Alasdair Stuart's Blog

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 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.

It’s probably time we talked about Batman. I grew up in the 1980s and as a result I have a deep intimate knowledge of the old Adam West Batman TV show as it, along with The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, was a mainstay of kids’ TV. I couldn’t stand the Adam West version for a long time, thought it was dull, had aged badly, wasn’t funny. Now I think it’s hilarious and not only that but I credit it for being my first introduction to the character and to the work ethic that sits behind the character.

You see what really fascinates me about Batman is the fact he’s a brain and a body working in perfect harmony. A deductive genius with medical and scientific training, a man who is at home swinging from a rope dressed as a giant bat as he is punching a mugger in the throat as he is swapping thoughts on F.Scott Fitzgerald at a blue blood fundraiser. Thousands of words have been written about the inherent duality of Batman, the fact he’s two personalities trapped in the same body but, because I’m arrogant, I disagree with that theory. I think Batman is truly a character in absolute unity with himself, someone who is as comfortable intellectualising the physical as he is taking the physical approach to the intellectual.

I mention this because one of my earliest memories of Batman comics is a story about Batgirl (Work with me it was the 1960s) and her final exam before being allowed out on the street. As I remember it, the story opened with the pair of them facing off on either side of a roof and Batman saying ‘A fight is like a conversation’ and the fight between them being the framing device for another story. That line always stuck with me and it’s one which returned to me this week at Judo.

Although, with all due respect to the last heir of the Wayne fortune, I think he’s wrong too.

You see, I don’t see Judo as a conversation, I see it as a language. It’s a physical language, certainly one where you communicate by controlling your opponent’s movement, their space, their limbs and they attempt to do the same. It has grammar and structure in its’ structure,its’ uniform and it has punctuation in the way that a fight transitions from standing up to the ground and back again. It’s a means of communicating and it’s a means which, up until this week, seemed designed for people a little bit smaller than I am. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got huge amounts from my first month at Judo but I was very aware going in of these three things;

-I’m tall and bulky.

-I’m overweight.

-I’m not very bendy.

A lot of Judo throws are genuinely graceful especially the advanced stuff. You twist your body through space to either escape an attack or drive one home and you do so at speed and at angles that my knees look at and, well, start laughing a little hysterically. I’m tall and bulky, I’m overweight, I’m not very bendy. It’s all well and good showing me this stuff where I bend through thirty degrees and throw my opponent onto the mat over my shoulder but…I’m tall. I’m bulky. I’m overweight. I don’t do bendy. Straight lines? I do. Short explosive power? I do.

What sealed the idea of Judo as a language in my mind was what I learn this week; it has dialects, including one especially for me. You see there are really a couple of major ways a Judo bout will go. Lightweight players will pull each other around the mat, going throw for throw, trading big, exhausting techniques until one of them gets lucky and pins or submits the other. Heavyweight players on the other hand, well, we have a big asset and a big problem; we’re big. Whether it’s flab or muscle or both the simple truth of it is this; the human body is difficult to push around for extended periods of time at speed and when you throw in another human body of the same type? And clash them together over and again? And then when you do gain control you have to pick up your opponent or throw them off balance, land them on the ground and either pin them or force them to submit? You can see how it gets to be hard work. That’s even before you factor in the way that Judo is 5-10 seconds of massive effort with 10-20 seconds of less effort followed by 5-10 of massive again. Like an instructor said to me a little while ago, the sheer effort involved in breaking an opponent’s guard and slamming your body into their’s is exhausting and when you’re already working hard because you and your opponent are huge it translates to a lower work rate and shorter fights. If you land the primary attack in a heavyweight fight and you land it fast and hard? Chances are you’re going to win. The trick is working out what that attack is. This lesson, we were shown it, at least for me.

You’re not allowed to use a leg sweep as a primary attack in Judo so we were shown how to use leg sweeps as primary attacks and get away with it. Sort of How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Tackle because that’s exactly what the techniques I was shown this week are; tackles. The first two were basically the same technique; run do not walk run at your opponent, duck to one side, him them with your shoulder and sweep one leg inside your opponent’s leg and pull backwards. If you want to steady yourself, raise an arm and drive it into their chest diagonally. They’ll fall down either way, especially if you’re big. Especially if you’re me. We spent a lot of time on these techniques and, well, they sort of amazed me. They’re rugby tackles. I can do rugby tackles. I’m good at rugby tackles and when I tackle someone they stay tackled. These are techniques that are built for people who are built like me and I’m good at them and I really, really enjoyed learning them.

Of course the throw we learnt after them, which involves grabbing your opponent’s back, sweeping one leg and hopping them backwards before lifting them in a circle and slamming them back first into the mat completely lost me. It’s odd because there’s some parts of this sport where I can almost feel the red line at the edge of my understanding in front of me. On the other side of it are these amazing, balletic throws but right now I can’t cross that line. That’s a part of the language I don’t speak, or rather, I don’t speak right now.

They also led to a moment which is one of those shining little things you don’t expect until they break over you. A lot of lessons now are ‘Here’s the technique, try it with a couple of sparring partners, here’s the next one’ and I ended up partnered with a twentysomething brown belt for one of these techniques. This guy is good, in great physical shape, fantastically gifted and as is always the case when I fight him, he won. But the whole time he was giving me tips, things like break the lock on your opponent’s elbows to get them close enough to you, to move faster, close the distance faster, launch the first attack. The end of the fight, he patted me on the shoulder, grinned and said ‘You want to work on these techniques. A guy your size will flatten people with them.’ He’s far, far better at this than me, far fitter and he took the time to complement me on how I’d done and give me some pointers.

I had another like that later on when Steve and I were taken to one side by Paul. Paul’s one of the instructors, and he’s built the same way as us. He’s also refreshingly up front about the limitations you face as a big guy in Judo and told us that a lot of the time it comes down to who gets the first attack in or ‘Fuck them up first’ as he likes to call it. I ended up sparring with Paul and noticed something fascinating. He doesn’t make eye contact, at any point, with his opponent. He does it all by feel, by touch, sensing where his opponent is without having to look at them and that speaks to both the idea of Judo as a physical language and the idea that you can take different approaches and reach the same destination.

Paul also makes this look easy and kept up a running commentary throughout the fight. There’s a principle in Judo called ‘fighting distance’ that everything happens within two feet of your opponent and a lot of the defence moves I’ve been learning involve holding your opponent at the edge of that space. If you can close through that gap, get yourself next to the other player, then you have the chance to throw them and to do that you have to move fast, explosively, push through their guard and basically slam yourself against them.

I did this, for the first time, with Paul. I think it was a tai toshi and I was so surprised I’d got him I almost didn’t finish the technique. Hurtling towards the ground, Paul very calmly said ‘No worries, I have no problem being thrown if you’re doing it right’ and then hit the ground. I’d done it right. Just once, but I’d done it right. I’d spoken the language.

That idea, that Judo is a language fascinates me. It’s a language of throws and sweeps, pushes and tugs, arcs and slams and the mathematical grace of letting momentum do your work for you. It’s a language of explosive physical activity and pushing past your limits and it’s a language whose sentences are frequently savagely violent. But it’s a language, it’s a means of communication, it’s something I can do not only with my body but with my mind. Six weeks ago, I had no idea how to even introduce myself in it but now? Now I can at least order a coffee and I’m learning more every week. A fight is a conversation, Judo is a language and I’m learning to speak it.

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.