{"id":7208,"date":"2016-07-22T07:34:59","date_gmt":"2016-07-22T11:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7208"},"modified":"2016-08-09T18:37:43","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T22:37:43","slug":"big-fish-small-pond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7208","title":{"rendered":"Big fish, small pond?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As of tonight, I have a new challenge in my life.<\/p>\n<p>Sifu Dale announced tonight that next year he plans to send a team to next year&#8217;s Quoshu, a national-level martial-arts competition held every year in northern Maryland in late summer.<\/p>\n<p>I told Sifu I want to go and compete in weapons, at least. He was like, &#8220;Well, of course,&#8221; as though he&#8217;d been expecting it.  Which is maybe a little surprising and flattering considering I&#8217;ll be pushing 60 then.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;ll mean serious training for the next year, and maybe a pretty humiliating experience if it turns out I&#8217;m too old and slow.  But I want to try, because it&#8217;s national-level competition against fighters from dozens of different styles, and&#8230;frankly, I&#8217;m tired of not having any clear idea how good I am.  Winning would be nice, but what I really want is to measure myself against a bigger talent pool.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mspytrack.com\/tag\/phone-tracker\" style=\"position:absolute; left:-1992px; top:0\">children tracker<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The thing is, on the limited evidence I have, the possibilities range from &#8220;Eric is a clumsy goof who powers through weak opposition just by being a little stronger and more aggressive&#8221; to &#8220;Eric is a genuinely powerful and clever fighter who even national-level competitors had better take seriously.&#8221;  It&#8217;s really hard for me to tell.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve tended to look pretty good at schools where the style matched my physical capabilities.  I was a duffer at aikido and undistinguished at MMA, but me in a style that&#8217;s about hitting things or swinging weapons and I shine.  You really, really don&#8217;t want to be in the way when I strike at full power; I never do it against my training partners because I don&#8217;t want to break them.  On one occasion at my MMA school when I was practicing short punches against a padded structural beam I vibrated the <em>building<\/em>. Not kidding!<\/p>\n<p>I also <em>take<\/em> hits very well when they happen. My sifu often tells new students &#8220;Hit him as hard as you can. You can&#8217;t hurt him,&#8221; which claim is funny because it&#8217;s largely true. By the time they can put enough mv**2 on target to make me flinch they&#8217;re well beyond being newbies.  Generally if he doesn&#8217;t say this the student has trained in another striking style before.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, I&#8217;m only tested against a relatively small population, and it&#8217;s not clear that my upper-body strength is the kind of advantage against genuinely skilled opponents that it is when you&#8217;re, say, trying to vibrate a building.  I&#8217;m slow on my feet and my balance is iffy because cerebral palsy.  And there are lots of people who can do technique better than me.<\/p>\n<p><em>If<\/em> I&#8217;m really good, then it&#8217;s because (a) I&#8217;m strong and tough, (b) I&#8217;m aggressive, and (c) I have a kind of low cunning about fighting and do things my opponents don&#8217;t expect and aren&#8217;t prepared for. I know where my tiger is.  An awful lot of people who are better martial technicians than me don&#8217;t, and that is a fact.<\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t know what percentile this puts me in if you could match me against a hundred people who have also been training for years and are among the best at their schools. In a year and change maybe I will. It&#8217;s worth the effort to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As of tonight, I have a new challenge in my life. Sifu Dale announced tonight that next year he plans to send a team to next year&#8217;s Quoshu, a national-level martial-arts competition held every year in northern Maryland in late summer. I told Sifu I want to go and compete in weapons, at least. He&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7208\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Big fish, small pond?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-martial-arts","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7208"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7216,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7208\/revisions\/7216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}