I’ve been taking some higher-level krav classes since I passed the belt test in February. I’m at level 2 now, so I can take level 2 classes and level 2/3 classes. They’re hard. They’re not really any harder physically. Or they are. It’s hard to describe.
These classes don’t require more physical strength or stamina, but they do require a lot more accuracy and control. And I fucking suck at that. I can gut out a hard workout, and I can hold a punch shield against my chest while people punch it so hard over and over that I think my sternum might crack. But I can’t get my head around hook-cross-bob-cross-hook-bob-hook-cross-bob-cross-hook-to-infinity. I can barely even type that shit in the right order.
I feel so stupid. But the worst part is that I fuck things up for whomever is unlucky enough to be my partner in any given class. If I fuck up while I’m punching and my partner is holding the pads, no problem. If I fuck up holding the pads in the right place at the right time while my partner is punching, that’s a problem. Now my partner isn’t getting the training he or she deserves to be getting. I do not want to be the bad partner.
Even the less experienced people are more skilled than I am. I just can’t seem to pick this stuff up.
I’ve always had this problem with sports, which is why I took to running and biking so enthusiastically. Those things don’t require as much coordination as catching a ball or something. And even then, it took me a while to figure out how to put my feet right and hold my upper body right and find rhythm while I run.
I still blush when I remember “trying out” for softball when I was 11. It wasn’t tryouts really, because everybody got to be a on a team. But they had us all show up to the field and demonstrate our skills, and then coaches from three teams (small town) would meet and pick their players. It was essentially the same embarrassing thing as picking teams on the playground except I didn’t have to actually witness being picked last.
That day I tried out, they sent each of us up to bat and pitched until we each got a hit. Most girls got a hit within three or four pitches. Not me. I swung at everything, and I missed everything. And when I say everything, I mean every fucking thing. I mean that I was standing there for at least 10 minutes, wildly swinging that fucking bat, while the adult man pitching tried to throw balls I couldn’t possibly miss and every girl I ever went to school with and their parents groaned behind me. I finally hit one when he stood about six feet in front of me and virtually rolled it to me.
I still played, because everyone was playing. But they put me in right field, and they made me bat as far down the lineup as possible. I’ll be fair to myself and say that I don’t remember a single moment of coaching, of anyone actually showing me how to catch a ball or throw a ball or swing a bat. They really just went with what skills we showed up with and the coaching was mostly them shouting encouraging things at us. I learned to swing a bat later, when my little brother taught me.
But that’s just one small example among many of how my brain and my body just do not communicate. There have been times when people have patiently tried to teach me physical skills and I just don’t get them.
I love biking and running, for example, and Austin is a big triathlon town, so of course that’s the natural thing to do if you like to bike and run. I can swim, in the sense that I can move through water and not drown. But I have never been able to get all my limbs and my head and my breath to work right to actually swim efficiently any significant distance.
When I first started doing tris, I took a swimming class from a tri coach. By the end of the four-week class, even the people who’d been afraid to put their faces in the water at the beginning were out-swimming me, while I was making it about 15 meters before I’d mess up the rhythm and breathe in when I should have breathed out and then choke on water. The coach was really nice, but I could see her gradually, over the weeks, start looking at me less like a potential triathlete and more like an unfortunate and annoying burden.
I’ve done several tris now, and I did figure out the stroke and the breathing, but I still can’t sustain it for long before lose my place and suck in some water. I flop around and get passed by all the waves after me and cough up water and reassure the nice people in the lifeguard canoes that I’m fine. It’s embarrassing.
And I can’t figure out how to fix it. Practice more? Stop thinking so hard? A ton of fighting advice boils down to “don’t think, move.” I . . . don’t know how to do that.
I love krav so much. I love every minute that I’m there and every part of what I get to do there. But, man. I’m starting to feel like I’m just in everybody’s goddamn way.
I have this great teacher, the one I work with most often, who is really patient with me. When I spar with him, he will keep hitting or kicking me the same way over and over again, and I can tell that he’s waiting for me to figure out what to do. I think, “He’s done that round kick three times in a row, slowly, and with meaningful looks at me. I should know what to do. I should know what to do. What the fuck should I do?” And then I flail around and throw random punches and leave my face wide open and sometimes even fall down.
Eventually, he will break down and say, “When I kick you there, step this way and throw this punch.” And then he’ll patiently kick me again and again until I do it right.
Of course, the very next time I spar with somebody, and that’s usually exactly one minute after I just finished sparring with the teacher, I will forget that and all the other things he’s told me, and I’ll just attack with a crazy amount of punches that aren’t even punches—they’re just my gloves flapping around in the air. I’m all attack, no tactics and no defense.
That teacher and another teacher I work with a lot and several of my sparring partners keep telling me the same thing, too. “Don’t just stand there.” Because that’s what I do. I go in straight on, and I punch crappy punches and take punches that I fail to guard against and punch some more and take some more punches. I don’t move around. I don’t get in and get out. I don’t move to the side and attack that way. I don’t have the patience to wait out my opponent and see how they move and figure them out. I just barrel in and stay in using the same tactics over and over, even when they aren’t working.
I could use my sparring behavior as a metaphor for how work is going lately. There will be a problem, and I will pounce on it and beat it into submission in the most clumsy way possible. I don’t step back and assess. I don’t coolly check out what’s going on all around me and step to the side a little so I can approach the problem from another angle. No, I just go flailing in like a big dummy.
And lately at work, there are lots of problems. A reorganization, shuffling around of staff, people acting a little strange and out of character because the atmosphere is like right before a big storm—it’s heavy and with all this air of expectation and potential disaster. My approach to projects—jump in and do the work and gut out some long nights and weekends and swing at every problem that crops up—that’s not working so well when the problems are more delicate and when people are edge and when I’m on edge. I’ve got to figure out how to get more accuracy and more control and, really, just calm the fuck down.
