Chris Dwan

Tag: judo

  • Observations

    Snippets and observations from a day:

    * Woke and fought the alarm, as usual with alarms.
    * Coffee. Sometimes you need coffee before you go downstairs to get coffee.
    * Solved technical problems by social means. Primarily public shame and an unwillingness to just let it go. Labelled the goddamn wires so it’ll be hard to claim ignorance when they get screwed up again.
    * Solved technical problem by technical means. Damn the tape robot. Damn it to tape robot hell.
    * Found a local judo club. Called ahead. Got nervous about grappling with these people
    * Lanced a social issue at work. Sat very, very still while said social issue worked itself out. Washed hands.
    * Rode mass transit for 1.5 hours to get to workout. Read first half of The Watchmen
    * Felt calm on the ground and standing. Saw the opportunity to apply a choke, and applied it. Opponent tapped. Noticed flaws in technique, worked on them.
    * Rode mass transit for 1.5 hours to get back to a hotel. Nearly finished with The Watchmen
    * Decided to go to Hampton, VA tomorrow evening rather than stay here. Save myself a whole trip by sacrificing a day.
    * Hotel restaurant closed. Restaurant kitchens close at 10pm. Bars are open later. Asked the front desk for local kitchens open late. TGI Fridays. Ick.
    * Ate dinner surrounded by waitstaff having a beer after their shift. Nice folks. Foul deep fried dinner. Foul.
    * Heard lyrics in head – “Bartender” by Dave Matthews Band. Next song on the radio was “Satellite” by the same. I was thinking Bartender please, fill my glass for me, with the wine you gave Jesus that set him free after three days in the ground., but instead I got satellite, strung from the moon, and the world your balloon.
    * Set up travel for tomorrow. Dependencies: Train, Flight, Car, Hotel. Car depends on flight, since I need to know where to return the car. Hotel totally doesn’t matter, since “recession” means “lots of hotel rooms.”
    * Posted to LJ.

  • Return to the mat

    Competed in my first post injury judo tournament today, and it went pretty well. My division (over 30, under 185lbs) consisted of me and this other dude. The first match went the full four minutes. I won on points (one “wazari” to his “flat nothing”). At one point I had him in what felt like a really tight choke, but he toughed through it.

    The second match, he pinned me after a minute or two, and won by holding me down for 25 seconds.

    So, won a match, took second (in a small division), and survived without injury or undue fuss.

    Now: A celebratory glass of wine with assorted LJ folks.

    –UPDATE–

    I have no idea if these will work for you, but they play for me in Quicktime on my apple. Your milage may vary:

    Match 1 in which I choke all but the tap out of my opponent at the beginning (I mean, seriously, he lifts me off the ground using his own lapel around his neck!), get very, very lucky (2:00), toss him with a left footed tai-atoshi (2:25) and proceed to run the clock down holding him off in my guard for a win. Yes, I knew that there were only 30 seconds left when I dropped to my back and pulled guard.

    Match 2 in which I start off strong, but wind up getting pinned. I think I do a great impression of a chinchilla resisting being caught. To quote justkidding_nr No!no!no!no!no!no!no!no!no!

  • Pants

    Went to Judo last night, and got my pants un-seamed. Ripped clean open from knee to crotch on the inside of the right leg.

    This is perfectly normal, though rare. In judo (and other gi-based sports) you control the uniform in order to control the person inside it. I put on a pair of the spare pants that hang on a rack for exactly this purpose, and came back to the workout.

    How odd.

  • Recent updates

    Today I entered the Ocean State judo competition. It was a double elimination tournament. I fought twice. You figure it out.

    Here’s the video (mostly for other guys in the club):

    links below the cut

  • Judo

    Another weekend, another judo tournament. This was a small “developmental” competition at another local club.

    Four of us showed up (in my division), so I got beaten three times. Still, getting better. I feel that if I keep improving at this rate, I’ll start winning some matches pretty soon.

  • In which I get owned on the mat.

    Tuesday and Wed are open sparring nights at my Judo school. Tuesday we start standing up, and Wed is for grappling. Jay, who runs the school, is very informal about a great many things – but he is quite firm on the fact that he teaches on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays … and on Tuesdays and Wednesdays we practice like we’re going to compete in matches.

    Generally, Jay sets up an interval timer. Four minutes on, 30 seconds off to find a new partner. People sit out as they need a break. We put rock and roll on the sound system. It’s a good time.

    This evening, I showed up and Jay and I were the only ones there.

    He looked at me and said something like: “Glad you’re here. You ready?”

    Ready? No timer, no nothing. Just 20 minutes of me learning a lot about what would happen to me in an open contest with a really good judo player. It involved a lot of getting thrown, and a lot of getting swept. I would like to think that towards the end of that period I was a little better at keeping my feet out of the way, and that he was having to use more combinations to set me up. In reality, I think that I just got owned.

