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I went to a BJJ gym this summer; just visiting to check it out. Some free rolling at the end, and I pulled a muscle, was out of it for a few weeks. Then a HEMA tournament, then a cold, then overtime at work, then a few weeks of single parenting, another HEMA tournament, then a flu...and here comes your post, reminding me of the fact that today, this very evening, I could go to the local (non-Brazilian) Ju-Jutsu gym for another trial visit. I had one scheduled ages ago that didn't materialize due to one of the aforementioned flus. Which means that I need to quickly figure out an excuse as to why I can't go today. Guess I'm still out of sorts from the flu? Didn't get enough sleep last night? Feels bad, but I'll be able to live with it better than with showing up and getting trashed because I'm in just that bad a shape.
So let me derail this a little to talk about the most recent HEMA tournament. Because that one was at my old club, and in the evening - what kinds of madmen start training martial arts at 19:00 and go on until 22:00? Well, we did, back when we were university students. Oh how the sinful life of my past catches up with me now. I was tired before I even got there, and ignoring the signs of the oncoming flu on the two-hour drive.
Normally, when I arrive for a tournament, I gear up as quickly as possible, but do only the lightest of warm-up exercises. Basically just a few fencing steps, a few guard transitions and a handful of strikes. To see whether the gear sits correctly, and to remind myself of which way to hold the sword. Usually this comes with me noticing the same things every time.
The answer to all of those is, of course, "Because you haven't actually trained at all, or done any other sports or athletic exercises with any regularity, since early 2020. And you're getting old.".
Not this time though. Because this tournament simply took up the time slot of a regular training session, and the trainers were present, they started the event with communal warm-up exercises. The stuff that, six years ago when I was still a regular, would have come as naturally to me as climbing a flight of stairs. Well, not anymore. I was close to vomiting by the end of it, heart hammering, drenched in sweat, out of breath and all strength. And of course the schedule was tight and I had to gear up and get ready to fight immediately anyways.
So I went and did the needful. Terrorized some of the newbies with guards they had no idea how to deal with, with creating the illusion of distance to land unexpected thrusts, with letting their strikes repeatedly wiff because they don't actually utilize their range (until I got a very embarassing bonk on the head when I overplayed that hand) and some cheap shots to the hands when separating from a bind and they mistook that for deescalation (Though in one such separation, one of the newbies got a beautiful thrust to my throat in). Notice a theme here? It's all tricks and leveraging experience. When fighting against the more experienced comeptitors (who of course all know me and what I'm up to), they just went all-in and either trashed me through superior strength and/or speed, went into grappling distance and folded me up, or even sprung my own dirty tricks on me. I don't hold up under actual pressure anymore; the muscle memory may be there but the muscle isn't anymore.
I still enjoyed it. It was fun. I recovered somewhat over the course of the evening; the fights themselves being less strenuous than the warm-up. I chide myself for going in without a plan this time and just screwing around; I know I could've performed better because the competition wasn't much stronger than at the last tournament, and there I actually got a lot done purely by merit of having that good plan. I met some old friends I hadn't seen in a while. Felt a sense of homecoming to a familiar place and familiar activities. The chairman even gave me special patch for the ten-year anniversary of my membership. Which I chuckled a little at, because I had been a member for several years prior to that in the predecessor club, but apprently that didn't count for the current-day buerocracy. Nevermind, I really did appreciate that they thought of me and thanked them accordingly.
But of course nothing is the same anymore. For every old friend I met again, there was one stranger and three empty places. More on those empty places later. You can't leave your jacket in the locker room anymore because of rampant theft. Adults are not allowed to be in the locker room at the same time as children anymore. O tempora. But that's marginal. What bothers me is the following. We had always had a culture of stupid jokes. Nothing worth retelling, basically just inside jokes that functioned much like 4chan memes; easily memorized applause lights for socially inept nerds. Some drove that, some were the butt of it, some tried their best to ignore it and focus on the fencing. And I know, I know that I'm a grumpy old man now, and badly out of touch, but those jokes have gotten out of hand. Not worse, or crossing boundaries, but oppressive in their repetitive omnipresence. Every conversation is just a nonstop exchange of meaningless in-group signals. "A game of emote-with-me", this stuff was called recently. Sometimes variety is inejcted by quoting the internet meme du jour. If anyone present was serious about the sport, they didn't show it. Most of the newbies were busy trying to one-up each other with statements meant to showcase how crazy or special each one was. Socially inept nerds still, but I just don't gel with the new generation.
Beyond this point comes the Culture War.
