’t found the trunk of my tree, not yet at any rate, but this week I have found a bunch of interesting new branches, all of which looks a little like the Pussycat Dolls. Sort of. But before that, there was the small matter of me injuring myself again and my return to the less than wonderful world of the mental block. Far too many years ago, I hated and feared maths, or math, if you will. Maths was the boogeyman, the irrational, ridiculous, cruel beast that was standing between me and Academic Nirvana, or at least the University College of Ripon and York St John. Maths stalked me, picked at me and all I could do was back myself further into the wall I’d built between me and being able to understand it. It took four years of extra teaching from pretty much the entire Maths Department at my school to get a C, which is the highest grade I could get in the ability stream I was in. I got it too and now maths is something I simply respect rather than actively fear, thanks partly to the extra tuition and partially to the fact that working retail for seven years gives you decent maths skills and a pathological need to give exact change wherever possible.

Maths is no longer my mental block. Hopping forward rolls are. Let me explain, one of the warm up exercises we do is a forward roll where you crouch on all fours and push off with your legs. You rotate around your hands, head not touching the ground and roll to your feet. Or rather, they do. Me, I jump up and fail. Then, I jump up and fail again. Then I jump up, don’t tuck my head, crack my neck and bite my tongue and fail. In front of everyone else, who is much, much better at this than me.

The last person, halfway across the mat, an instructor on one side of me, a senior black belt on the other, helping me through a move every single other person in the class has done and done easily. Blood in my mouth, hot and sweaty and embarrassment on the horizon but not quite here, not quite yet. Not my finest hour.

But not my worst. I did it. I did it with massive amounts of help and the thought of doing it next week frightens the hell out of me but I’m going to do it anyway. I got a lot of encouragement and, stupid as it sounds, Jamie patting me on the shoulder, explaining what I did wrong and saying ‘Don’t hit your head, for God’s sake’ with a smile on his face meant a lot. I’d tried, I’d screwed up but I had tried and that counts for a lot. Jamie wasn’t alone either. Karen, one of the female black belts, was particularly effusive and later explained to me what I was doing wrong. I wasn’t pistoning up from my legs enough, wasn’t giving myself enough motion so, in essence, I was pile driving myself into the mat. Or to put it another way, I was literally kicking my own ass.

Next week, I’m going to run through it with Steve before hand. Next week I may even wear a gumshield because biting your tongue, ladies and gentlemen? Hurts. Next week I’m going to do this again, and keep doing it until I do it right. Still frightened though.

Gymnastics to one side, the rest of the lesson focussed on different variants of a single technique. Uki Goshi, or the Pussycat Dolls Hip Bump Throw as it will forever more be known to me, is a lovely technique. You step into your opponent, pop your hip up into their chest and roll them off your hip onto the ground. This week we learnt the multiple entry points into that throw, multiple angles of attack that work with your size, not against it.

All of which started with each of us being given a scrap of white belt, told to tuck it into the back of our belts and paired off. The game was simple; each of us had to turn the other and try and grab the scrap of white belt using only the hand holding the other person’s collar. It was a really smart piece of teaching because the movement it taught us was the set up for every single version of the throws we’d learn later that night.

Oh and I won. Sort of. I was paired with Wes, the US Marine instructor which is a little like being a feather paired with a forest fire. Wes is a phenomenally nice guy, an amazingly good Judoka and fighting him is a lot like fighting Judo itself. You will learn, you will get a throw in if you do it right and you will never, not once, be under any doubt as to who is in control.

Except I won. We closed, we locked up, Wes grabbed my piece of white belt. We closed, we locked up, Wes grabbed my piece of white belt and I grabbed his. Our hands actually passed in mid air and I was just registering what I’d done when Jamie, the instructor, came over, congratulated me, and pointed out I’d used the wrong hand. I apologised, Wes grinned and congratulated me anyway. A win’s a win. After all, Captain Kirk reprogrammed the Kobyashi Maru program so it was possible to win and he did Judo and everything. Seriously, where else do you think the falling back with one foot in the Klingon’s chest throw came from?

This drill completed, we then ran through the various different types of the throw. It all comes down to where you trigger the throw from, whether going over your opponent’s shoulder to grab the belt from behind, putting them in what is essentially a non invasive headlock or coming straight at them, it’s devastatingly effective. It’s also adaptable to your size, as I found out when I worked with Stephanie, the new red belt. Steph was very smart, very switched on, got the movements down and was a fifth my size. At competition speed, she’d have put me down every time but going at practice speed we looked a little like a small, precise female Judoka hauling a large training dummy around. So, I helped her a little, throwing myself the rest of the way when she didn’t have the force to complete the technique. I was careful only to do this when she got the movements down but, Stephanie’s a good Judoka, she got the movements pretty much every time.

The lesson rounded out with sparring and I found something very odd had happened to me; I was looking forward to it. Read back through the early Judo Diaries essays and what you’ll see is someone who wants to learn how to fight but isn’t actually that up for the whole fighting thing. It seemed a little…y’know, physical, confrontational. I might get hurt. I might hurt someone else.

This week I was bouncing on the balls of my feet on the sidelines waiting for my chance to go on. We tend to do a two fights on, two fights off rule to make sure everyone gets a fair shake and my first fight was against one of the club green belts. I walked forward, remembered the words of Obi Wan Judo from a few weeks previously, as well as the advice of friends and family and just…stopped. I set my feet and let him break against me, which he did. He picked and circled, looking for grips that I either defended or turned and I think, it’s difficult to remember, that I moved one, maybe two steps. Then he dived behind me and caught me in a bear hug.

I didn’t think, I didn’t act, I just turned to my left and suddenly he was in front of me. He just had time to mutter ‘Oh F-’ before I picked him up using one of the throws from earlier in the session and dumped him on the mat. He complemented me on the throw and, of course, threw me not long after but he had to work hard to do it and the throw I got in on him was great. I acted, didn’t think, acted and my body knew what to do. I need to trust it more, clearly.

My last fight was with Dave the Scottish brown belt, who’d helped out with our gradings a couple of weeks previously. Same approach, less successful result. The first match Dave yanked me towards him with my belt and put in a grip which basically shoved his fist, and my jacket, into my throat. I got out of that, and looked weirdly affronted by it, just in time for him to throw me again. This time it was something weird and esoteric that dragged my jacket across my entire face and finished with Dave asking whether he’d accidentally kicked me in the nuts. ‘Nph, I’g fime’, is what ‘No I’m fine’ sounds like through a gi jacket by the way. I got up, we locked up, he grabbed me by the bottom of my jacket and threw me again. I was surprised again, I was impressed again, I was thrown again. But I remembered and I learnt and I’m trying that if I can get away with it next week.

There’s a third book that the British Judo Association doesn’t send you. It’s the book you write yourself, the journal of your experiences in the art, your fear, your joy, your triumphs, the moments where you get a good throw in and the moments where you’re the last person out on the mat unable to nail the simple technique everyone else can. That book’s your map, not just of where you’re going but where you’ve been. I look at that book and I see white ground in the middle distance, and red ground beneath me (I’m officially a red belt, apparently). White ground behind me, yellow ahead, red below. I like my third book most of all, because that book is mine, and mine alone. I’ll like it more when I can do that forward roll too.

I’m a yellow belt. That means on the most basic level that I know how to do five throws (Osoto Otoshi, Deashi Barai, Uki Goshi, Uchi Mata and Tai Otoshi and note I said know how to do them not how to spell them) and five hold downs (Kesa Gatame, Broken Scarf Hold, Chest Hold…the other one and side hold). I know how to escape from hold downs three different ways (Not even going to try with those) and I spend about twenty minutes a week fighting. Six weeks ago I would have said I spent twenty minutes a weak getting beaten up but that’s got a little bit better. Not much, but a little.

I’m a yellow belt. I’m fitter, I’m stronger, I’m smarter than I was. I don’t get terrified when I fight anymore, just lightly scared. I’ve bled, out on the mat, which is a ridiculous Hemingwayian chest-beating piece of machismo but it’s one I’m oddly proud of. I’ve been hurt in a fight and kept going, not won, but held my own.

