Treina duro, luta facil

Last year I competed in my first Finnish Open and lost in first round in blue belt division. I felt kind of sad at the moment and even cried a bit, but it was quite easy to stand up again with a smile and try to get better. Last weekend in my debut in elite class I managed to defeat one of the girls I most look up to, seriously something I was not counting on at all. And still I come back home without a feeling of success.

I look back to the year and I feel that I accomplished a lot in bjj competitions. Despite wins and medals, mainly I have learnt the proper attitude that allows me to give my best while competing. I have learnt to never fear the possibility of a loss, to step onto the mat smiling and willing to fight, to never give up and to believe in myself. I have also learnt that no matter what I do or what I achieve it will be for myself, only myself. 

It feels good to know that I could win my first fight in europeans with one month of purple belt experience; that when for the first time foreigners were allowed in Finnish Team Championships I gave my 100% and won all my 4 fights in open class for my team; that I could go to Finnish Open and face someone like Charlotte von Baumgarten, and although I obviously lost to her I could wrestle without having any doubts. But then again, not a feeling of success.

There is a point in time in which competing started to feel surprisinlgy easy, no matter who my opponents are. The key for this success is clear: "treino duro, luta facil". Indeed the harder the training gets, the easier the competitions is. I have always thought about that "physically" and not "mentally", but now I know the latter is definitely the determining factor. Eventually I had nothing to loose and everything to win, from where comes both the success and the emptyness...

I never wanted to be a super competitor or a reference for anyone, I just wanted to belong in a team. Competition has been always a secondary thing for me.  I used to think that I will succeed in competition when walking through the fighting area would be as easy as walking thorugh the gym tatame, but the truth is that I only starting winning when the first thing was easier than the second one. Now I understand in a different way this saying "Treina duro, luta facil"... As a grim life joke, at this point going to training is so stupidly hard that any competition seems like a walk in the park.

It is not the amount of pushups I do, but the life lessons I learn that allow me to achieve victories.

Photo by Henrik Siiskonen

Train with the enemy

Lately I have been having a rollercoaster of feelings about training and that got me thinking about the BIG question: Why do I train? 

I have small goals like training techniques or practicing a position, that get me going for a week; and a bit bigger goals like competitions that can get me going for months... but when I think about next year, and the following five, why do I keep training?

In the last couple of years I have done probably about 90% of my training hours in bjj and that is because I have been motivated. For some time now I have been trying to get that feeling back, if I had it before I can get it again, but I still need to know how!

Luckily some time ago I got the good advice of writting a bjj diary and it has been quite interesting to read it. I didn't keep it up for a long time but enough so that today I can have the key to get my mojo back :)

Interestingly, I wrote only one page for my first two years of training: 

For the first year I wrote about how everthing seemed fun and awesome at the beginning and how I got my girl Peke as training partner. Then how some guys didn't seem to like rolling with me (I wrote about this guy that I still remember who was so embarrased because he "was even loosing to the girl"), how my coach discouraged me to compete, how every training started to suck, and how I ended up practicing techniques from a DVD in a corner of the tatami with Peke.

However, one of the most important parts of my training in Spain was the day I met Vero. Apparently she saw a video of my first competition (crappy rolling patatoes in action) and she arrived to my gym in order to ask me if I would train with her. I remember I saw her standing in the tatami all tall and fit with her awesome Keiko Gi (at that time I rocked the training fashion with a 15€ karate kimono from Decathlon, a retarded face, two braids and the belt tied just below my boobs). It was terribly hard to gather courage and not pee over myself from fear and excitement, but the most intense feeling of the day was gratitude. This girl who was a million times better than me and belonged to the same belt/weightclass didn't want to kick my ass or show me how much better she was to push her ego: she wanted to team up with me. Because of some issues with my ex-coach she never came back to our gym, however, I managed to keep contact with her. 

My first bjj competition. I wish someone would have told me about the belt... but still, nice memories :)

After that first page I changed gym and I started writing with noticeable increasing excitement. I wrote about the girls beginners course where I met Malika and Shaniqua and later Mercedes, and how the number of girls in class started to rise quickly. I wrote a lot about how we all trained together for competitions and travelled there as a girls team. I told the stories of the roadtrips to girls-only seminars, of how emotional were the girls' belt promotion, and about the time Susanne and Vero visited Oulu in order to train with us. I even had some drawings of our girls' team t-shirt and gi patch. In the last chapter I talked about how the girls team met to watch Outi win the Worlds and how much we cried when she phoned us after the fights. 

