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.

The worst is when the hurting stops.

Last three weeks, there's been a leg issue. Below the butt and above the thigh, there's a muscle, a big one, that I think doctors refer to as notchurassitol. (That makes more sense if you say it aloud and fast.) Anyway, that muscle has been roasting itself over a campfire, or taste-testing Naga Jolokia peppers, or maybe just snorting melty glass. This particular pain hasn't made it any higher than my list of secondary concerns, because it's not like it hurts all the time. It's only a problem, really, when I roll, stand up, or take a step. Or stretch my legs in any way. So, basically, it hurts like hell on earth, but only each time I take a fall.

Tonight, over three hours of practice, I took somewhere right around three hundred falls.

And yeah, my leg hurt pretty much every time I stood up from one of those. That is, until somewhere in the third hour. It was at that point that the hurting, well, seemed to go away. I didn't realize this until later, because at the time, I was too busy being sure not to get punched in the face or thrown into a wall. After class, though, during what has become, over these last three, pained weeks, my usual limp to the car, I realized the pain was gone.

Yea! Right? I can live a pain-free, happy life as a pimp. Or a safety and quality inspector of crutches. Or maybe a professional hop-scotcher. Right?

Wrong: the limp was still there. My body has played this trick on me before; I know exactly what it's up to. It cripples me with pain for a time, until I'm no longer thinking clearly, then it pretends to go away, like a cheater at hide-and-seek (who stomps his feet as if running away while actually just standing in place), only to come back, and soon, with a vengeance. I'm sure there's some science I could only half-guess at that would explain this dynamic, but I don't need it. All I need to know is that the limp has stuck around after the pain has subsided, which means tomorrow the leg will hurt even more than it did before, and tonight's is perhaps the worst--because the most insidious--suffering of all: the anticipation.

Sometimes the pain is only in your head...

...which only makes it worse. Tonight, the full-body ache subsided, sparing me just enough endurance to carry on with the test preparations. After a full night's excellent practice--attentive, athletic, and accomplished--one of the newer students had a breakdown. He's been training a year and a bit, and he's taken only one test before. Thing is: he's a very, very good student. Even on days when the demons aren't hunting his self confidence, he's got only an inkling just how much he's learned, how capable he's become, in such a short time. Tonight, though, the demons were on a rampage.

When I asked him to pinpoint what was bothering him so much, he spent ten minutes showing me his approach to ikkyo (literal translation: the first teaching), insisting that he knew he was performing it incorrectly, that he knew the correct form, and that he couldn't, for some reason so unknowable that it bordered on the magical, do what he was "trying" to do.

This was the struggle Yoda taught us about twenty-five years ago. The only thing wrong with this guy's ikkyo was that he thought it was wrong. The ten minutes he spent demonstrating his supposedly flawed technique, I spent explaining to him that there was nothing wrong with his technique. I wasn't lying to him. His method was correct; he just wasn't actually using it when attackers were levelling knife-handed shomenuchi strikes at his head. Perhaps this description makes his problem sound like one, simply, of timing. If only that had been the case. Timing, like the mechanics of technique, is tricky--something even the masters keep working on--but it's not mysterious. Proper timing can be demonstrated, observed, pursued, and, eventually achieved. Tonight, the problem wasn't timing, because the student didn't even get far enough into the technique for timing to be a factor. He was getting hit in the head and tangled up in arms because there was no intent left in him by the time the attacker reached him. He had convinced himself that the technique wouldn't work, so he never really gave it a chance to. Excruciatingly, he continuously defeated himself well before his attacker ever had a chance at him.

This is the secret we can never show: agatsu. Self-victory. It's an often-discussed topic in many martial arts. Innumerable teachers have worked on it with even more students for longer than we could ever catalogue, but no one has ever successfully taught it. This is one teaching we all must learn for ourselves. No small demand on those seeking the way, because doubt hurts: in the mind; heart; and, as a result, tonight, the forehead.

We will keep working on it, though, and some day I will have the rare pleasure of seeing this student--and friend--realize the vast scope of the victory he will at that point have achieved over himself, and we will think back on tonight's painful progress...and laugh at it.

No one is safe.

Eight mudansha, junior students to prepare for tests right now. Theirs is the present toll on my body. If I weren't so fond of these truly, very good friends, I wouldn't be offering myself up to the degree I have been. Despite my high regard for them, despite only wanting the best for them, and despite the fact that I am supposedly helping them to learn how not to be hurt, sometimes, I injure them. The evidence:

And in that picture, the bruise is only about twelve hours old. It's already half the length of her arm and approximately the color you imagine when you think of an ulcer. She doesn't remember when it might have happened, nor what exactly might have done it. It's going to get bigger, darker, and more sensitive to touch before it starts to heal, when it will get even uglier. Yellow, purple, spotty and raised. Still, she showed up for three hours of class the next morning, ready to practice again the test that left this mark on her the night before. Tough, persistent, and further developing both of those qualities every day: this is a big part of budo, embodied.

A lot.

Thus far, I've enjoyed thirteen years of aikido, including five distinct styles, six different dojo, and more seminars than I presently care to count. In that time, the following injuries have come my way: a torn knee ligament; a twice-broken nose; a dislocated finger; mat-burn to the point of bleeding from the knees, heels, toes, knuckles, and face; a chipped tooth; a black eye; a couple slight sprains of the wrists; innumerable relatively-minor bruises and cuts; and no small amount of damage to the ego. To be certain, there is more, happily forgotten, for now.

This sounds, perhaps, like a lot. But I train a lot: three hours a day; six days a week. Compared to the peril, violence, and plain-old accidents of normal life (car wrecks; potato peelers; drunk guys and psychos) it's not a bad ratio for what some might describe as a part-time job in a full-contact sport. Tonight, however, I've reached an ignoble impasse. Tonight I suffer pain I cannot blame on any particular strike, joint-lock, or throw. Tonight I am, simply, sore. It hurts to stand. And walk. Even breathing must be done in proper measure. (Almost) worse than the pain is the mystery of its source. I've been putting forth a little extra effort lately, and I am more often industrious and athletic on the mat than I am lazy. Yet, though I can't single out any specific recent training for blame, my body feels pushed to a more dire limit than I remember it previously knowing. Wisdom teeth surgery sore. Disastrous teenage romance sore. Santa Claus truth sore.

Maybe it's the eight soon-to-test nage for whom I am presently designated uke, and their attendant preparation. Maybe the years are catching up to me even worse than I'd suspected. Maybe, rather than writing and complaining, I should have just gone to bed, instead, but tonight I feel impelled to begin a long-ruminated project, participating in that dubious literary tradition of sharing my pain with the world, and so I begin this blog of just how much aikido hurts.