I’m a yellow belt. I’m one of them now, no longer a rookie, no longer a tourist. I’m on the path, the same as everyone else, a fellow traveller learning the ways the human body moves, its tolerances, what it can stand, what it can’t abide, where my limits are and how to push them. I’m not perfect but I’m not meant to be, I’m meant to be learning, meant to be improving. I’m standing on yellow ground where I used to be standing on white. I’m on the path. I’m getting there. I’m a yellow belt.

Except I’m actually a red belt.

I was a couple of minutes late to class this week, and when I got there they were just starting warm up. I had my glasses off before I really noticed anything and halfway through warm up, Steve came over to me and I realised that his belt was visible. Now the thing is, for anything to be visible to me is quite an achievement with my glasses off but his belt was visible. It was also red. He explained that apparently the club used the red belt rank as well, which is discretionary, and whilst we had definitely graded, we had graded to red belt. As was pointed out to me later, this was probably why the base of the certificate I got saying I’m now a 6^th Kyu Judo player and the little sticker I got to put in my licence book were both red. By the way that little book and the fact there’s now writing in it is one of the things I’m proudest to own.

Anyway, a belt is a belt, red is red, so I tied a belt on and off we went. Jamie’s doing a lot of work with gymnastic stretches at the moment and it’s paying dividends. Judo, fundamentally, relies on your flexibility as much as your strength and skill so the bendier I am, the better position I’m starting from. If nothing else, the bendier I am the more capable I am of wriggling out of holds and the more able I am to throw myself around the mat. That’s coming too, especially my forward rolls, as was demonstrated by the forward break falls I did last week. It’s not impressive by any standards, but I’m quite proud of being six foot one, 22 stone and able to execute a pretty damn good forward roll.

By the way, that little fact was me sharing. You may all begin colouring in your pictures of me green and marking them Shrek now.

Anyway, the techniques this week were a couple of turns, which are really important. If you’re thrown during a Judo bout, and your opponent isn’t quick enough, you can turtle. You pull your arms and legs in make yourself as small and heavy as possible and bank on them either wearing themselves out trying to move you, the fight being restarted on your feet or them screwing up and giving you the chance to fight from the ground. The two techniques we learnt were great for countermanding this, the first involving grabbing your opponent under the arm pits, tucking your head under their right arm and rolling sideways with them going over the top. Do it right, you basically land with them in a chest hold and, well…I have a lot of chest. Do it wrong, they’re still in trouble but you’re in line with them when you should be at ninety degrees to them. We did this a few times, and some we got wrong and some we got right. That’s how it works, after all, we’re COLOR TO BE DETERMINED LATER belts now.

The second technique was similar but way more fun. From a standing position you grab your opponent under the armpits, haul them up against your knees, bump your legs against them and fall backwards. Do it right, they basically fly where you want them to and this one? This one we nailed. Steve and I are both drawn to ‘No you’re going OVER THERE’ techniques and this is just the ticket. I think I can add it to my arsenal (Arsenal in this case being two throws and three hold downs plus some stuff I still need to do the maths on) after another week or so.

Then the real fun began. Jamie’s very fond of what I call ramping randori, starting with throws and nothing else and building up to full blown bouts. This was what we got plugged into and as the lesson went on I did a full run of five opponents and five matches. It occurs to me now that this is not only the second week I’ve done that but only the second week I’ve done that. My fitness is definitely improving, my technique, well it’s on the way.

I love randori. I used to hate it but now I love it, because it’s fun, because it’s playtime. It’s a chance to try techniques out on people who trust me and who I trust and pick up some valuable tips. This week, it was also a chance to catch up with some old friends. Two matches in, I bowed, walked forward to my opponent and was met with the smiling face of Greg, who I referred to as Glen in week nine. Greg was the guy I’d had the (relatively) epic fight with, where I’d got kicked in the face and he’d had a full size me land on his wrist by accident. He waved at me with a hand in a purple cast and I boggled and asked if he was okay. He grinned, assured me he was and we bounced each other off the mat for two minutes. This one, he got the better of me on, but it doesn’t matter. Every match is a learning experience and, being honest, I was worried about him. I was worried about hurting him, and more so when Steve mentioned in passing that he was training to be a surgeon. I didn’t particularly like the idea of accidentally being complicit in the maiming of a surgeon. Being very honest I was also worried, no, frightened, that he was going to want to kick my ass seriously. He wasn’t, he didn’t, it was a fun fight in a string of fun fights that also included getting bounced around by Karen, one of the club brown belts. Karen’s huge fun to fight, because she’s small and relentless and throws something interesting into the ground work every time. This week it was an armbar and this week? I tapped out, like always. But this week, I was paying attention too. After all, I’m a EVENTUALLY WE’LL FIND OUT WHAT COLOR WE ARE belt.

Having been well and truly bounced around, and done a reasonable amount of it myself, including a hugely fun match with Steve which he won, Jamie called us over to one side of the balcony for some final exercises. These started with duck walking, where you bounce from your knees and swing your arms whilst walking in a straight line, sort of like Chuck Berry but without the decades of rock and roll and slight sense of being trapped by ‘Johnny B Goode’. This hurts, and being honest is the reason why my knee was creaking a full week after the last session but I did it anyway.

Something odd happened during this too. Three quarters of the way across the mat, my knees yelling at me, I was aware that Jamie and a couple of other people were cheering me on. This…bothered me. I’m used to the ‘Let’s cheer the fat kid who’s last home because otherwise he might die’ response in physical activity and I hate it. I don’t go at anyone else’s speed, I go at mine and I’ll damn well get it done if you give me the time to do it. On the other hand, though, this time it was…genuine. Or at least felt genuine, as people who were working as hard as I was and saw I was doing my best decided to cheer me on.

Knees still screaming, we then did this backwards. I fell over. I did it anyway, at least three quarters of the way across the mat. Then, we did bunny hops back across the mat, and then, around the time my legs were telling me that it wasn’t that they didn’t like me it was that seeing other people might be healthy, Jamie unleashed the final punishment for the night. Bunny hops back across the mat, but pushing with our legs as much as we could and using our legs to push us over into a forward roll. It was beautiful to see, using the largest muscles in the body to push the rest of the body neatly through the air in a perfect circle, heads never touching the ground.

Let’s do some maths; that sort of move plus six foot one 22 stone tired nerd who doesn’t want to quit and whose instructor is yelling ‘Come on, Alasdair! Big effort!’ equals…

The feeling of my entire body resting on the top of my head. A crackling noise from my neck. Two points of light and heat and pain on either side of my tongue. Me actually, swear to God, completing the damn roll, and sitting, legs wide, very still for a couple of seconds and wondering if I’d broken my neck.

I hadn’t. I stood, walked over to Steve and we sat out the next exercise because I was feeling a little dazed. Also, I’d bitten my tongue, very hard, with both incisors, and spent the rest of the night swallowing blood. I also spent the rest of the week talking oddly as my tongue briefly became diamond shaped.

It didn’t matter. Heading off the mat when we were done, a couple of people chatted to us. Greg gently mocked us about being red belts, technically a children’s rank, in the changing rooms (The a actual phrase was ‘Congratulations, lads, you are exactly as good at Judo as a nine year old.’) and then turned it on its head in a really interesting way. He showed us his syllabus, which made no mention of red belts for adults, assured us he’d never had to wear one and suggested we speak to the instructors about it. He…made us feel welcome, something which was only accentuated by seeing Ollie, one of the other white belts, who’d also successfully graded. We felt, the four of us in particular, like contemporaries, colleagues, a tiny little bit like a pack. We, I, appear to have been accepted. I’m not a tourist anymore, not a rookie. I’m a WHAT COLOR DO I ACTUALLY HAVE? Belt and it feels great.

We need to talk about film for a minute. In fact, we could take about film for days, film is very much my text, my safe place but that’s for another time. Instead, we need to talk about A Knight’s Tale, what it means to me and what it means to my study of Judo.

A Knight’s Tale is the story of William, a knight’s squire who, when his master dies on the way to a tournament, is urged to take his place by the other apprentices. They’ve not eaten for days, Will was always better with a sword anyway, and he secretly revels in the attention, so they put him in the armor, strap him up and he wins. In fact, he keeps winning and in order to maintain the illusion they find themselves having to recruit a female blacksmith, played by Laura Fraser and Geoffrey Chaucer, played by Paul Bettany. In any other film, Bettany would walk away with it, and, truth be told, he pretty does here, but the entire cast is flat out magnificent and the film unpacks its concepts in fascinating ways. Will’s relationship with the Black Prince is beautifully sketched, the interplay between Mark Addy and Alan Tudyk as the other apprentices is wonderful and there’s a single stylistic choice which is one of the closest approximations of pure joy that I’ve ever seen on the screen. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, because you should, for that scene if nothing else.

