Worse than tests.

Tests are a chance to showcase techniques. What goes on at tests, though, is often more about nerves than it is techniques. Perhaps, if we were being picky, it would be more accurate to say it's about techniques in the midst of nerves. Either way, nerves have a lot to do with it. The thing about nerves is that the bruises and scars they leave last much longer than those of punches and kicks.

At tests, uke and nage both get both kinds of bruises and scars.

The upcoming test is now the most-recently-passed test. I took--this is an estimate, of course--about two-hundred falls. Add another fifty or hundred to that for the class and free practice before the test. And, I'm not saying that all didn't hurt; quite the opposite, it hurts right now down the whole length of my legs, arms, and back. I think there's a bump forming on the back of my head. Something's wrong with two or three of my fingers, and there's probably more to come as my body continues its conversations with me. Much more painful were the few genuine goofs committed.

The goofs hurt both those who pulled them and me, watching them. They took the forms of lapses in etiquette, mistakes in technique, and a simple social faux pas. You try to teach them better; they try to learn. You both cringe when what was more than adequate preparation turns out to have been just not enough. This post has turned out morose, when my overriding feeling of the day is actually satisfaction: about a dozen friends went through a trial today, and they handled themselves, on balance, with grace, poise, and skill. Be it a sin or not, I am proud of them. That's no small joy... There's just no ibuprofen for regret.

Even the taste buds.

Nodotsukiage. Put hyphens or spaces pretty much anywhere you want in that word/phrase, it still means a strike to the throat, moving upward. In other words, nodotsukiage is a full speed strike, the whole body behind it, right into the neck, with an upward push, knocking the opponent backward and into the air. Of course, after that, the opponent still has to hit the mat. Also: that strike to the throat-part-of-the-neck (close to literal translation) often involves striking the sternum, nose, or anywhere in between. It often involves striking the opponent full in the mouth. Of course, this is a strike in the "ai" sense, as opposed to the "go" sense. That means more bruising than a leaking-sort-of-bleeding. Trust me, as I've suffered plenty of both nodotsukiage and plain-old punches in the mouth: you want neither, and you want even less to have to think about which is worse.

Just now, though, I have a firm opinion: nodotsukiage is worse.

When your ukemi isn't fast and/or limber enough, and you catch a nodotsukiage the wrong way, your whole face gets kind of smooshed into your mouth at the same instant in which your teeth get clacked together. It hurts the teeth, the lips that run into them, and the cheeks you (read: I) inevitably bite during this process. The result is basically a canker sore from hell. The Orajel I'm using calls it, simply, a "mouth bite". Orajel's marketers either are masters of understatement or have never even seen nodotsukiage, much less felt it.

The part that makes all of this even worse than a plain-old punch in the mouth: the particular privacy of the problem. You get punched in the mouth, everybody knows it. You've got a fat lip, and that says: "yeah, I've been punched good and hard right in the mouth, and I'm still here; what else ya got?" With a tooth-hole on the inside of your cheek, you suffer in silence. If you do mention it to anyone, they ask why you don't just use Orajel. You explain that you do, and the person you're talking to never really understands that Orajel just doesn't cut it.

I'll give Orajel this much: it cuts down on that salt-and-blood taste you suffer the duration of a mouth sore's healing process. Especially now, because, apparently, Orajel now tastes like peppermint. The last time I used Orajel, I think I had braces. I hadn't even discovered aikido yet. I don't remember it tasting like peppermint back then. So, I've learned that, at least, from the stinging and burning pain that's been haunting every bite of food I've had since last week when my ukemi just wasn't good enough for that one nodotsukiage.

I took pictures; they were just too gross to post.

Sometimes, you get hit with a stick. (Installment #1)

It's barely there, anymore, but on the middle knuckle of my pointer finger is a still-pink and puffy, half-scabbed spot from where my finger had lost an argument with a shinai. That's right: not even the noble heft of a bokken to blame, this time. Just a rattling, bending shinai. Anyway, it was nearly healed in only a couple of days, only to get infected, swell up to the point that I couldn't really bend my finger, then take another week or so to shrink down to the point that the scab catches on my pocket every time I take my wallet or phone from my pants. The picture doesn't show much, but there's not much left of it, either--just enough to annoy me, which hardly singles it out for attention.



I wasn't even going to mention the finger. Then I went for some ibuprofen before class today, and the bottle gave me pause. There was blood on my ibuprofen bottle. Nobody else has been in my house, much less messing with my ibuprofen. So it must be my blood, I reasoned. It's only a little blood, so I hadn't lost enough bodily fluids to go light-headed and fail to realize an open wound. Rather, as I held up the bottle to inspect it further, I saw my finger instead of the bottle and realized the problem was the bloody finger from a week ago. Now, bleeding on my medicine is only a small problem. Not realizing I had done so, is a slightly larger one, because of its implications regarding my overall mental health, especially given the number of times I've picked up that bottle in the last week. I'm not going to dwell on this, or anything, because I'm sure there'll be more, worse, and better to worry about the next time I get hit with a stick.

When I'm not there.

A few stats on last week's training:

--Classes attended: 11
--With practice after class: more than 22 hours of training
--It wasn't aspirin, after all: more than 36 ibuprofen tablets taken
--Each ibuprofen: 200mg
--Dogi worn: 4
--Loads of dojo-specific laundry: 3
--Miles driven to and from the dojo: 96 (estimated)

The bright spot is that last one. In college, my commute to the dojo was ninety miles each way. So, relative to my younger days, at least I'm saving money. I'm probably spending all the money saved on gas on ibuprofen; back then, I needed only a distraction (homework; girls; Law&Order reruns) and a beer to heal. Aging, apparently, involves pecuniary as well as existential costs. I'm at least a little thankful each day, though, that I now spend more time inside the dojo than driving to and from it. Even when the traffic getting there is holiday-season-dumb.