I wrote about friendship and team spirit, and how I felt that together we could achieve anything.

Kajaani Open 2014 - First bjj competition as Kamppailuklubi Girls Team

KK-Girls team graduation 2013 - Original photo Tomi Kaarela

NLO Oulu 2014. Photo by Tuomo Väinämö.

I couldn't help but notice that my texts were mostly about happy stories and good feelings. I think it would have been nice also to have written about the bad times when my knees were shaking too much to step through the gym's door, and how Malika stood next to me and helped me direct my way back inside. It is good to remember that people are around also in bad times and it is the same friendship I talked about that keep us going.

Reading and thinking about all these moments gives me the answer to the "why do I train" question: I train in order to learn and I train to win, but above all I train to enjoy life with my friends. Some of them stay close and some of them eventually disappear but the point of this journey is to always meet new friends and training partners. I am happy to be able to say that I have become friends with almost all the girls I have competed against. The fact that we might face each other again in competition will never be a problem in order to train together. 

I remember quite often a conversation I had with my teammate Marilena just before I attended my first girls-only seminar. It was a few months before europeans and we were discussing about the competition-mode feeling and how to have the best attitude in such kind of event. She suggested "maybe you should ask yourself what do you want the girls to think of you once you are done training" and I  inmediatly though "I wish they thought that training with me feels great and they want to train with me again". Thanks to that idea I have developed many good friendships in addition to my technique. 

Today I realize that Vero had that same attitude when we met and it is the reason why over four years later we are still training together. She has always had my respect and admiration for her skills and humility, but today I bow to her for teaching me the first principle I should never forget in training. She taught me how with the right attitude my "enemy" can turn into my best friend.

Vero :) I love you shosho!

Just fight

I have been reluctant to write a new post for months because "if you've got nothing nice to say, then don't say nothing!"

But today I feel like telling a story of how teaming up with girls in bjj could push me beyond all barriers I have faced lately. I tell this story because I feel it is worth telling. After falling into a dark pit and seriously thought about quitting I found some amazing ladies on the mat. I found an unbelievable treasure.

One year ago I decided to try and win the Europeans. In order to get competition experience I travelled to every tournament I could find that would allow me to fight, and signed up to all the possible female bjj seminars. Training was hard and especially joyful. The preparation for my goal gave me courage to face my fears in bjj: pushing myself to try to fight my best against higher belts, choosing sparring partners much bigger and stronger than me, working on my standup... and once my head was in the correct place, everything else just started going along.

About a month and a half before the europeans I got my purple belt and all my dreams and expectations suddenly vanished. My coaches knew about my intentions so when I heard my name during the graduation my heart broke into a million pieces. In the past I heard stories from people who have been in this situation, but I could never imagine the pain and misery that it could bring into my life.

Pic of my graduation, by Tuomo Väinämö

Once I cried my eyes completely off I had to start moving on. It was hard to realize that no one was going to get me out of my misery, but at the end it was "my problem". Of course, one thing is deciding to do something and another thing is to actually do it... 

I went back to Spain for christmas holidays. At first I did not want to put on the gi and not even look at the belt, but step by step I managed to gather my things and got to the door of a friend's gym. By "step by step" I mean my boyfriend gathered all my things and literally kicked (repetedly) my ass until I landed in front of our friend's gym (I love you Jen). As I was walking up the stairs I felt I was some sort of impostor, a fake fighter dressed up in a shamefull costume. My ass was beaten really hard that day by all the blue belts and when my eyes were informed that they could start calling the tears reserves, the coach Valdir Kabeza asked me to roll. I had about three seconds to decide what to do while he tied the black belt on his waist. Then he smiled at me and made me smile back, and I decided I would fight. For few minutes I forgot all about the pain and misery and I enjoyed every movement until we finished. Then he said "Aaaah cara, you are a good one". 

