The Occasional Odyssey that is Exercise

Yesterday I got it into my head that I was going to bike past an exercise station on the way home and do some pull-ups, etc. When I arrived at the station, on the grounds of a nearby high school, I was dismayed to find that it had been removed. WTF?!

Arriving home, I found out that our toddler was asleep in the car, thus occupying wife and leaving the apartment to me. I managed about ten minutes of sit-ups and push-ups, started in on some curls, and they came in the door. End of session.

Still resolved to manage something, I decided to go to an early bird kickboxing workout the next day (today).

The instructor wore one of those loose fitting workout outfits, all white with stripes down the sides, microphone headset jammed down over his gel-spiked hair. Not the usual instructor I’ve had the four or five times I’ve actually done this. It’s okay, I thought, how different can they be? It’s the same studio.

Very different. Different music (80s remixed), different attitude. He bounced even more, if that’s possible, and did everything tightly. It was hard to tell if he was doing a hook or uppercut, roundhouse or front kick.

After about twenty minutes I realized that I hadn’t had to pause to catch my breath, which was heartening. Then we started doing this thing where you crouch down to the floor and then come up into a kind of karate-kid flying front kick. Cool, I can do that. Of course, I don’t so much fly as hover briefly, and the kick isn’t to the head but somewhere vaguely torso-ish, but I can do that.

Then we switch to something else and I’m all pleased with myself when the effort that went into those crouch/kicks hits me like a bear hug around my ribs, and the rest of the class is downhill. I’m covered in sweat, wondering when it will be over, and just trying to look like I’m keeping up.

Now I’m wishing for the usual instructor. It’s Stockholm syndrome. I want my usual punishment. Ugh. Shake it off. Not sane.

Things start to blur. “You can do it!” I can’t keep doing this. “This is it!” Uh, you just said that a couple minutes ago – Do you think we have the memories of goldfish? “Higher.” Yeah right. That chick over there is doing much worse that me. Good to know. I’m gonna stick with taking out imaginary knees and thigh-bones.

Now and then he brings around these black plastic sheets that he makes people kick. They crackle and make a loud noise no matter how well you kick them. He never holds them out for me. I’m obviously not worthy. But he does toss them on the ground near my feet. A few glances between jab cross jab confirm that those are in fact X-rays.

Whose X-rays? Why on earth are we kicking X-rays? Are these students who didn’t survive? Criminals? Mementos of the instructor’s martial injuries?

Then a brief feeling of serenity washes over me. Those are the keytones. Forgot all about that benefit of aerobic exercise. Haven’t felt that in years–since back when my ankles would let me jog long enough to get a runner’s high. Or else they’re piping some sort of gas into the building.

Okay, I may just stick with this kickboxing thing for a while.

Cardio Kickboxing

As part of my ongoing recovery from the stress and weight gain of early fatherhood, I am trying to increase my aerobic capacity to a level that is … well, on a chart somewhere.

Jogging is out (it would have been my preference). I’m just not built for it, and now past 40, my ankles don’t even recover well from three-milers.

I bike to work, but it really does nothing. I can’t bike fast because it would be hazardous. Plus I don’t want to show up at work bathed in sweat. Coming home that way is sometimes acceptable, so I’m going to do what I can with that.

Working out at home is out because our toddler daughter considers exercise the equivalent of ignoring her. Maybe she’s right.

So I’ve been trying cardio kickboxing. [looking sheepish]

Besides the occasional urge to direct one of my kicks into the instructor, who screams “HIGHER” over the techno beat, it has not been a completely embarrassing disaster. I do pause ever few minutes, with increasing frequency as the class progresses, to catch my breath or stifle the urge to throw up (five hours after last meal). I don’t tuck my hips under me for front kicks (not planning on backflips any time soon). My side kicks barely clear 2 feet off the ground. My quarter kicks and knee strikes from TKD ages ago have come back and seem to work pretty well.

I am literally the only person in the room who does not bounce on their feet. Seems martially wrong to me.

Just need to find a way to get to more than one class a week, or nothing much will stick aerobically.

Plan B, part 4

Really, there should be no Plan B.

Plan A is Aikido, which is part of Budo, which theoretically consists of all possibilities. Plan A gives precedence to those actions that de-escalate, reduce harm, and resolve conflict. If my Plan B is a potentially lethal strike to finish the game, that’s just too easy–at that moment I’ve stopped practicing aikido and completely broken with Plan A. Was Plan A just a ruse or a trick? Why bother? Aren’t we just training? Am I really in any danger?

Plan B is also legally problematic. People die in relatively minor scuffles now and then, and the one left standing can go to jail.

