I was reading a thread in r/judo today that I think might be of interest. The poster had just been in a fight. A real fight. Some drunk guy started winging punches and he started winging back. He was upset writing the post because he said his training had failed him. Or rather he it. He claimed to have boxed for years and had a good amount of mat time but when this guy started swinging he just started swinging back. No form, no technique, and the part he was most upset about, no judo at all. This brings me to a point I have tried to make a few times. Your reaction to stress is what matters. To put it another way, your grappling under stress is your real grappling. In the case of the Reddit poster, his club judo might be great but his real judo sucks. What you do under stress is what counts, and he did the same thing he would have done had he never trained at all. If you have any illusions about training for self defense this is important and not something you can ignore. I want to be clear that I'm not saying his training was a waste of time, far from it, his technical training is super important, but his mental training was lacking. His reaction to stress was under trained, and as a result his technical training was irrelevant.
Unfortunately there is no real way to know how you will respond to someone trying to hurt you and the stress that brings until it actually happens. I'm not arguing for going out and picking fights, obviously, but until you're in a fight It's all just hypothetical. That said, it's also impossible to know how an astronaut will deal with the stress of blast off before you light the fuse, but that doesn't mean they don't test themselves ahead of time. Exactly the opposite. They spend as much time as possible in the simulator. Simulation isn't the real thing, and they know that. If they screw up they won't die and they know that. It's not the real stress but, it's the best tool they have so they use it.
As martial artists competition is our simulator. Competition is the best way we have to test ourselves under stress. To see how we respond to it and to inoculate ourselves against it. Competition is not a 'real' fight. A grappling match isn't a real fight, there's no striking, etc. but it gives us a fraction of that stress. Even an MMA match isn't a real fight, there's rules, a ref, no sharp edges, but it's awfully fucking close and it gives an even larger sample of that stress. What we do in the face of that sample stress is our best indication of how we would handle ourselves in the face of the full dose.
It would be easy to think that winning or losing determines success in this equation but it doesn't. It's not about if you beat your opponent or not, not about your technique being better than theirs. It's about if you attempt to implement your training or not. I have known many athletes that are phenomenal in the gym. They are incredibly talented when they are comfortable. However, when they compete they crumble under the stress and suddenly play an entirely different game. The leg lasso expert suddenly clings to closed guard. The hyper mobile, hyper aggressive athlete freezes up and fails to move or initiate at all. It's happened to me. I had a match as a blue belt in which I wilted completely. I was seeded against an opponent that I just knew was better than me and I got crushed, which is to say I watched from a weird internal distance as he crushed me. I came off the mat emotional and devastated. I remember saying "I don't know who that was, but it wasn't me." That loss bothered me more than any other. It still does. I have lost many many matches since then, some by more some by less, but none have stung like that. If you have a match and you are true to your grappling, you attempt the techniques you wanted to, you play the game you intended to and you lose, that's ok. No big deal, that's easy to fix. Your techniques didn't work? Improve them. They were the wrong techniques? Get new ones. That's what class is for, that's why we have open mat. If your opponent is technically better, it's a wholly different problem than folding to the stress, and a much easier one to solve. Train more. But, if you went out there and did your best, you tried what you wanted to try, fought the way you wanted to fight and still lost, you should take pride in that regardless of the outcome. The guy that we started talking about, the one who didn't use his judo, wasn't upset he lost a fight, he claims he won it with wild punches, he was upset he the lost to the stress. They are different issues.
That's the point in this long and rambling commentary. What is the true value of competition? Is it a chance to test your technique? Yes, but more than that it's a chance to test yourself and your dedication to those techniques. Your grappling under stress is your real grappling. In this way we can win a match and still lose to ourselves, but perhaps more importantly we can lose a match and still win the day.
I still feel the stress every time I compete. In many ways I hate it. But that's why I do it. It's as much to test myself against the stress as to test my technique against my opponent. The more often I do it, the less stressful it becomes. This is a double edged sword. The more comfortable I get the better I perform, but in some ways the less value the experience holds. If it ever gets too comfortable I will need to up the ante, I'm already considering Combat Sambo, but for the moment grappling feels like enough. Winning matches and medals is nice, but it's not what really counts. Win or lose, doing things that are difficult, not in spite of their difficulty but precisely because of it, is what matters.
One of my many loses. This one was at the 2018 Combat Wrestling World Championships. It was a bitter pill to swallow but I am better off for it.