I treasure that moment because only then I started moving on. I decided that I needed to keep training and I needed to find girls for that! I didn't have time to go looking for women gym by gym so I tried the Mission Impossible: Girls Open Mat!!! After finding a great gym that lent us the tatame for free, I wrote messages to all the bjj girls I know in Madrid and made a facebook event. 

Four days later 18 girls appeared in the door... and hell, one of them drove 500km to come train with us!!! Throughout the 3 hours of training I could not stop smiling for a single second. After all the sadness, the emptiness and the tears I was there with all the new and old friends enjoying bjj again.

These girls reminded me of the reason why do I do this, why should I keep trying every day... I thought "they feel like my team" and I could not have known back then how right I was.

BJJ ladies Open Mat, Madrid January 2015

With my batteries charged again I went back to Finland and faced a broken heart, a failed research project and a doomed quest for a victory at the Europeans. All of this living 4500km away from my people, in a land with 2 hours of sunlight per day and an average temperature of -15ºC (59 F) with a broken car. Not bad for a challenge, right?

Well, it was the hardest road I have ever had to walk in my life. The motivation went up and down but I always had the support from the girls as well as from my boyfriend (who had to convince me almost every couple days to keep moving forward). Time went by and I was in Lisboa with Jen and my mum (yes, I have an amazing mum: She has no idea what bjj is but she came to support me and patiently watched all the matches for 4 days. And she did not even bring a book or anything to the arena). One of the greatest experiences I got from this tournament was the chance to be with all the girls I met at the open mat and support them before their fights. Everbody knows that you enter the mat alone, but how cool is it when you look to the fence and see your bjj-family there? I was extremely moved to be part of that moment and felt that I was helping them find the courage to go for it.

And right there the magic started happening. They all fought with such an incredible drive that it was impossible not to feel inspired: Urabayen and Zinguerela are 38 and 46 years old and yet they were fighting in adult division winning fights and kicking some ass; my baby Elsa had to change teams not long ago and had an injury, but it took her about 30 seconds to submit her first opponent; It took Elisa about 15 seconds to do the same; Vanessa had a really hard weightcut but gave every breath in her fight; Jimena fought in a higher weightclass than usually and submitted a huge girl in her first fight; Dimitra just got her blue belt few months ago too and she absolutely smashed 3 opponents... None of them had an "easy road" and they gave their best performance. "And here I have been" I thought to myself "all this time crying about my problems, while these girls have NO EXCUSES".

Sometimes you find the right people at the right time, and these girls made me realize that I spent too much time thinking about being underweight, feeling lonely and very unexperienced, and instead I could think I was strong, independent and eager to start my journey. I decided to forget that my opponents had over 3 years of more training than me, that they all held previuos IBJJF gold medals while I had nothing, that they all had a lot of things I did not. It did not matter who they were, because like all my new friends I came here to fight.

The moment before the fight is something I used to think a lot about. Usually I wondered how would I feel standing next to my opponents: will I feel like a winner, will I be eager or scared to go the mat? Nothing like I imagined, I actually started dancing listening to my music and felt just happy to be there. With that attitude I went to the mat and won my first ever match in purple belt division. It took me a whole year of competing but I finally understood that the only one that should have my attention before the fight is me. Someone told me once "If there is no enemy within the enemy outside can do us no harm". So true.

After all finished I was not particularly excited about fighting in adult purple belt division, or winning my first match against a more experienced purple belt, or getting a medal. Those things are OK, but not amazing. The absolutely BEST feeling was after my opponent tapped and I became aware of my win, I looked up and saw my boyfriend yelling, my mum clapping from far away in her seat and all the girls from the Open Mat shouting and jumping like crazy people over the fence right in front of me. That memory is worth the hard work, the pain, the tears and everything else. Whenever I feel again like quitting I remember that moment and why do I really do this.

It is hard to think of myself as a "warrior" or something similar. But I am cool being a nobody among a lot of people because at the end what makes me who am I is who I choose to surround myself with. When the messenger of mysery cames to visit you, what are you going to do? what will keep you in the game? Being around these ladies reminded me that if I can look up, I can get up :) And if I can do it, everyone else can too.

Jen and I <3 Photo by Tuomo Väinämö.