Balance of Inequality – Lessons in Sparring
Twenty seconds into sparring with Den this afternoon, I’m already frustrated. There are hundreds of reasons why I shouldn’t be: Den has 300 fights to his name and that doesn’t happen without countless hours of training, of trying and retrying until “moves” become movement; he’s bigger than I am, faster than I am, has reach advantage and can see everything I’m thinking of doing while I’m still thinking it; and he’s laughing the whole time, reminding me each time he takes my breath away with a punch to the gut or a kick to my ribs that this is fun. It is, no matter how real my mind and body make it, just a game – it’s not a fight.
And so my tactic is to stay calm, dead-pan and non reactive to the ten kicks he’s landed on me and the punches that are causing my eyes to water in just the last minute of this first round. I’m trying to relax, to not think my next strike but just to throw it. I’m trying to maintain my balance and stance so that I’m at least ready to throw a punch or a kick even if I don’t actually get to it in the time it takes Den to hit me again or dance away. I’m pressed into the corner and can think of a dozen ways out but not one of them is actually happening.
Part of my petrified mind – a large part – comes from anticipation of increase. What the hell does that mean? It goes like this: when I was a kid I was the youngest, smallest kid in the family. My brothers picked on each other in the proper pecking order of their ages, but the younger brothers grew larger than the older brothers and eventually the possibility of evening the score worked out. I didn’t grow bigger than my brothers and my age gap was such that there was no way that my single-digit-aged body could cause damage to my pre-teen or teenaged brothers. If, at some point, I got in a Hulk-like rage and managed to hurt one of my brothers, the return was terrible and unfairly hard. My rage increased the energy of the altercation and it became scarier, more painful, more unfair in favor of my tormentor.
So I have this same fear when I’m sparring with a man who is making me feel impotent while he’s taking it easy on me. There is a beautiful thing in Muay Thai and the culture of Thailand and its particular masculinity that all “points” (meaning demonstrations of dominance, landed strikes, etc) must immediately be neutralized or matched – even in play, even when no one is watching. If I decide to just come forward and eat as many kicks or punches as it takes to reach Den and land something on him, there will be a quick and explosive response to bring the score back to Den’s favor. Every time I try to kick him I end up on the floor from my standing leg being swept; so I’m hesitant to kick. I get blasted into the ropes every time I land a punch on his arms, let alone to his body and I’m being conditioned to know that whatever dominance I show will result in a greater display of his power to correct the balance.
The lesson, then, is to know that you have it coming back to you and go anyway, while being prepared to launch a counter to the counter and so on. And just as the return of a blow is quick, the return to a neutral plane where anyone can score is equally fast. My dog is an Australian Cattle Dog or Blue Heeler (she stayed in America with my parents). The temperament of the breed is wonderful and bizarre and one of my favorite things about them is that they act first and think later; they are incredibly stubborn. If you push your Cattle Dog off the couch or accidentally kick it in the jaw because it’s following you too closely (happens a lot) it will “bottle nose” or nip you immediately to bring the score back to zero before giving you a “what was that?” look, or even an apologetic wag of the tale.
My ACD, Zoa.
In this same way the response from a Thai fighter will be immediate and too-fast-for-thought, but it doesn’t last. The escalation of energy is just enough to even the score or pull it into his favor and then it goes quiet again. Getting a strike in on Den does not mean the whole rest of the round is an overwhelming ass-kicking; the escalation, the increase is only enough to even the score and a second strike follows to tip the scale. It is not so much a fall down an endless rabbit hole, but rather a ball being juggled in mid-air.
I really appreciate this balance, Sylvie. As an older brother who used to play “relativity” with you [meaning that with as much effort as you put into a punch or jab from your small frame I would put in my relative effort with my larger frame in return], it is wonderful to read about your understanding of balance and the mental game played out within the situation.
I’ve told many people about the relativity game we played growing up. I also tell them all that I would not care to play this game with you today. I love you and see you as the warrior you are.
Training your body to automaticity is something that takes countless hours of effort. Many times, training others, I see the mind take over the movement – making it choppy and mechanical. Helping athletes to stop their mind from commanding their movements and allowing their reactions and “sense” awareness to take over turn their movements into grace and precision. I witness this from something as simple as ladder drills (quick foot movements that you can do without a ladder easily but with a ladder become increasingly more difficult with thought) to something as complex as balancing on two separate balls (one for hands and one for feet) for pushups and planks.
