Choke

Here's the thing:  losing to a worthy opponent is not so bad.  I have lost three matches to the same fighter from another club on the island, and after the first time, it ceased to bother me at all.  Because, hello!  she's awesome!  She moves like nobody's business and I swear she's got a third leg hidden somewhere.  I can learn a lot from her and hope to one day be able to say "Hey, at least now I'm giving her a run for her money!"

But losing to someone who is just an okay fighter?  Sucks.  Because if you know that she's not more experienced, she doesn't train more rigorously, she's not in better shape, she's not much bigger, or some other reason why she is just a better fighter, you know that what it comes down to is that she played the mental game better than you did.  And that's hard to take. 

Saturday was not a good day for me.  (Warning: Another long and rambly and woe-filled post about sparring!  But more photos making the click-through worth it!)

It started out pretty well, with a silver in Korean forms (I tied with another woman from my club, we went to a tie-breaker, and I won by .1 of a point: exciting!), but I totally choked on my point-stop match.  I fought a woman who is lower-ranked than me, slower than me and older than me and I lost 5-1.  And to tell you the truth, I didn't even know I had that one point until the match was over and I looked at the scoreboard.

So what happened?  Well, I underestimated my opponent, based on the factors I listed above.  I thought "Oh this fight should be no problem."  Then, after she scored two points, I changed my mind, but unfortunately, I didn't change it to "Whoa, she's better than I thought, but I can still take her I just need to ramp up my effort a bit here."  No, that would have been the smart thing to do!  But instead of that I thought "Oh, she's got me beat.  I might as well give up now.  There's no hope."  And so even though I did score once after that, my head was totally wrong and I just didn't go for it at all.  Very disappointing.  Perhaps even moreso for my coach than me.  I could hear him yelling "Go get it, Rebeca, go get it!" on the sidelines and my mental response was sort of "K, in just a sec!  I'll do that right a----oof!  Damn she hit me again." 

Oh woe woe woe.  And woe to my poor coach, who died a little inside with each point I didn't score.  If I could have gone straight home and sought solace in a glass of wine and a cuddle with my spouse, I would have probably recovered quickly.  But oh no, I still had to hang around for around three and a half hours for my next event: continuous sparring.  As if I wasn't nervous enough about fighting in a continuous division (which is rankless, therefore includes black-belt sparrers), now I had this crashing failure in the point-stop division to lower my spirits even more. 

So that was a rough and depressing afternoon.  Tobias was there, and I rested my head on his shoulder, and this helped.  My coach was nice, saying "the day's not over for you madam" and things like that, even though he knew as well as I did that I wasn't going to make much  of a showing in continuous.  I thought about how the worst-case scenario was this: I get humiliated again, but the humiliation only lasts about 90 seconds and then I get to go home and have dinner and play with my kids, then go out to the opera. How bad is that?  Not very.  This little peptalk to myself helped a little.  Keywords: "a little".

I came close to going home.  But seriously, that is the kind of thing where your coach and your teammates actually start to be annoyed with you.  Losing is okay, but bowing out of a division because you lost another one is not okay.  Because of this, and also because I remembered that is it Lent and I can't have wine anyway, I stuck around. 

The men's continuous fighting was right before my division and man, this did not help matters.  It was violent, y'all.  I did not want to get in that ring.  Thoughts of failure were dashed from my mind, which now became completely preoccupied with thoughts of maiming.  This was probably for the best, because by the time I had to fight, I really wasn't thinking about my last match at all, I was just thinking "Don't get killed." 

And I had a good, satisfying fight.  My opponent was the woman I mentioned in the first paragraph, and she mopped the floor with me, but it was pretty fun.  I got kicked in the face, and it didn't bother me at all!  That was pretty cool.  It's nice to be afraid of something, get all worked up about it, have that something happen, and then realize you can totally handle it. 

So I am glad that I stuck around, even though it was gruelling for me and for my kids and my spouse.  M'hijo didn't like watching me fight.  Apparently he looked very alarmed the whole time, watching his mummy get pummelled like that.   

Aside from that, though, he had a great day, walking around, acting tough and being admired in his little dobok. 

So what to do about this failure?  Well, at least that decision is easy to make: I just continue on, think about the next tournament, and try not to get mired in self-doubt. 

Weight-loss update:  I did not lose 4 pounds, but I did lose 2.5.  More importantly than that, however, is that I remembered that I have a fat-squisher, which I always forget I own.  So I wore that to the opera and there were no little rolls popping out.  Thank you fat-squisher! 

Comments

[Tana]

You know how totally f*cking awesome you are, right? I wish I could have stuck around to watch you be so damn brave. I can only imagine how daunting it was to go into continous sparring that day.

Watch out though. Next time I'll be in your sparring division and you'll really have a fight on your hands. :)

[Bec]

Aw thanks Tana. You're nice. I can't wait to fight you :)