There is a term from Alexander Technique called end gaining. It refers to the natural human habit of focusing on the end-point of our actions and becoming frustrated when we do not immediately achieve our aims. Consciousness of this tendency in yourself allows you to inhibit it and focus instead on the moment. The ironic side effect is that achieve your aims more easily and with less stress when you aren’t directly obsessed with them.

For me, the aggressive Plan B in aikido is a kind of end-gaining. It sets up a habit of escalation in more things than aikido. It reminds me that I’m thinking about *me* winning, not a win for the situation. That can carryover to personal interactions off the mat.

I remember an exercise from when I was about 12, in a karate class. Your parter shoves you, and you do nothing, but stand your ground. He does it again. You again do nothing. He does it a third time. You take him out.

This exercise is very basic for a reason–it’s for children. And I’m sure I learned a bit of calm and patience from it. But I also learned [unfortunately] that past a certain point you can stop caring for the other person and just win. This has been my impression of most martial arts (aikido excluded). The idea being that a good defense isn’t just a good offense. A good defense is a perfectly timed rapid-fire highly targeted devastating attack that obliterates your opponent. Our culture, especially action movies, seems to encourage this thinking.

Outside of Hollywood fantasies, reality is more prosaic and bureaucratic. Training for police officers and emergency responders includes considerations of levels of force. Justifications for their use are laid out in detail, and woe to the officer who uses lethal force in any but the most obvious of circumstances. A mountain of paperwork, mandatory time-off, and possible legal action awaits. This is as it should be.

In our day-to-day life often the most dangerous situation we deal with is getting cut off in traffic. There are few immediate penalties for just being a jerk. There is unfortunately no dope-slap angel to appear and correct us when we go over the line. But training to be compassionate in a violent situation can, I think, mitigate some of our negative, though natural human responses.

Darwin Day

We’re trying to institute a new holiday in our lives–Darwin Day. I took the day off Feb. 12, and we managed to go out for a short hike in nature with our toddler. Later, it was out to dinner for fish ‘n’ chips.

We had originally planned to have friends over and make roast beef tenderloin with potatoes, carrots, yorkshire pudding, and a nice bottle of bordeaux, but their little boy came down with a bad cold. When two families with babies/toddlers want to do something together, a cold can nix it. Hard for those without kids to understand, but it’s serious stuff for the sleep-deprived. If you get my kid sick, you’ve just fogged my brain with sleep deprivation for the next week. So we deeply appreciated their consideration and I only looked longingly at the wine and beef tenderloin in the grocery store, then proceeded to pick up milk and sandwich meat.

The hike was nice. We discovered a great place that is nearby, and our daughter discovered she really likes riding in the Kelty carrier I picked up at a garage sale for $2 a couple months ago.

Didn’t get to reflect much on Darwin or being a naturalist for a day. But it’s a start.

Plan B, part 3

Example 3

Plan B Becomes Intention

Aikido can seem frustratingly nice. So many opportunities to do damage fly by during every technique, without the time to savor them, much less try them. Most techniques are designed to do no permanent damage, even when executed full force. A flickering black and white movie of O’Sensei shows him walking around flapping his arms while being attacked, seeming to expend no effort, much less give off macho malice. What fun is that?

Now and then something snaps and I toss all the peace and love and de-escalation talk out the window. Plan B becomes Plan A. I toss in light atemis to the ribs, groin, solar plexus. Oooh, sooooolar plexuuussss. My favorite! Is my angle right for gut punches? Uppish for floating ribs, straight in for compression, downish when at or just below the belt. For fun during knife practice I’ll add a few extra slices to cripple or finish uke off. While doing a standard ikkyo pin I sometimes run through my mind the many continuations that I might need to do if I found myself in this position on the street with someone I knew would not stay down. Strike to sweet spot where the jaw, ear, and neck come together. Hard knee down on the arm between elbow and shoulder to break the bone. Kidney punch. Rear choke.

These alternative plans fill my mind and make a mockery of the idea of aikido as a moving meditation. When I do this it’s more like fantasy target practice, and ultimately, as fun as it is, I feel like things have gone off the rails and I’ve erased whatever gains I had made in recent days.

A teacher once referred to aikido as “riding the dragon”. He may have been quoting O’Sensei. I don’t know. But now I’m thinking, to paraphrase a hackneyed joke about the Soviet Union, “In Aikido, dragon is YOU.”

