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.
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| 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.
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| Kajaani Open 2014 - First bjj competition as Kamppailuklubi Girls Team |
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| KK-Girls team graduation 2013 - Original photo Tomi Kaarela |
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| 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.
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| Vero :) I love you shosho! |
