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I was pitted as nage against 3 guys in my class one of whom attacks hard and fast, much more so than most guys in the dojo and doesn't budge unless he really gets thrown. So the result was I made a complete mess of my randori. At least that's what I thought and a lot of it was actually that I wasn't really moving fast enough so I'm not used enough to full speed training.
What was a surprise to me though was that when I walked out of the dojo, I got a very different reaction from my fellow yudansha. They were all going, way to go! Hey I really liked your hip movement when you threw him..hey we were rooting for you there etc etc. I was very surprised as my sensei had very clearly indicated I had not done well and then proceeded to show the class how it should be done. And one of the assistant instructors when I passed him just said, you need more practice ie that sucked in there and you need to do better. So basically I was even more puzzled by my fellow yudansha's reactions.
I think in the end while my instructors were right and my technique clearly was inadequate on technical grounds, many of the senior yudansha all hadn't expected I could take down this uke at all. I'd missed my chance to take him down properly and instinctively just flipped him in a static throw once I figured he wasn't about to let go. Since he's considerably bigger than I am (not hard since I'm pint sized) I think no one really expected me to be able to flip him from a static position. Naturally in real life I'd have been slaughtered several times over but well, it wasn't real life, it was mat life. So they were basically cheering the underdog.
Anyway, the nice thing is clearly that while I was initially mortified by my own performance on the mat, clearly i've gained some street cred, or mat cred!
I should however try to make peace with the uke for dumping him quite unceremoniously and certainly not gently on the mat.
07-26-2007 10:08 AM 
