Sparring Partners

I love learning escrima.  Classes make me happy, thinking about it makes me happy – it brings me joy.  When I first started learning, I found half a broom handle to practice the movements with.  Now, when I’m working as a lighting designer during intense periods, and can’t make it to class for a while, I practice some basic stuff at home by myself.  Footwork; basic strikes, that kinda thing.  However, there’s only so much a girl can do by herself, and though the gentleman in my life occasionally lets me practice twisty twisty body mechanics stuff on him, there’s only so much he’ll tolerate on a Sunday morning before a cry of, ‘right, tea!’ passes his lips and all violence must cease.

All of which has led me to thinking about sparring partners.

99% of all things we do in escrima ever are done with partners.  We spar (gently) to warm up, we practice drills together, we change partners constantly and, in this way, get to experience (with luck) what it’s like to go up against every size, shape and level of experience in the club.  It’s good – it’s particularly good when, having done a drill with Short Guy, you then do it with Tall Guy, and discover that their methods, their style, their strikes – everything is completely different, yet somehow oddly the same, and what you did before suddenly stops working and you have to adapt.  This makes me happiest of all – every time I get hit it’s a great regret because blimey it can hurt, but it’s also absolutely thrilling because hurrah, learning something new about a thing I didn’t even realise I was doing wrong!  (This is particularly true when my teachers hit me.  A drill which I thought I was doing fine, I’m suddenly going to do very badly when a scary wall of teacher appears in my space, coming at you like you said something rude about its grandmother.  Often painful, frequently terrifying, it’s also one of the highlights of the class.)

It’s interesting observing, as you move through the class, the different kinds of style that different people have.  Certain trends slowly manifest.  For example, the Strong-Yet-Stiff-Male, of whom there are several sub-categories.  Generally he has a great deal of strength in his body when he strikes, but doesn’t actually step much into a space when attacking, and on certain strikes always seems to show his elbow, his arms as he pulls them back for an attack, gaining power from his shoulders rather than his body, so you can see what’s going to happen before it does.  The consequence of this is that he is wonderful to jam (block before anything’s really even happened), but a bit of a nightmare to disarm or use takedowns on, as there’s just so much locked-in-place strength you have to overcome to get there.

There’s a couple of Uber-Strong-Males too, in whose presence you half-wonder whether there’s any point fighting, since they could probably just grab you with thumb and little finger and that’d be it, farewell victory.  (Except let’s face it, beneath this thought is another, harsher revelation that crops up whenever one of the Uber-Strong crowd attack me, and it is this: that the only way I’m going to actually achieve anything against these boys, if they don’t respond with grace when I try a lock, for example, is by really hurting them until they’re more obliging, and no one wants that.)  At the other end of the spectrum are a number of wonderfully Delicate Ladies (I’m not really in that category, I suspect) who’s arms are so thin and light that even I, with my limited sense of remorse in these things, feel a shudder of anxiety every time I do a takedown, in case I break something, and yet whose joints are so supple that if anything you have to keep turning and putting on more pressure to get a lock, lest they just wriggle away from you.

There’s a recurring trend of Too-Polite-To-Ladies, who will strike softly when sparring with me, until I remind him that I’m not going to be soft back.  Then there’s Kung-Fu-Laddies who tend to have done another martial art before, and who is usually fast, strong and prone to putting in kicks when you least expect it (which I personally love, as things I least expect are precisely the sort of things I wish to happen) and will catch you wonderfully off-guard when you least expect it.  There’s Dudes-Who-Flow and who will just keep coming, gracefully and often sneakily, who are amongst my favourite people to spar with as you have to be constantly alert and able to change what you do.   (I’m usually neither.)  Then there’s Dudes-Who-Don’t-Flow, but stop every third of fourth move to shake their heads and chide themselves for not having put their feet in the right place and they too, have great advantages as partners in that my feet are frequently in the wrong place, and occasionally reminding myself of this fact is helpful and good.

Then there’s that moment of surprise when you meet Person-On-Their-Second-Class.  They’ve only had one hour of training, and they’re very, very nervous, and when they first start hitting they’re going to pull punches and come in with absolutely nothing, afraid of striking you.  At this point, being a Good Person (you hope) you stop, and suggest that really, they actually do come for you with their whole bodies, and don’t worry about hitting me because honestly, my teachers have done far worse (and occasionally not even noticed the damage You-Know-Who-You-Are-Ow) and it’d be better for everyone if they gave committed punches.  And then – joy!  From nervous newbie this explosion of energy emerges and not only do you have to move to get out of the way of the strikes, but you get for a moment a sense of what it’d be like to go against someone who hasn’t had two years of learning to control their punches, of learning when to pull power and when to slow an attack in order to be kind – in short, of fighting someone normal.  Someone awesomely, wonderfully, heaven-blessedly normal.  And this too, is brilliant.

Only one thing my club really lacks now, I think, and this is a group of people who don’t do escrima.  I’d like to spar with karate boys.  I want to see what sneaky things tai chi laddies can do, and what they can’t, and where wing chun ladies get their awesome from, and how they use their bodies to achieve miracles.  I want to find out how to deal with taekwondo kicks and judo locks, and at the end of the day I want to experience what it’s like to deal with those most famous and notorious warriors of this age, angry-drunk-males-who-just-want-to-hurt-you-with-a-chair.  But mostly – mostly! – I want to find someone who lives nearby, who’s not exactly brilliant, but just a bit better than me, who doesn’t mind spending a Sunday morning hitting and hitting back, and playing around with joints and footwork, and just generally having all the fun while finding out together, all the stuff that I still don’t even notice I’m doing wrong.