I mention A Knight’s Tale because at one point, this being a sports movie (Just one which is a bit clankier), Will is inevitably arrested and the villain of the piece, played by Rufus Sewell, misquotes the Book of Daniel stating that he has ‘been weighed, and measured and found wanting.’ It’s a line which the film returns to, and it’s a line which becomes the heart of the second half of the film. Will’s an apprentice, a nobody and he’s committing a crime just by being there. Whether or not the fact he’s good at it, or his knightly demeanor have nothing whatsoever to do with it. He puts in a ton of hard work and there’s no guaruntee that it’ll do anything other than get him arrested or killed. He puts everything on the line, knowing he might still fail. That has a certain emotional resonance the week of my grading.

I have never passed a physical test. Ever. I was one of the two kids in my class who failed their cycling proficiency test at Primary School, I sat my driving test multiple times and failed each one, I captained my school’s second Rugby team for no reason other than I’d been there longer thnan every other player and the first time I went to boxercise I was told, strongly, to get a drink when I turned a deeply purple colour. I don’t pass physical tests. I’m a sharp brain in a doughy body, someone who has spent their whole life two steps back from the world because I take up too much room. Or to put it another way I have been weighed, I have been measured and I have been found wanting plenty of times so the concept of being examined in how good I was at Judo filled me with something close to terror.

Actually that’s not true, what terrified me was the idea of failing where everyone else succeeded. There are four white belts and as far as I knew all four of us would be grading. Steve’s done Judo as a kid and Karate as an adult, Jim and Ollie both did Brazilian Jujitsu prior to joining the club and I can spell Brazilian Jujitsu and have watched Karate videoes on youtube, whilst eating a cheese sandwich. If anyone was going to fail, it was going to be me and that’s even before you factor in my weight, my lack of good eyesight and a dozen other different factors. As a result, I spent most of the day being haunted by one image; Steve, Olli and Jim getting their yellow belts, me failing by the tiniest of margins. The version of me standing across the mat smiling, turning and walking away. Weighed, measured, found wanting.Again.To make matters even worse, I’d sat out the Friday session the week before, which, it turns out, was essentially a How to Pass Your Grading Session.

Weighed. Measured. You know the rest.

So, on Steve’s suggestion, we turned up early and asked for mat space to practice. Grading is actually a very simple process; you just have to answer two questions, know some Japanese terminology and be able to demonstrate five throws and five holddowns. Simple, right? Especially after ten weeks.

I knew three hold downs. I was okay on two throws out of three, not five. We worked pretty hard as a result, walking through multiple practices of each technique both the motions and completing it. We did it at half speed, because we’re not idiots, but even at half speed this is a tough sport. You get picked up and put on the mat, hard, over and over and by the time the lesson started, we were both very, very warmed up and as ready as we were ever going to be. We even had a plan; obviously we’d be working together so on the hold downs we’d struggle enough to look convincing but not so much that we’d tire the person being assessed out. Easy, simple.

Wrong.

After the warm up, Steve was called over to do his grading and I was put in with the class. To the wet, apologetic sound of our plan collapsing under the weight of logic, I sparred with five different people as we worked on how to do throws right and left handed, going backards, forwards, sideways, stationary and at speed. Backwards throws are particularly fun because if you’re moving backwards your opponent thinks they’re on a winner, they step forward, you sweep their legs away and you both hit the mat. The secret is, make sure they hit it first.

Sparring at the top of the lesson is always a little weird because there’s no aggression but a lot of energy and focus. It’s also really interesting to do as a white belt because you’re essentially getting one to one coaching some of the time too, in between the violence. I remember sparring with a green belt who put me down, I got back up and he said ‘You got a grading tonight?’ I nodded, said I was worried and threw him. He got back up, smiled and said ‘You’ll do fine, your osoto otoshi’s great.’ and threw me again. Polite violence, a good conversation, reassurance. All those things and more in nothing more complex than four motions and a breakfall.

My last bout was with Wes, the US marine who also teaches at the class and by this stage we were drilling to land a throw, move to newaza or ground work and put our opponent in a hold. We locked up and Wes, as usual, didn’t make eye contact. He and a couple of the others never do this and it’s interesting because you don’t need to look at your opponent, you can feel where they are, what they’re doing. He threw me, put me in a hold, I did the same and suddenly, he was looking at me. In fact, he was looking at where I was positioned, whether I was actually holding him down. I was being assessed and after a few seconds he nodded, said ‘good’ and up we got. This went on until the last hold I was going to be graded on, the chest hold. I put Wes down, locked it in and he looked at me and said ‘What are you doing?’

‘The chest hold?’

‘Push down, come on! A guy your size I shouldn’t be able to breathe!’

So I did and then some more and then some more and finally, he nodded and up we got. We locked up again one alst time and he smiled and said ‘You’re not nice to your opponent on the mat, on the mat? You crush them. You buy them a drink in the bar afterwards, that’s when you’re nice.’

Show up. Work hard. Fight. And in my case, be graded. I was up.

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Steve, just got called over and bounced on the balls of my feet until it was time to go. I felt weird, calm, focussed, not worried, just…ready. I wonder if getting ready to compete is going to feel the same. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot more fear and nausea followed by hysterical laughter when I finish my first fight.

This time though, there was no laughter. Just Phil calmly telling me to execute a back breakfall, which I did, followed by a side breakfall. I did a front one and he gently pointed this out and even more gently guided me through the ten seconds of ‘OH GOD I’VE FAILED ALREADY’ hysteria that was clearly written all over my face. It turned out I had to do three front break falls anyway so I did my side one, then two more front. By the way, a front break fall is a forward roll off one shoulder and I’m surprisingly good at them. Backward rolls? Let’s just say my natural grace is in the mail.

Techniques were next and two of the yellow belt throws are amongst my favorites. Osoto Otoshi is lovely, nothing more than stepping to the side of your opponent, putting one foot behind them and shoving them backwards. I nailed that and nailed Deashi Barai, my other favourite following it. That’s as simple; wait for your opponent to move forward onto you, sweep their outer leg and power them into the mat. Again, it went well, something I was massively relieved with given I’d seriously practiced it for the first time an hour previously.

Uki Goshi followed that, or the Pussycat Dolls Hip Bump Throw as I still think of it. On big guys that’s a little difficult for me but Dave, a Scottish brown belt with a spectacularly deadpan sense of humour was very easy to throw. Plus, he sold for me like an absolute pro, executing perfect breakfalls despite being thrown by a scrappy, slightly panicked whitebelt.

So that was the vocab out of the way and the next stage was a few sentences in Fight. We did the throws again, this time transitioning through to a different hold down every time. Hold downs? Are very much my bag, as, when it comes down to it, all they actually are is restraining your opponent and lying very flat on them. Wes’ words echoing in my ears, I followed through, pushed my chest as far as I could down onto Dave’s and again, we were done. Break falls, throws, throws to hold downs and following that, escapes from hold downs all came naturally. The version of me on the other side of the mat suddenly looked further away, a little uncomfortable, a little like he was going to be beaten.

Vocab Test.

Two words, a single, completely blank mind. It was oddly restful in there, all I could hear was my breathing, echoing softly around in a lot of empty space. The other me, on the other side of the mat, began to laugh and saluted me. He turned to go, he’d won, he didn’t need to see the rest.

I scrabbled to keep the panic down, scrabbled to get focussed again. I was so close, so close that I could feel it and the image of me as the last white belt left in the shop was just that; an image. It wasn’t going to happen, I wasn’t going to let it.

I was going to think my way out of this. I paid attention to what was being said to me, how it was said, I put the bits I could remember in line and I…guessed. I had a decent shot, I knew most of it and all it was was language. I can do language. I can’t do physicality, I suck at physicality but language? Language I can damn well do.

I guessed, I got it. Phil looked up at me, smiled and said ‘You’ve passed, well done mate.’