The pain today is having to make that qualification: (estimated). Today, my girlfriend came back into town after a week away, and, by Murphy's Law, her flight got in during class time. There were two classes today, and the girlfriend is a far better one than I deserve, so she agreed to wait in the dojo during the second class, because it's halfway between home and the airport, and the timing just barely worked out.

Now, of course I was gratified when Sensei seemed actually glad to see make the second class, but as I recall the smile he greeted me with, I reflexively think about the class he'd finished teaching only minutes earlier, which I had missed.

No, I don't remember who did it, or where, but there was a poll taken of centenarians at the turn of the milennium, which asked, among other things, about their biggest regrets. Their consensus: missed opportunities. I'm not likening missing one hour of aikido to a marriage proposal, participation in a war, or international travel. I'm just shedding a little light on the dark corners of what some might call an aikido addiciton. Aikido is a living art. Every practice, practitioner, and execution of a technique is a unique intersection of effort and time. O-Sensei wrote of this repeatedly, in terms more eloquent than mine. I'll recommend his writings rather than elucidate further. At any rate, each moment of training I miss is one I can't ever get back. In this way, the love for aikido is just like that for a girlfirend, or a good drive, or anything else.

Admittedly, sometimes, with the bruises and the fat lips and the limping, the love of aikido does look very different from those other ones.

On the nose.

More accurately: in the nose. Tonight's is not a story about a punch, or elbow, or foot to my nose. No. Tonight, the weather finally turned wintry. The dojo version of air-conditioning and heating is to prop open the doors at each end of the building and enjoy the draft. So, tonight, I wore a woven, judo-style dogi. This was a decision based on the weather outside, and its potential to be frightful; this decision failed to account for the increases in body heat, humidity, and the accompanying sweat of three hours of practice in our relatively compact practice space.

Thirteen years, I've been practicing aikido. About twenty-five years since I got my first dogi, and first entered a dojo. I should be smarter about some of this.

Thus, the assault on the nose came when, after a leisurely and hilarious two-hour dinner with fellow students after class, I got home and pulled the dogi from its bag. It's fair to say something smells bad when it actually hurts to smell it.

For the record: yes, I had showered just before class; yes, the dogi was freshly washed before class. Yes, I understand the implications this holds for me as a member of society. Yes, that is a bottle of Febreeze in the bottom of the picture, and yes, I used it liberally and will wash the dogi before bringing back into public. The Febreeze is just because I have to live in the same house as the foul thing until tomorrow when I can do laundry again.

You don't get used to it.

I mean, you do, sort of, sure. Everyone remembers their first nikkyo. Hoo-boy. For so many of us, it's the first technique we feel, when we ask that neighbor, or cousin, or new teacher: "so, what's this aikido stuff you're talking about?"

"Grab my wrist," the neighbor says, taking a break from mowing his lawn.

Boom. Nikkyo. Nage has lots of control, it requires little or no ukemi beyond the intuitive "ouch" and crouch; so, for dealing with first-timers, it's a go-to technique. And we are all first-timers at some point. And we all remember that first nikkyo. The sensation of every third resident of China using your wrist as a crash-test dummy for learning acupuncture, all at once. Then, it gets better. You get a little used to it. Your wrists get stronger, then larger, and if you stick with it, somebody one day says that grabbing your wrist is like grabbing steel cable.

You do not get used to anything over the course of a single day.

Five hours of aikido for me, today, spread out over three classes. Twice a week, lately, I've been enjoying this indulgence of time and exertion. Today, I started to feel the wear on my knees in hour two. It did not go away. I did not get used to it. Fifteen minutes into what would have been the sixth hour, I was done for the day, not because I wanted to be, but because I had to be. And, even after limping to the car, and then into the house, for a reason having nothing to do with the pre-existing leg injury, my head's too preoccupied looking forward to tomorrow's three hours of class to really feel the pain from today. It's probably time to take some aspirin, before the subconscious absorbs the blog and figures out how the body's supposed to feel.

The Next Day, Delayed.

The leg is there. No denying it; the leg is there. However, everything is a little more motile than I'd expected. What pain persists serves, mostly, as a reminder to keep stretching, both before and after practice, and just about any other free moment of the day, in the hopes that I might one day walk, once again, in a manner unlike that of a pirate.

This just-enough-nagging brand of hurt had me looking around the mat last night. Mostly, I know my fellow students' longer-lasting ailments. I know who has the truly bad knee. The guy who needs the hip replacement but refuses the surgery. The woman whose wrists always, always hurt. Last night's was an interesting study. We all watch the same sensei, then we do innumerable, personal variations on that central standard. A little more apparent than usual last night was the fact that our personal derivations from the source often take one of three forms: response to pain; aversion to pain; and laziness. There's a second, huge category, of simply not getting it, with its own sub-categories, but that's a different post under a different topic on some future day. I was reminded last night in a very visceral way that, just as we aim to avoid hurting our uke in the process of blending--for the sake of his reflexive cooperation, and circularity, and morality, etc., etc., etc...--the path we take and the form we use to accomplish that blending has quite a lot to do with avoiding hurting ourselves.

This is something I hadn't thought of in a while. How much horse stance hurts; and just plain-old hanmi. Especially when you're just starting out, or nursing an injury, and probably in the practice of later years, just standing still can be incredibly, unendurably strenuous. Maintaing that posture, while dealing with someone flinging hands and feet and headbutts at you? Well: there's your difficulty right there. Aikido's hard becuase standing upright is hard. Our evolutionary ancestors knew all about this pain; Aikido reminds us of it.