    Somewhere in there a third guy showed up. This was Roger, who was still recovering from his flight back from Belgium. Where he had, oh yeah, been in some big international tournament. I was in need of sitting down, lest I fall down, so he and Jay fought for about 20 more minutes. That was amazing to watch.

    Jay is a small guy. I’ve got 30 pounds and 5 inches on him. Roger is my size. They’re of comparable skill, but I think that Jay’s size gives him an advantage of leverage. At one point I’m convinced that I saw Jay reverse a sweep in midair so that instead of landing on his back, he managed to pivot over and land in a perfect pin on top of Roger.

    Then it was my turn with Roger. More ownage. Harder, this time. They were both being nice to me, but you can only pitch someone over your shoulder so gently. At one point I caught him looking at something outside the mat area. I tried to seize what I perceived as an opportunity and he tossed me without even looking. It was … humbling.

    I like my new sport, but I’ve got a lot of learning to do.

  • Back to judo this evening. Class was *huge*, perhaps 20 of us. We worked from 7:30 to 9:30, and I think that I managed to get through the evening without re-injuring my back. True, true, any back “injury” that goes away after 2 weeks wasn’t a very big one but damn it was annoying while it lasted.

    Also went to the dentist today. Through BU, we get access to the dental school … so a dental student took my X-rays. Full mouth X-rays. 20 freaking shots. The student was nice and all, but after the third shot I asked “so, is this some kind of new machine where you don’t have to put the lead vest on me to protect me from radiation?”

    She was so apologetic.

    In related news, I have apparently begun to grind my teeth. Grrrrrrr. My first thought was “but I started MEDITATING this year, for heaven’s sake!”

    Tomorrow, I go to the doctor to get the oil changed and perhaps get a new air filter. Or something. Medicine confuses me. redmed made me do it. Anyway, I picked a doctor at random and it turns out that he went to med school in Pakistan. Woot.

  • Judo

    Woke up at 6 this morning to take to the airport, down in Rhode Island. Then turned around and drove almost that far back north to Pedro’s Martial Arts for a judo tournament. I entered two divisions:

    “Masters” – 30 and up, open. We jokingly referred to ourselves as the “geritol” division. I took DFL (from a field of 4)

    “Seniors” – 18 and up, novice, with a nice small weight class of four. I won zero of my matches. On the other hand, I did get props from the crowd for toughing through a nasty lapel strangle to drag the guy out of bounds. The idea was that I would get (at most) a small penalty for retreating … rather than getting choked out and losing the match (not to mention consciousness).

    No serious injuries, although I do have a bruise on my neck.

  • Public beatings

    I have a couple of public beatings scheduled for the next few days:

    On Sunday, I plan to enter the Mass State Judo Championships. I’m eligible in two divisions: Seniors (over 17) and Masters (over 30). The seniors will be, by far, the larger division, so there will be subdivisions by skill level. I will most assuredly be a novice. Masters will all be older guys. On the positive, we omit the aggressive and uncontrolled 18 year old wrestlers. On the negative, I’ll be up against the entire spectrum of competitors.

    My sensei advised me to enter both. He says that the masters crowd will be more fun to work with and have greater overall control so I’ll learn a lot. Conversely, I have a chance of winning at least a few matches in the senior novices.

    Then on Tuesday, a unique opportunity has presented itself. Dan was contacted by the local branch of ABC (channel 6). They’re doing a little series on ‘how to protect yourself.’ The first two episodes were about escaping a burning building and something similar. The third will be on “self defense,” for the special case of “someone jumps you in a parking lot.”

    I’m to be the punching dummy. I’ll don the padded suit and get thrown around.

    It’s going to be an awesome week.

  • Car

    My car has now driven 100,000 miles. Hooray for the car, hooray for me. Interestingly, that makes it the same “age” as me (reading 100000 as a binary number rather than a decimal one).

    In other news, I went to an “open sparring” night at judo for the first time. They do open standing techniques on Tuesday, and open grappling on Wed. I threw and was thrown. Good times. I did about 9 3 minutes rounds … which seems like plenty to me.

    Afterwards, a couple of guys who had driven a long way asked if anyone wanted to do some grappling. “Why not?” says I. The first one asked “are you okay with arm locks?” I said “look, I watched a guy get his arm broken on Sunday. So ‘yes’, but when I tap, you stop … and I plan to tap way before my arm breaks. Cool?” He was cool with that, so off we went. There’s no shame in working up to these things … since one apparently can’t work back from “too much.”

    Oh yeah, and the last guy I grappled is apparently a Search and Rescue marine. Ow.