I swear to God the triumphant Top Gun guitar theme started playing in my mind as I walked over to the rest of the class. A Steve shaped pink blur looked over at me and I gave him the thumbs up, he gave me one back. We’d done it. We’d done it and after two hours of physical exercise I was all set to go again. Put me in, set me in front of someone else and whether or not they’re going down they’re damn well going to have to work to put me down. I felt great, I felt strong, I felt ready and that feeling lasted exactly as long as it took me to get two steps into the warm down. Everyone else was moving with grace and speed and control. I was, well…let’s just say I was moving. For a while. Then I stopped.

We lined up and Jamie told the class we’d passed. We were called out one by one to get our licences and clapped on the way back to the line. As we were dismissed, Wes shook our hands, Gareth congratulated us and Phil quietly reminded us of the phrases that, it turned out, we’d both tripped up on. Florien, who six weeks earlier had dropped me very hard on my shoulder, even stopped to congratulate us.

Someone else didn’t. The version of me I always stand across from didn’t congratulate me. He looked at me, for a long time and didn’t say anything. He wasn’t smiling, and he still isn’t. He knows he’s in a fight now.

I’m writing this the Sunday after the grading and it’s taken four days to get my knees working properly again. I’m tired, I’m sore and I’m very aware that I no longer have a safety blanket. I’m not a white belt anymore, my job is no longer to fail better next time. My job now is to get better and to keep getting better, because no one’s going to go easy on me anymore. I’ve got a belt, I’ve got a rank and that means I need to work harder not just for me, but for everyone else. For the next tubby thirtysomething white belt who doesn’t know if this is a good idea or not. Him, especially, I’m looking forward to working with.

I’ve progressed. I’ve learnt a huge amount in the last three months and whilst none of it’s been easy it’s all been fun, even being kicked in the face. The ground beneath me used to be white but now it’s yellow. Three months back, a fat, frightened man with crappy eyesight is wondering whether or not he’s made the right choice. Now, a less frightened, less fat man (Who still has crappy eyesight) is looking ahead to his next grading, for orange belt, in a couple of months. I have been weighed, I have been measured and I have not been found wanting, not even close. Who knows, maybe they’ll make a knight of me yet.

Three impressions. A voice first, ‘DON’T CHASE HIM!’ being yelled at me as my opponent dances in, grabs me, turns me, dances out and I do my best to chase him and my best isn’t good enough. He’s smaller and faster and better at this than me but if I can just keep up, just match his speed…I’m going to be lose.

I stand still. He approaches me. I throw him.

There’s something in my face. I’m kneeling, my opponent beneath me trying to wriggle free and I am not letting him. He pulls his left leg up and over my shoulder and across my face and that’s fine because he’s not going anywhere and, weirdly, neither am I. I’m working hard, I’m working longer than I’ve ever done before but I’m not panicking, not overstretched. He’s on the floor. I’m above him. He’s not going anywhere. Then he draws his foot back and I move forward and his foot moves forward and-

I’m kneeling on the floor, looking at my opponent as he pulls himself upright. Jamie’s yelling something at him and cuffs him on the arm. My lip feels a little big, a little sore and there’s something in my mouth, something which comes away red. I stand up, we lock up, we go again.

Judo, for me, sits on the borderline between polite and brutal. It’s a sport which consists of countless variations on the same basic movements, the physical language that I’ve spoken about before. Twist one way you do one throw, twist another you do a second. You trip and be tripped, pull and push, fall and get back up again and content yourself with the knowledge that good students, good teachers, will help you back up when you fall.

But they will do their best to push you over first.

We had a visitor at Judo this week, a former instructor and heavyweight member of the English squad. He was an instructor when Phil, the older instructor who looks after the lower grades was in his 20s and the first look I got at him was a very serious, very large man making his way down the hall towards the mat. My first thought, because I tend to go there first, was we were going to be graded this week and as a result, I was doomed. I wasn’t ready, I needed more practice, I hadn’t even made any flashcards. I mentioned this to Steve, who hadn’t seen the gentleman at all, and he looked at me thought for a moment and politely asked if I was hallucinating Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid movies again. One time, one time and it just never gets left behind.

Our visitor turned out to be a former member of the British team who was also a former instructor at the Railway Institute Club, an instructor who taught Phil, our instructor, when he was in his twenties. I was still trying to do the maths on exactly how old he was during the first third of the session, which was sparring with people and using control games to learn how to move, feint and avoid. Holding one hand in the back of your belt, you face off with your opponent and try and hit a particular part of their body with the flat of your hand. If you’re small and nimble and fast this is great. If you’re larger, slower and have bad eyesight, this is necessary.

There’s a moment in Redbelt, one of David Mamet’s best films where the female lead comes to see Mike, the main character at his Jujitsu studio. She talks herself out of learning the martial art and is in the process of leaving when Mike, standing at the opposite end of the room says:

‘Can I strike you here?’

She thinks for a moment and says ‘No.’ He tells her to move to where he can strike her and she does, standing in front of him. He asks again ‘Can I strike you there?’ she says yes and he sayd

‘Don’t stand there.’

Judo is all about not standing there, not moving to a spot where your opponent can take you and even better, making sure that they move somewhere you can take them. I hated these drills. They made me feel fat and slow and stupid but they didn’t last long and I got better as they went on. Sort of like the violent version of eating your greens being good for you.

From there, we went onto working on a particular throw and Steve and I got pulled to one side by this veteran. He was our size and then some and together we walked, very slowly, through the throw until we got the movements down, got it tweaked, got it right. Or, at the very least, right enough for starters. There is a huge amount of subtlety and care to Judo, movements which aren’t apparent but if you can tailor them to your size, make the difference between a clear throw and a scrappy one. We spent half an hour being taught by a forty year veteran and that experience, that ability to get deep into conversation with someone who speaks the language fluently, was extraordinary. This was a man who was much further along the road than we were but was still learning, still adapting and still travelling down the road. He was in the process of getting over knee surgery, was cautious, in pain at times but kept going. He was fighting too, not just opponents but, like we all do, himself. For me, that fight is with my lack of confidence, my physical fitness. For him it was getting past a knee operation, learning how to move again. It was tough, it hurt, he kept going. So we did too.

The end of the session, after practicing the technique we had what Steve refers to as a solid half hour of ‘Fight Club’. Randori, or sparring, is practice fighting, at competition speed for some, at a speed you can still breathe at for others. I had a couple of bouts, including one with Karen who, at one point, I threw. In typical Yorkshire Judo fashion she plummeted to the ground cheerfully saying ‘Nice one!’ before picking herself up and putting me down. We chatted as the fight finished, both opting to take a breather and as we did so she said ‘You and your mate are really coming on, you’re getting much smoother now.’ That felt great. Karen’s a brown belt, she’s an excellent Judoka and if she thinks I’m getting better? I’m getting better.

We watched Steve finish a match and take a breather, and after chatting to him for a moment, I went back on. My opponent was a yellow belt, a third my size. He’s good, very good in fact and when we begun he dived for me and we began turning and turning, looking for an opening, looking for a way to take each other off balance. He threw me, we moved to groundfighting and something odd happened.

We kept going. He didn’t shut me down in fifteen seconds, I didn’t tap out. He tried a hold, I broke out of it, I tried a hold, he broke out of it and round we went. We finally got stood back up and started again and again, I tried matching his pace. As an aside, I was aware this session that the Alasdair is Having Too Much Fun siren hadn’t gone off, hadn’t even thought about it in fact. I was tired though and getting more so as we yanked each other around again and this time, the veteran yelled ‘DON’T CHASE HIM!’

I stopped. He moved onto me, and I stopped and I threw him, hard. I followed him down, tried for a choke, he broke free, tried something, I broke free and we rolled over. He tried a scarf hold on me and I just…sat up. I moved him off me, looked for a choke and he rolled out of the way and this time he was on his back. That is not where you want to be, especially if your opponent is two thirds bigger than you and I dived on him, distantly aware that Steve was laughing, yelling ‘CRUSH HIM!’ and he and Karen were commenting that I was doing pretty well.

I was aware my opponent was panicking too. Aware that he was trying to break free and even as he pulled his foot back, even as his heel bounced off my face I wasn’t angry. I was very calm, very focussed. I’d set my feet. I wasn’t chasing him. I wiped my lip, was distantly aware of my opponent being told off by Jamie and we stood up. We fought again, he threw me and again, on the ground he could do absolutely nothing. Time was called on sparring and I stood up and, to my surprise, found two things were happening. I was utterly calm and grinning like a wolf firstly and secondly, I had something left in the tank. I could have sparred again, I wanted to spar again and that was something more than the standard survivor’s joy, something deeper. I’d had fun. I wanted to have fun again. Instead, I asked my opponent if he was okay, as he was holding his wrist and he said he was, we got up, bowed to each other and joined the class’ warm up.

