One Day, I’ll Have My Own Martial Arts Movie

Have I mentioned that I’ve been going to Aikido lessons? I don’t think I have. My first grading is coming up in a few weeks – it’s all very exciting. Then I’ll get to wear a pretty gi (y’know, the baggy white pyjamas) and a nice yellow belt. Much like belly dancing, ‘Sephone somehow duped me into going. We’re two of the three female members in the whole dojo.

Usually, our sensei at the beginner level is a very gentle brown-belt. But he’s been away for the past two weeks, so we’ve had another sensei who is something like fifth-dan black-belt or some ridiculously high qualification like that. It’s not that he’s not gentle – he never singles people out or humiliates them, and he never pushes us too far. But he comes very close to it. He gets right up to our limits and just stops before they’re stretched to breaking point. This is amazing. He’s had me doing things I didn’t really think I could do – like a whole bunch of press-ups, for instance, or learning two new submission techniques in one week. Consequently, I feel absolutely shattered today after last night’s lesson. Muscles everywhere ache, and I have a surprisingly large number of bruises that I don’t even remember getting. They were probably from the mae-ukemi practice (I’m not giving the proper Japanese names just to feel special, we have to know them for grading so I’m trying to get them into my head!).

At the beginner level, the sensei gives instruction, and then we are paired with a kyu-grade (graded student) to train. So here’s all 5’0″ of me, training with these massive, hulking 6’+ men with blue belts (I haven’t figured out the heirarchy of belt colours yet, but blue is pretty high). But the good thing is that I’m getting it. Yesterday, I was paired with an absolute bear of a man for the mae-ukemi (forward rolling) practice. What happens in this particular mae-ukemi practice is this: One person presents their arm for an attack. The other grabs the arm. The first person releases themself from the grip of the second person and through a series of cunning manoeuvers, throws the second person to the ground. The landing is the hardest part, for obviously you can’t just fall like a sack of potatoes. From standing, you have to gracefully go into a forwards dive-roll, recovering again to standing position. Of course, it’s all very structured and the two people are in absolute co-operation, so it looks very impressive. And me and this great bear of a guy got into this excellent rhythm, so that when the roller recovered to the standing position, the other person was prepared in the proper stance to begin the exercise again. We must’ve done the whole thing about 10 times in the two minutes we had to do this practice. We were both grinning away like idiots, it was so fun (cos being thrown into a dive roll can’t help but be fun, really, when you think about it). I could see he was actually getting a bit of a work-out as he was grinning away, which felt great from my point of view: instead of having to prod me and give explainations of the manoeuver, this hulking great blue-belt was actually getting a workout and enjoying training with me. I couldn’t have been prouder.