Judo

When i was a kid, i wanted to sign up at a local Karate club for years. The problem was that the club was ridiculously expensive. I recall going by the club & asking about how much it would cost to join. I was told 600 bucks a year plus other costs. That was a huge amount of money back then. Obviously i didn't even take this to my parents to ask them.

I used to go to the library & get out books on martial arts. The Whitby Public library had a surprising amount of books on martial arts. The one i got the most was one on Judo. It had a picture of a really angry looking white guy on the front with the title "Judo: Japan's Secret Weapon" which even then seemed utterly strange. Inside, the introduction of the book told you that if you studied this book, you'd be able to defend yourself against opponents two or three times your size (i weight about 90 lbs at the time, i'm 180 lbs now so that means i would have been able to defeat myself easily). The first chapters dealt with breakfalls, the standard grip, and things got more complicated from there.

One day i noticed that the program for the Y had shown up. I looked through it to see if they were offering anything interesting & saw that Judo was being offered! And it was only $40! For 3 months!! I knew that my parents would say yes, so i ran & asked my folks & was given the green light.

I showed up the first night not really knowing what to expect. The instructor was a big guy named Gary who actually looked like Chuck Norris except he had cauliflower ears (if you stay in Judo, you'll get these). Gary was what i would today refer to as a total hardass. He beat the crap out of us. He took no small joy in it - he took large joy in it. It's not that he wasn't a good guy, it's more that he was of the "if you can take it here, you can take it on the street" mentality. The first night he told us to drop & do 50 pushups. I couldn't even do 5, let alone 50. I will write a lot more about pushups another time.

We then began working on breakfalls. Over the next few weeks, i would come to understand that breakfalls are aptly named because first you fall, and then it feels like you broke something (ribs, arms, pride, wind, etc). I remember that we started out doing them as one sided somersaults, and i thought "that's not so bad". Then we did them as rolls from a standing position, and i thought "that's not so bad". Then we did them from on top of a partner from a standing position, going over the other guy's back and i thought "Holy crap, that hurts". It took a while to get used to actually executing the breakfall properly, but once i learned it, it no longer hurt so much (probably because i'd severed some nerves in my spinal cord). I will say this, though: out of all the things i learned in Judo, breakfalling was one of the most useful things. Just ask me someday about the time i wiped out going full speed on a longboard a few years back. Breakfalling & rolling probably saved me a trip to the hospital.

I'll talk about Judo more next time.