I made a point of talking to him because the last thing I want to do is carry macho bags between sessions. I hadn’t won, make no mistake, but I hadn’t lost and the last thing I wanted was for him to think I was lording it over him. Besdies, all that had happened was I’d held the line and he’d broken against me. I was the one able to bounce up and walk away, apparently grinning through blood stained teeth but that didn’t mean he hadn’t done well. We’d had a great conversation, one that had left us both battered and bruised and able to speak the language better. For that? Being kicked in the face is no price at all.

I am, as we’ve discussed before, six foot one, overweight, both softly and well spoken and a big, big nerd. This combination, along with my fondness for thinking, reading, non physical activies and being the son of a teacher who taught at one of the same schools I attended combined to make me one single word; target. I got bullied, a lot. A lot of it was passive aggressive sniping, a lot of it was intimidation and none of it was violence.

Let me say that again, none of it was violence. I had the same quotient of deeply rubbish fights everyone else did at Primary School, actually, no that’s not true. I was occasionally provoked into a fight at Primary School but it never went far, just pushing, shoving and a small amount of physical contact. I can remember Darth Vadering someone by the throat one day when I got particularly angry but that was it. I got bullied, I took it, I got bullied some more, I took it, lather, rinse and repeat.

I did this for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, because confrontation terrifies me. I will cross the road to avoid telling someone something they don’t want to hear, will soak up damage and hurt and guilt because that’s easier for me than standing up for myself. Some of this comes from the fact that when it comes down to it, I’m a nice guy, some of it’s because I’m Catholic enough for the Catholic guilt to kick in and some of it is pure unadulterated terror.

Of me.

I’m big. I’m not the largest person I know in terms of weight, height or muscle bulk but I’m pretty big and that brings a social contract with it, one that’s signed in utero and that you never get to finish. If you’re big, you are aware, all the time, of the damage you can do. You’re aware of what could happen if you ever cut loose, the damage you could do to someone and to your life. I always remember, when things got bad, being told that the best way to get a bully to back off was to punch them very hard in the face and break their nose. It’d bleed, it’d swell, they’d look ridiculous and they’d be in too much pain and embarassed to try it again. Vision of Batman-style disfigured bullies running through my mind, I never did it, firstly because they’d get better and then I’d get hurt and secondly because of control.

If we’re talking about control, it’s probably time we talked about Michael Garibaldi. Garibaldi is one of my pantheon of heroes, a fictional character from the old TV show Babylon 5. The station’s chief of security, Garibaldi is tall, gregarious, funny, odd and completely and utterly nailed down. He’s a man who’s made horrible mistakes and the only thing that terrifies him more than that is the thought of doing it again, something that becomes overt when the station command staff are required to express their deepest fears as part of a ceremony. The site of Garibaldi, my height, my build, my sense of humour and my hairline saying:

‘I am terrified, all the time, of what would happen if I ever lost control.’

is seared into my mind because I know, exactly, how that feels. When you’re big, you accept that you’re going to be a quarter step back from the world, a gear down because that way you’re not going to cause any damage.

Now, before you all back away slowly from the blog trying not to make eye contact let me clarify. I am not the Incredible Hulk, I’m not convinced that a red cyclone of martial violence waits to erupt from my soul because, well, there’s not really much room for it in there in amongst all the DVDs and Doctor Who tat. What I am convinced of though, is this; I’ve never been in a fight, I’ve never been in a physical confrontation and that simple fact terrifies and enthrals me.

It terrifies me because last session I got shown what it feels like to be manhandled. Jim, nice, polite, courteous Jim, got me within about ten seconds of passing out. He sunk a rear naked choke in during sparring which is essentially where you try and pop your opponent’s head like a spot between your arms and if you keep it on long enough, the blood and air supply to the brain is shut off. Long enough is about ten seconds. I would guess I was in the choke for five. I made gurgling sounds. I still felt it in the soft tissue under my chin three days later. I was in a fight. I lost. It scared me.  It scared me so much, in fact, that it was an act of will to go to the next lesson, knowing I’d be doing that again. I did, I turned up, and, because the universe has a sense of humour, I was partnered with….Jim. For pretty much the entire lesson. Now, just as I’m not the Incredible Hulk, Jim isn’t some giggling pscyhopath who likes hurting people. He’s a guy my size, with more experience than me, who’s more prepared to put the aggression in than I am.

He’s also as unsure, as unconfident at times, as I am which was extraordinary to realise. As we worked through the drills, the pair of us ran through each step, did verbal checklists for each other and made sure the other one was landing the technique right. It was fascinating, and massively reassuring to experience and the lesson was immensely positive and fun. We’re all travelling the same road, as I’ve talked about before, and the funny thing is, whilst we’ve all got the same map, we’re not expected to travel at the same pace. We work, we travel, in courteous solitude, punctuated only by the sound of people hitting the floor and, from me at least, frequent giggles. Because even now, I’m still not quite able to shut up especially when something’s going well. Because make no mistake, Judo is fun. There is elegance and grace to this sport and an intellectual element that both Steve and I are devouring like large, starving men at a banquet but there’s also an inherent challenge to it. It’s a language and a language which changes depending on how loud you speak, how dynamically you act. I’ve been mumbling whilst Jim, and everyone else, has been engaging in a full on conversation. Because I’m still the fat kid at the disco on some level, that’s started to push me further away, tying in to the frustration at not being brilliant at this yet, to create a situation where I don’t try because I’m scared to fail and I’m even more scared to try let alone to win. I mean, why should I win?

Why do I deserve to?

Because I show up. Because I work hard. Because I have to get to the point where I’m gagging and retching before I step off the mat and the only way I’ll get that to stop is if I keep pushing, keep working, keep getting back up and most importantly, start trying to win. Because I do something brave every time I take my glasses off and step onto the mat. Judo is fun but the price you pay for that is accepting it’s tough too. As well as the intellectual and spiritual element of the sport, when it comes down to it, I’m learning how to fight. One of the first things they said to us was this is a rough sport and, believe me, it is. Nine weeks in I have a shoulder that’s tight every morning, a right wrist that’s taken three weeks to get to almost full rotation and knees that creak for twenty four hours after a session. But oddly, that’s a good thing. Because every time I feel one of these nagging little injuries it makes me smile at the hard work that led to me earning them. I’m out of my comfort zone and facing some of the most difficult things I’ve ever faced in my life, all of whom wear Judo suits and none of whom have recognisable faces without my glasses.

I’ve never been kicked. I’ve never been punched. I’ve never stood across from someone knowing with absolute certainty that they were going to their best to hurt me and the only way to avoid that was to subdue them, knock them down, choke them out, break their will, before they did the same thing to me. There have been countless opportunities for me to do that and I’ve talked or joked or begged or ducked my way out of each of them because I used to be terrified of finding out what would happen if I lost control. Not anymore. Now I know there’s a difference between losing control and letting go and that I can do one without doing the other. I trust my opponents completely but up until now, I haven’t trusted myself because I’ve not had the confidence to untense, to stand up, to come to grips.

Not anymore. I’m not Mike Garibaldi. I’m not the Hulk. I’m a man learning how to fit into his own body, and gaining the confidence to use that body in a way which fits it. I’m shutting up, I’m showing up and I’m coming to grips. I owe myself nothing less.

Mention Judo to anyone and, chances are, they’ll think of four moves. The first is the foot in the chest over the shoulder throw that Captain Kirk used on a near weekly basis in Star Trek. It’s called tomoe nage and it’s a throw I’ve not been taught just yet partially Steve and I are both larger than most other people there and partially because you have to be able to fall over, backwards and support your opponent, on one foot as you hurl them over your head and onto the ground. There are variations too, which are variations in the same way that being hit in the chest with a plank is slightly different to being hit in the head. One of them involves spinning your opponent sideways on your foot into the ground, another involves rolling all the way over with them and putting them in a stranglehold and all of them involve more skill and manual dexterity than I have, at least for now.