Plan B, part 2

Example 2

Aikido pins take a lot of practice to get right, and are not really so fool-proof or rock solid as they seem to the beginner. Sure there are people who can pin anyone. But in reality, no pin is permanent against someone who a) doesn’t feel pain, b) is abnormally flexible and strong (or simply much stronger than you can physically handle), or c) who happens to know a good reversal to the technique you are using. Moreover, the grips and positioning that pins and joint locks depend on are set up long before you actually “see” them as a spectator, long before it is applied.

Nonetheless, when a pin fails, especially if there is ego at stake, the next move is often what the pinner believes is a really badass pain-compliance technique. Or the pinner points out uke’s exposed vulnerabilities, as if knowing about them would be enough to take advantage of them without any real practice doing so.

Suppose you have uke in what is referred to as a ‘high pin.’ Uke is lying face down, you have one of his arms essentially vertical as you kneel at his shoulder and torque the shoulder and elbow while pushing toward the head and screwing his arm into the mat. For whatever reason he manages to tuck his shoulder and will momentarily roll out of the pin. Do you take the hand that is still under your control and start bending fingers? Do you roll back to get your legs around him and do a jujitsu arm-bar? Do you politely point out to him that you could break his neck from this position? Would you really do that to someone?

The completely ‘aiki’ way seems to me to be to blend with whatever uke does. If he squirms out of the pin and just sits there, the game is over. If he attacks, you do more aikido.

But if he squirms out and pushes it to so-called ‘ground work’?

Sometimes this happens with aikidoka I know well (we know what to expect from each other) and only rarely with aikidoka I don’t know so well. But it almost never happens, and certainly not to a great degree if a high-level sensei is teaching the class. We know instinctively that we have diverged from the usual training, that we are not ‘doing the technique’. Not good in front of the boss.

Plan B, part 1

Aikido has a number of memes that are not explicitly part of the art, but that seem to arise naturally from it being a “soft” martial art. One of them is “Plan B”. You often hear it mentioned when a technique seems to fail, or someone demonstrates how a technique could be reversed. The instructor says something along the lines of “If this happens, go to plan B,” or “Uke moves this way because he doesn’t want to experience plan B.”

Example 1

A well-known aikido sensei was demonstrating yokomen uchi shiho nage for a class at a retreat. Yokomen uchi closely approximates someone swinging a weapon at your head (starts overhead but curves just before with the head, with the arm fully outstretched at the moment of contact). The uke swung fast and hard. Sensei moved just enough (the attack missed), but somehow the attacking hand got away from him, so the desired technique wasn’t going to happen.

Sensei counterattacked.

What we saw next was not yokomen uchi shiho nage but yokomen uchi open hand to throat. Uke’s head flew back to absorb/evade and he was airborne for a moment before hitting the floor flat on his back. Clearly surprised, but having appropriately saved his own ass, he scrambled back to his feet and got into position.

Sensei smiled and shook his head, then motioned for uke to attack again.

We’ve all seen this sort of thing. Even though the ‘technique failed’, the martial artist moves fluidly into a valid response, but it’s not a ’soft’ technique. I completely respect this sensei’s martial judgment and depth of aikido (he studied under O’Sensei), and I accept that what we saw at that moment was aikido. But I find it difficult to explain to myself why.

More examples to come.

Cult?

When my daughter was about 6 months old we were in a Target wandering toward the checkout when suddenly she saw something that really excited her. I looked in the same direction and was horrified to see a giant Hanna Montana head smiling and sparkling from one of those hanging poster boards.

To be sure, I took her over to the area and held her in front of various items, hoping to to find out the reaction was to a hello kitty backpack or such. Then I held her up to the poster. She was overjoyed, and I began to despair. How can we fight advertising that works on a six-month old?

[Several months go by]

A few days ago, while visiting relatives, we met a little girl who proudly told us she was four years old and proceeded to run about entertaining herself. We were all just innocently sitting around talking and having a good time, and then, out of the blue, that little girl ran right up to me, smiled, and said “Hanna Montana” just like she would have said “Boo!”

I stared, disbelieving. “What did you say?”

“Hanna Montana!” she said, confident she had hit her mark.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means I’m going to be a rock star!” she said as she skipped away.

I’m starting to get a wee bit frightened.

Baby Ukemi

From our baby I’ve happily handled hair pulling, her crawling repeated and gleefully all over my head, being kicked in the face, grabbed, etc. just fine, but yesterday, by jamming her little finger up my nose, our nine-month-old gave me my first bloody nose in a long while.

Her little finger.

She has, however, been nice enough to the cat (with close supervision) to elicit purrs.

Neti Pot Day 2

The second and third times haven’t been as pleasant. Definitely the sensation of water up the nose and even sneezing this last time. Ugh.