After the tournament, we went to a nearby pizza place. At 10 PM, fuck me, and with a two-hour drive still ahead of me, but I don't get to be there often. Turns out I regretted that part of the evening and I should've just headed straight home. Because the next hour was a non-stop leftist ranting session. It started off with a twenty-minute hate session for the autistic club treasurer who managed to antagonize everyone. Then came the politics. Comparing everyone right of the social democrats to literal Hitler. The anesthesiologist telling us what he would do if he learned that one of his patients was such a "nazi". Someone else recounting how he taught his kid vulgar anti-fascist songs. Condemnations of the EU's relenting on the internal combustion engine ban. A general agreement on the inability of the market to do anything positive, and the need for more regulation. Several rants about how ridiculous it is to exclude foreigners or attribute anything negative to immigration. Three cheers for diversity. By a table manned (and womanned) exclusively by straight upper-middle-class white native Germans who managed to bully all the non-believers out of the club (the working class, the sexist-jokes-maker, the non-vaccinated, the German-paganism-inclined, the Christians, even the one foreigner we used to have) . Oh, and dear Americans, they were not kind to your democratically elected President of the United States. The big orange satan was the ultimate boo-light. And to cap it all of, a big announcement of how the people present finally managed to march through the institutions of larger organization our club is part of to change the statutes so that membership of or support for any right-wing organization will be grounds for immediate exclusion in the future.
Guess who ate his apple chips, kept quiet, and half-pretended to fall asleep in his chair? Please ignore me, I'm just an old fossil trying to die in peace.
Back when, we'd generally not discuss politics. It just wasn't what anyone was there for. Occasionally conversations strayed there, but effectively only in 1-on-1 situations, and then we genuinely did accomplish polite disagreement or laying out differences in basic assumptions, and left it there. But I guess everything is poltical now, and you're either with them or against them. I don't know whether I'll ever make another trek to my old club. It pains me to say this. I paid my dues and earnestly tried to keep up over the last few years, wore my club regalia and all. But given how much of a hassle it is to get there, and how few of the old guard are left, and how much the new people there grate on me...I think I'll just hit daytime tournaments across the region, diassociate myself from the club, and avoid the social get-togethers from now on. This used to be a very important part of my identity, but it just doesn't work anymore.
It's almost funny how the HEMA people I actually had producive sports-centric interactions with over the last few months included honest-to-god flag-waving communists and nonbinary gendersomethings, but the polite good decent moderate people are rabid ideologues whose politicization of previous apolitical institutions disgusts me. They think I'm one of them. I don't want to deceive them, but I really did not come there for a hill to die on, and so I kept quiet. Almost funny, but ultimately I'm just sad.
Sorry for steering this into CW territory. I just wanted to talk sports, but apparently I had some venting to do.
I've been fighting off a series of colds for a month now. It really interferes with things.
Politically my BJJ gym is kind of opposite of my rock climbing gym experiences.
Climbing gyms are self-consciously aggressively blue tribe, but secretly conservative because of the naturally white, elitist, nature of the sport. Serious outdoor sports cannot by nature be really inclusive. They can be friendly, welcoming, but ultimately the nature of the sport is that it revolves around travel to remote locations, the more remote the better, the more difficult to reach the better. No rock climber likes crowds. Rock climbing forwards the myth of complete gender equality (to be fair, rock climbing comes closer than any other real sport), and does its best to promote women's climbing, but if you're going to climb a 5.10 and she only climbs 5.9, sorry. Rock climbing gyms circa 2020 loved to do BLM stuff, often to distasteful extents, but they're all lily white. There are probably more socialists than Republicans in your average gym, but the nature of any workout is that it makes you conservative, correlates your personal development with your personal effort.
My BJJ gym, by contrast, is self-consciously red tribe, but actually very inclusive. It's full of serious Christians, gun nuts, cops, divorced dads, off color jokes, and a full understanding that the women are playing along but in a different class. But, it's also the United Colors of Benneton. The owner is Puerto Rican, the Monday coach that gave him his black belt is white, the Thursday instructor (whose classes I mostly avoid because the moves are too complicated for me) is black, the weekend coaches are two puerto ricans one a doctor and the other a truck driver during the week, the other black belts are bearded white guys. Racist jokes are occasional, but the rules aren't enforced by anyone glaring at you or shaming you, but if you cross a line you risk a bad round with Andre. Gay jokes are constant (how do you even do BJJ without gay jokes), and to my knowledge we don't have any gay guys, but if one joined and played the game, I don't think anyone would really care.
I actually explained this to a friend of my wife's who runs the local LGBTQWERTY youth center, that if she wants to help trans kids who are looking for an athletic outlet, send them to our BJJ gym instead of telling them to join the track team. As long as they don't enter a comp, which 80% of people never do anyway, they'll just be them around the gym, nobody is going to bother them. I'd just understand that if I roll with Pat that I roll harder than I would with a woman, but not as hard as I would with a teenage boy. This is already an adjustment we're all making constantly to accommodate size or experience differences. As long as you show up and try, there's not going to be any hatred.
How fit and strong do you have to be for BJJ to make it enjoyable? Is it a bad sport for someone who picks up injuries easily (tendonitis in various places)? :P
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