The second iconic Judo move is a shoulder throw or seoi nage. This is where you grab your opponent’s arm, turn and slide your other arm into their arm pit with your knees bent, lift your knees, bend your back and hurl them over the top of your head. Again, this hurts, again this looks amazing and again, this is a throw we haven’t quite got to yet.

The third iconic Judo is the Judo chop. But that’s just something Austin Powers does. Or, again, it’s something I’m not quite ready for, it’s difficult to tell.

The final iconic Judo move however is uchi mata. Uchi mata is the nuclear warhead of Judo, a throw which is very difficult to pull off, very difficult to land right and if you do, scores the maximum possible amount of points. It’s also, like all these other moves, made of very simple motions. Unlike these other throws, it’s something I know how to do.

Speed is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about following this lesson. It’s something I have to be aware of because the faster you work, the harder you work, especially if you’re my size and that means that the amount of time you can compete begins to drop off pretty steeply. It’s all well and good wanting to be Rocky, some huge slab of man muscle that can take endless punishment but the thing is? It doesn’t work. Because you’re a huge slab of man muscle and man muscle is HEAVY. So it’s all well and good throwing yourself around like a ninja but you’ll be able to do that for just over a minute. Then you’ll be throwing yourself around like a large, stumbling overweight person desperately trying to breathe. And by you I mean me.

So speed is a factor as is size. And as a result I was desperately grateful that after the traditional brutal warm up, we moved onto uchi mata in the last possible way I expected us to; at walking speed.

You see, speed in Judo is a shared commodity and one that you both try and gain possession of. Every time you move you generate energy and if you generate the right amount you can take your opponent down, or throw them or put them where you want to be. Of course every time you move you also give your opponent what amounts to a free start on getting you where they want you to be. Balance and strength, speed and power, move and countermove. Like I said last week, Judo is a language, a Judo match is a conversation and uchi mata it seems is a full stop.

We partnered up and, as Steve had waved off for the night, I was partnered with Karen, one of the club’s brown belts. Karen’s very polite, softly spoken and an excellent teacher and together we followed the instructions which meant we walked slowly back and forth, facing each other and holding our gi jackets on the collar and sleeve three steps one way and three steps the other. You live and die in Judo based on your weight, where it is, what your balance is like and this drill got us to focus on that. Next, we walked three steps each way and on the third step, the person moving backwards stopping as the person moving forwards took an extra step towards them. Then we did it again, adding a fifth step as you turned towards and into your opponent. Then we did all of that, followed by a turn sideways into your opponent and lifting your off leg. Then turn sideways into your opponent and lift your off leg and sweep it back wards. Then do all those steps again, with your partner following through and landing as though thrown. Then, doing it at full speed.

Uchi mata is a visually impressive throw, as you grab your opponent, turn into them and sweep a leg backwards as you simultaneously yank their shoulders down and around. It literally spins your opponent around your leg, driving them through two hundred and seventy degrees and into the ground.

We ran through it a few times and then the instructor called a break and yelled ‘You! Big white belt at the end! Ever done this before?’ I had a moment of absolute nothing, absolute clarity. Was I in trouble? Probably not. So I said ‘No’ and the instructor said ‘Everyone look at this, do what you just did.’

And I did. And it worked, and Karen pinwheeled into the mat. The instructor pointed at us and said ‘First time he’s ever done that, that’s pretty good.’ And just like that I felt something fit into place. It wasn’t a big Damascene moment, no shining light, no ancient warrior spirit bowing in acknowledgement of me or anything like that. Just the realisation that I’m good at this, I’m not a dead weight, that I’m capable and crucially, becoming capable of doing much, much more. I didn’t rest on my laurels, I kept working hard and in fact didn’t have a choice. The conversation hadn’t stopped after all.

We moved onto a strangle, and I have to confess, I love these. I’ve been fascinated and terrified by the thought of learning chokeholds and strangles since I started because I have a superhumanly strong gag reflex, something that I find out three or four times a lesson when I hyper ventilate and start to retch. This has become known to Steve and I as the ‘Alasdair is Having Too Much Fun’ siren and every instinct I have is to work through it. I don’t. It beats me every time so now I work on trying to spread the gaps between the times the siren goes off. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. As a result though, strangles and chokes are something which fascinate me because they show me where the line is, show me things I can’t do, where my weaknesses lie.

The strangle we learnt this week is, like all my favourite Judo movies utterly simple and utterly brutal. Once your opponent is prone, you dive on them, sliding the hand nearest their bum (This is honestly how it was explained to me) under their arm pit to grab the far side of their jacket. Then your other hand digs into their collar at the neck and then your first elbow drops. You effectively crush their windpipe between your arms and then you roll on one shoulder, dragging them over the top of you and either put them in a scarf hold or keep the choke on and get the submission. It’s a really, really nasty elegant move and it was the other major thing we practised this lesson. Again, it was something I got, another piece of vocabulary dropping into place, another word in the language learnt.

As is always the case, most of the last fifteen minutes of the lesson was sparring and, as is always the case, I didn’t last through all of it. The Too Much Fun Siren kicked in about three quarters of the way through and I raised my hand and walked off the mat. It’s one of the things I love about the Railway Institute Club, they positively encourage you to not be a hero. If you hit your limit, and you will, then you raise your hand, take a couple of minutes off the mat and then come back on. When I step off, what I try and do is pay attention to the fights that are still going because then I’m still learning. Admittedly it’s difficult without my glasses and everyone is reduced to a pink blur but I won’t put my glasses back on during a lesson. That’s a crutch, a lifeline, me running back to being mild mannered and nerdy and unfit. If I do that, the me on the other side of the mat wins. So I stand, because you get your breath back faster that way and I watch how other people move and I think about what it’ll be like when I’m fit enough to go a whole lesson.

I could have stayed off the mat for the last ten minutes. I ached, I’d been thrown around, I’d worked hard. I quite wanted to stay off the mat, run out the clock. Then the instructor asked for a volunteer and I stuck my hand up before I was quite aware I was doing so, walked forward and down to the bottom of the mat and bowed to Ollie, one of the other white belts. He bowed to me, the teacher signalled us to start and we locked up.

Ollie is two thirds my size and wiry and strong and as we fought for leverage, I realise now that something stopped happening; I stopped thinking. I reacted, launched attacks, turned him around and got dumped on my ass. I was already moving as Ollie wrapped his legs across my shoulders and tried for an arm bar but was able to resist it. Arm bars are where your opponent uses their entire weight and both arms to hyper extend your arm and force you to tap out. If you don’t, your arm breaks, it’s that simple. Much like Uchi Mata it’s a fight ender, a full stop. Unless you get your other arm around the one that they’re trying to arm bar, which I managed to do.

We got back up, went back at it and Ollie got me again and this time, got the arm bar on and I tapped out to show I’d submitted. This is when you tap your opponent twice to make sure they know you’ve quit and it’s a must if you don’t want to get hurt.

What interested me in both cases was these were rough fights. Neither of us held back, both of us wanted to win badly and yet when we’d finished, Ollie grinned, patted me on the shoulder and we congratulated each other, as did one of the instructors. Judo is a language of violence but it’s also a courteous one.

Judo takes it all out of me so I tend to be one of the last people out. As I was leaving, the instructor who’d called on me earlier said ‘Your uchi mata worries me.’ He grinned as he drew level with me and said ‘I get very uncomfortable seeing big men do that move that well. It’s such a hard move to land but if you can? That’s a match winner.’ He headed past me out to the changing rooms and after a minute, I followed. After another minute, the quiet, satisfied smile even began to fade.

I hurt after every lesson, sometimes badly. Despite the armbar Ollie got on me being half strength, my elbow ached for four days afterwards. It pushes me to the absolute edge physically and intellectually and, for the first time, I got an indication that I’m good at this, that I can learn and most of all improve. Or to put it another way this isn’t just a language I can speak, it’s a language I’m starting to learn. The road is still stretching out in front of me, but I’ve travelled some distance and, for the first time, I can see that.