The more frustrated you become with these situations, the more you begin to think about what just happened, how unfair it is, how difficult it is, etc. All of these thoughts are distractions from the moment – they take you away from the “now.” When Gabe and I used to fight, I didn’t care if he would hit me while I moved in. I was in the “now” and he didn’t understand it because he didn’t want to get hit. This was the only way that I knew to move through the thoughts and barriers that kept me from getting the “even strike.” I just wanted it to be even, I didn’t want to get ahead.
Wow, reminiscing.
I was trying to explain “relativity” to Kevin a while back; your description is more concise.
We just watched a Muay Thai fight on TV with one of the best, most entertaining current fighters: Saenchai. He is amazing, completely joyful in his movements and basically looks like he’s playing while completely taking his opponents apart. The guy he was fighting was actually really good, a guy from England with solid technique and really very tough. But against Saenchai’s relaxed confidence, he looked brittle. The contrast made the fight appear like a blow-out.
There’s a basketball player, I think Kevin Garnett, who runs up sand dunes as part of his training. While that practice is absolutely physically grueling, the physical result is not the true purpose. Rather, he says, the point is that it’s impossible to make it to the top at full speed. Your legs burn out, your lungs get drained and you start sinking; the point is that it’s impossible. It’s mental training, to keep going despite the impossibility of it. I like that very much. Reminds me of an anecdote about how Olympic Wrestler Dan Gable would tell his students “one more round” and then make them just keep working these two-on-one drills for round after round (well beyond his promised “one more”) to see who would break.
And in the end I think that’s what Den is trying to teach me. That if you can stand in there and keep coming back at someone who you have really no chance of bettering – if you can lose repeatedly without losing your will – then you can fight anybody, or endlessly… or both.
I don’t mean to sound flippant about it because I recognize it as an important and complicated question, but in short the major difference in fighting with my brothers versus sparring with Den are: 1) growing up; and 2) my relationship with Den as my trainer is very different from the kind of relationship one has with siblings, where the family dynamic, life-long knowledge of one another, changes in relationship as one ages and having a mix of love for and fear of older brothers is unlike anything I have with Den.
It’s the same issue with training with my husband versus training with a teammate or coach – the personal relationship invites emotional responses to an otherwise detached experience.
When my brothers were picking on me or taking advantage of their size/age against me, the unfairness of it was borne of our bond, a mix of expectations of both the pecking order and the tacit promise for protection from outsiders. It was inherently unfair and the life lesson of “dealing with” unfairness or taking your knocks as the younger sibling is not one that you see as a kid – you see it many, many years later.
But with Den I know he’s teaching me something that I need to know in order to step into the ring with another fighter who is ready for me, who has done the work to meet me in there and do her best to take advantage of her advantages and point out the weaknesses I do my best to hide, as I do hers. He’s picking on me with rules, using his advantages to test my resolve not to demonstrate his dominance for the sake of defining our relationship. That’s what brothers do.
This is really interesting, Sis. I had been thinking (wondering) about your fighting lately in terms of control of the body. Hannah Arendt once (not altogether accurately) attributed to Socrates the discovery that one must rule the body despotically in order to become virtuous. It seemed to me that the excellence of a fighter especially gives evidence for this, as you undergo so much physical toil in preparation for that critical moment of contest. Within the limits of what is good, there is nothing that you will not deny your body or cause it to undergo in order to bring it into the best condition possible.
I had been imagining that when you stepped into the ring, the contest might be described in terms like these: to the fighter who can best control her body goes the victory; and perhaps this superiority is decided by which fighter can best control not only her own body, but in so doing can also in a way control the body of her opponent.
But now, reading your comments above, I understand better how you can say that you have despaired more at some victories than ever you did at some defeats, and rejoiced more at some defeats than ever you did at some victories. If now I understand correctly, the contest is not about dominating your own body and that of your opponent, using both however you wish; but the contest is rather about knowing that you yourself are at the top of your game, that your will and your body are as one – neither failing the other or falling behind. If you can feel that way, who cares whether your opponent gets in more hits?
Well, perhaps I should not presume to understand what a fighter feels, but if I err I hope that you will be so good as to teach me – endlessly.
I think your former understanding is objectively how fights are won/lost in the eyes of judges and your latter realization is in line with the personal experience of the fighter. Neither is incorrect or carries truth at the expense of the other. I think I’ll write a blog post to go into more detail because your reply came just after a conversation over breakfast with Kevin on this very subject.