January 18th 2010

I’ve been ill for the last four weeks, with something which if it wasn’t swine flu certainly knew where swine flu lived. It’s been hugely frustrating at times, because by nature, I’m pretty robust. I get ill maybe twice a year, get very ill once every decade or so and hopefully this is my big illness for the next few years. Regardless, the end result is a hacking cough, having to take naps in the afternoon and not being able to get to Judo. To make matters worse, every successive week meant that the psychological barrier to going back got a little higher and the words written on it got a little bigger. Words like; fat, overweight, unfit, failure, coward. I wasn’t good enough, I would never be good enough and there was no point even trying to be because I was ill. Better to stay at home, watch TV, read, get more sedentary, get slower. The worst elements of me, standing across the mat, telling me there was no point us even sparring because I would lose

I went. I went and each step towards the station where I was going to meet Steve was exactly as hard as the ones before it. So, I did what I’m trying to do at every stage of this process; be honest. I told Steve I was nervous, I told him I still wasn’t quite well and he sympathised, suggested I take it a little easy and, like any good training partner, kept me moving. We got to the gym and got changed and the first major event of the evening took place; I put on my gi to train for the first time.

A gi is the traditional white outfit worn when practicing Judo. It’s a pair of thick white trousers and a huge jacket with a slightly quilted collar that runs all the way down the body. You tie your belt around your waist and, provided you’re not wearing jewellery, shoes, socks or, if you’re a man, a t-shirt underneath it, you’re set. My gi, and I’m deeply satisifed about this, is a little storied. It’s actually a Karate gi for a start, inherited from Steve after he bought a new one and it fits pretty well which is a relief all by itself. The one exception is the trousers which fall down pretty much instantly at the moment, so for now, my ‘gi’ is in fact my gi jacket. That’s fine, that’s what draw strings are for.

What’s interesting is how putting the jacket on changed my mindset. It’s not that I wasn’t frightened anymore, it’s that I felt…equipped. There was no ego boost, no stirring music and moment of ‘YES, I will win local contests in this jacket one day’, just a sense of being…armoured. Ready. Equipped. No longer quite as much of an outsider.

Because make no mistake, I feel like one sometimes. I’m a 34 year old overweight nerd with appalling eyesight, a lingering cough and cardio vascular fitness which is better than it should be for someone my size but remains uniquely unsuited to fighting anyone, at half speed, for more than fifty seconds. The last time I went, I wrestled a marine. Who was also a fireman. This is not even a little inside my comfort zone.

But I went, and I showed up and we got told that we’d be put in with the main group for the first time and at no point did I whimper. For the last two sessions I’d attended, Steve and I had been off to one side, being walked through basic techniques and breakfalls at a gentle pace by Phil, one of the black belts who specialised in training beginners. It was hard work but it was relaxed, focussed on the technique rather than the environment to execute it in.

The rhythm of training with the main group was completely different. Instead of two or three techniques split over ten minute chunks and finishing with a little sparring, all with the same partner, we went through three techniques, a counter to one of them and sparred using every single one. The pace was, for me, relentless, five minutes theory, five minutes practical and to make matters worse? We were going to rotate partners. I’d be fighting people other than Steve. I’d be trusting other people to not hurt me. They’d be trusting me, and remember, 34 year old mole-eyed overweight nerd, to not hurt them. I was concerned and it didn’t matter, because, as it turns out, sometimes, inexperience is a good defence.

The technique the main club were taught first is called seo nage. It’s an iconic Judo throw where you grab your opponent’s arm, turn into them and pivot them over your shoulder and straight down into the mat. If you land it properly, if both their shoulders hit the mat? You win. It’s an amazing technique, visually impressive, requiring great strength and completely outside our abilities.

So instead we got taught koshinage, the hip throw, which is another iconic Judo throw. Here, you step into your opponent, grab their back and roll them over your hip into the mat. Like a lot of techniques it’s simple and elegant and done right? It’s brutally effective. It’s also, on my current skill level, very difficult to practice. Steve and I are the tallest, bulkiest people there by a good margin and that, combined with our inexperience, meant that it wouldn’t be entirely safe for us to try this on the rest of the group yet or, more importantly, for them to try and practice on us. So, we walked through the four basic movements a few times, and Steve got it pretty quickly and I…didn’t. It’s interesting because I’ve been aware, going into this, that there was an inevitable moment where one of us began to pull away from the other in terms of ability and this, combined with the fact that Steve is going to two lessons a week rather than one, gave me a choice between getting frustrated at him for going twice a week when I can’t, frustrated at me for not being Batman straight away or accepting it was going to take a while, that I had less than three hours instruction under my belt and that in time, things would change and I’d get better. All I had to do was keep moving, keep showing up, keep breathing.

We were put back into the group to be shown a sacrifice throw next and again, this, I just didn’t get. Like all the moves I’ve been shown so far, it’s surprisingly simple, four motions strung together which take you from standing in front of your opponent to shoving them forward, then back, then dropping them onto the mat first, you landing a split second later and covering them for a pin or submission attempt. Unless you’re me, in which case the four motions look a little something like this:

1.Grab your opponent’s arm and yank forwards.

2.Grab their belt at the back with the other hand.

3.

4.Victory!

When the instructor added in a variation where you actually run in front of your opponent and use that to aid the throw, I was completely at sea. Tall, overweight, older than most, fatter than pretty much everyone, no one’s head recognisable as anything other than a pink balloon, hot, sweaty, at the top edge of my endurance and with no idea how to do the thing everyone else could do. On the other side of the mat, the version of me that didn’t want to move in the first place smiled, I could tell even through the blur of my vision.

So I called Phil and asked whether we could go through it and we did and it sort of clicked. Judo has a grammar, it’s a language of push and pull, step and grab and turn and I’m starting to see the commonality of set up and execution even across the six or so moves I’ve been taught. By the end of the practice, I was starting to understand how the move fit together physically, if not how to execute it physically. The blocks are in front of me, I just have to arrange them A, B, C and D, if you like. The process has started, all I have to do is keep my eyes open, keep moving, keep breathing and most of all, know my limits. That’s what the other version of me uses, my limits, my fear, my lack of confidence. He uses them to get me to stay inside my comfort zone, colour in between the lines, don’t take risks. But what struck me, a few minutes into Monday’s session, was this; if I go up to my limits, if I push myself? Then stop? Take a breather. It’s not a failure, and it’s something which was directly addressed by Phil in the session. To be honest, I suspect I was pushing myself a little too hard, as on a couple of occasions, both he and Steve suggested I sit out for a minute and, as Phil pointed out ‘No one’ll thank you if you pass out in the middle of the mat.’ So, my big realisation this session was this; that I’m unfit, that I’m going to hit my limits before very nearly everyone else and that those limits? Will expand, literally as my lungs finally clear four weeks of flu gunk. Because all I have to do is, of course, keep breathing.

The thing is, though, that breathing is a little difficult when you’re in a fight. The sheer impact of your body slamming against your opponent’s, even before you throw or are thrown is hard, you’re always in motion, always looking to counter their attacks and launch your own. It’s a dance that isn’t choreographed and if you get a step wrong, then you lose the fight. That’s even before you get to the barely contained terror of watching someone swim into focus as they approach, arms up, eyes on you, intent on slamming you into the ground as hard and fast as possible. It’s a stress reaction as well, something which one of my opponents and the instructor told me afterwards, it’s terror as you tense up in fright at the thought of being thrown, being pinned, being hurt. Being beaten.

It passes.

Those two words, in the week since the session have come to mean a lot to me. It passes. You’ll get better. There’s no judgment or expectation in there and that’s like looking at a clear sky for the first time. My whole life, physical activity has either been about getting a slot because I’m big enough or that size hanging like a millstone around my neck. I’m not confident in my body, let alone in a physical environment and it would be easy for the base level of competence at the club to frighten me off. It would be easy for the other me to win but I won’t let that happen. I can’t let that happen because I’m coming up on 35 and I want to be fit by the time I’m 40.

What’s fascinating is the other side of that coin, where I’m molly coddled. One of the things that got me through the session was the fact that every time we changed sparring partners, the instructor reminded people that we were white belts and not to try anything unusual that we might not know on them. The effect that had was startling; three of my opponents introduced themselves, asked what I knew and let me work through it. One of them tried a shoulder throw on me, got me exactly three inches off the ground and then gave up and I felt a certain joy in that. I was big. That would help. It was that thought I held onto, even as I staggered and retched off the mat.

It was only after I’d done that that I realised I hadn’t thanked my opponent. It was something I made a point of doing, because every time you spar, you’re being helped out, shown what to do, what not to do, what attacks to take and this guy, I hadn’t managed that with. To make matters worse, I now couldn’t distinguish him from any of the dozen or so pink balloon-headed gi-wearing people in the room. To make matters even worse, I apologised for not thanking him after the fight to the same guy. Who wasn’t the one I was looking for. Twice.

The final sparring session we did, known as randori, put me against someone I’ve not fought before who, after being told specifically to not try anything new on us, proceeded to throw Steve using tomoe nage, the classic Captain Kirk throw and me using seo nage. He threw me fast too and I hit the mat hard. Then got up, finished the bout, bowed to him and sat out for a minute. Be respectful, know your limits, breathe.

I finished the session sparring with one of the instructors and I was one of the last out. I found the guy I’d fought and not thanked and we got talking. He reassured me the breathing thing would come, told me how they’d taught kids to get over it at his old club and treated me like, for want of a better word, a fellow traveller. The instructor who’d taken the lesson was the last one out and he spent some time talking to me too, about how the sheer physical impact of body on body is hard and again, how the breathing will come. The last thing he said was asking if I’d be there on Friday and I told him no, but Monday for sure. He grinned, said he’d see me then and headed off.

I’m 34, I’m overweight, I have appalling eyesight and I’m unfit. But sitting there felt right, it felt like I’d put an obstacle at my back and the way was a little clearer. In the short term future are extra fitness programs like yoga on the wiifit and free running. In the mid term future is grading for my next belt, competing in a local tournament and beating the other version of me, the version that wants me to stay as I am. In the long term future? I have no idea. But as long as I keep breathing, I’ll get there.

6th December

The first lesson I learnt this week, I learnt about an hour before the lesson itself;

Lesson One: I have a negative body image. A fairly huge one.

There’s a cheap joke I’m not making here about how that seems only fair because I have a fairly huge body.

See that space? Up there? That’s where the joke I’m not making would sit.

This realization came to me six and three quarter days after being told at the end of the last session that we wouldn’t be able to wear t-shirts under our gi jackets from this week. The gi by the way is the thick, cotton suit you wear when you train or compete in Judo. It’s deliberately outsized because a lot of the sport is about getting a grip on the jacket in particular and using that to put your opponent where you want them. It’s an iconic garment, bulky and designed to protect you and baggy enough to give you freedom of movement and the jacket comes undone constantly because that’s where you and your opponent are holding onto each other.

Opened jacket and no t-shirt meant exposed manflesh. My exposed manflesh. My white, chubby exposed manflesh. I was not happy about this, in the slightest, to the tune of getting panicky to the point of a lump in my throat on my way down there. I didn’t want people who actually have muscles on their body to see my Baron Harkonnen from Dune-like torso and recoil in horror or laugh, or both.  After all, I’m a nerd! Look at my shiny brain! Pay no attention to the meatsuit!

So that was lesson one and I decided to attempt to deal with this by telling Steve, my training partner. Steve sympathised, told me he had a similar problem and, whilst he had a gi left over from the period where he took Karate, was quite happy to stand in front of me whilst I grabbed one of the club jackets and slung it over my white, pallid torso. I thanked him for this, told him it wouldn’t be necessary and only later did it occur to me that this was the first piece of Judo I learnt that night; sometimes you get someone to go where you want them to go, by agreeing with them. Reverse psychology for fun and profit, or in this case, fitness. Or, to be more accurate, lack of fitness, which led to lesson two.

The first section of each session is a warm up, which always starts out the same way. We jog around the mat and do exercises that the teachers call out to us. These start out with things like touching your right hand to the mat, then your left, then both, then your right ear.

Seriously.

Then running side on, then backwards, then forwards, all of which is designed to teach us how important it is to:

A)Have rock-solid cardio vascular fitness.

B)Be able to move quickly whilst keeping your feet as close to the ground as possible. The bigger the gap, the easier it is to trip you, pull you, push you, put you on your arse or your back.

C)Make me see a white tunnel of light with my ancestors beckoning me towards them.

This became particularly apparent, weirdly, during what should have been a relatively easy exercise. After managing three forward rolls in a row instead of two like last week, we were told to commando crawl down the mat towards the red section, then do five sit ups and five press ups. This I can do, crawling I can do, press ups I can do, sit ups? I can impersonate. But, after everything else this just blindsided me, the crawl became me dragging myself down the mat and by the time I got through the press ups I was about done.  But, of course, I wanted to keep going, no pain no gain, that which does not kill you makes you stronger and all that other masochistic nonsense.  Then they called out the next exercise which filled me with terror, or would if I still had any part of my body that wasn’t filled with the desperate need for oxygen.

There’d been a seminar the previous weekend taken by Craig Fallon, an international-level Judoka which meant that after the usual stuff, we were told to pair up, one person on all fours, the other standing on their back as they walked across the mat and back again.

I’m six foot one. Steve is six foot three. Neither of us are small. Even through my ridiculously bad vision I was able to see Steve walk over, kneel by the side of the mat and say ‘You know what? I think we should sit this one out.’

We did. And the one that followed it where one person had to crawl on all fours across the mat whilst the other did a handstand on their back. Later, Steve explained to me that this was something he’d learnt at Karate; there is never any shame in knowing when you’re going past the red line into full on exhaustion and sitting out on an exercise you know you can’t do. Hence;

Lesson Two: Get a training buddy. TRUST your training buddy.

After warm up we were taken off to one side by Phil, one of the instructors who works with beginners. He very, very sensibly took us through the hold down we’d learnt the previous week as well as breakfalls and then moved us onto two new throws. One of these, tai otoshi or ‘body drop’ is a fascinating, and elegant move where you grab your opponent, turn in place and use their momentum to carry them over your outstretched leg to land neatly on the mat, or near the mat. We are, after all, beginners.

Phil walked us through this movement by movement, repeating each one until it was second nature before folding the next one in and finally, executing the move. It’s not perfect, not close, after all, I’ve had ten minutes to practice the thing, but…I really, really like it. It’s the combination of grace and strength, physics and motion that really appeals to me, and the fact I was good at it, first time, is really pleasing to me.

Lesson three though, comes from how I was taught it, motion by motion, repetition building on repetition until it’s second nature and you, or your opponent, are sailing through the air before landing on your side on the mat.

Lesson Three: Every move is made of smaller moves. Learn them first, chain them together,.

By the end of the session I was tired, I was sore (I’d pulled a muscle in the bottom right hand quadrant of my chest which, unfortunately, I described after the lesson as ‘spraining my tubby’, a term which has stuck) but I was warmed up, I’d had fun and I was ready to wind down and go home.

Wrong choice.

The last ten minutes of each sessions is randori or free-sparring. This is where the instructors swap people around and use different restrictions (Throws only, ground fighting only, that kind of thing) to allow people of various abilities to train together and try out the techniques they’ve learnt. I did not want to do this. Steve did, I followed. See lesson two.

I was asked whether I wanted to spar with Wes, an American who worked at a military base outside one of the nearby towns. Maybe I was tired, maybe I was a little ashamed because I hadn’t wanted to compete and maybe it was the fact everyone is a pink blur to me without my glasses, but I volunteered. We bowed. A large blue blur came towards me, we locked up and began turning, both trying attacks, trying to push the other into a spot where a throw could be landed. I think I managed about eight seconds before Wes dropped me on my arse. Then helped me up, and asked Phil what I’d learnt. We bowed, locked up again, and I tried tai otoshi on him. I threw my not inconsiderable bulk into it, threw every ounce of mass and speed I knew how to into turning in and to the side and pulling him over my thigh.

He moved about half the distance he should, there was a split second pause and then he went the rest of the way himself. He landed perfectly, we bowed, he said well done, I walked off the mat and was almost sick I’d been working so hard. Then, Phil chose to tell me Wes had competed for the US in Judo.

I had just spent two minutes sparring with a US marine fireman who competed internationally in Judo. He hadn’t killed me. He hadn’t injured me. He’d had dozens and dozens of ways out of every single thing I’d thrown at him in what, to him, must have looked like slow motion. He’d let me throw him.    He’d helped me.

Lesson Four: Be polite, be courteous, be helpful, learn from everyone and everything.

I’m writing this two days out from the session and whilst my tubby sprain has largely healed, my right knee is complaining very loudly and I don’t care. Because I learnt four lessons on Monday and I’m looking forward to what I learn next week.