Sick, tournament result

Like many mom-dad-kids families I know, ours doesn't have much of a safety net in place in the event that mom gets sick.  And that's where we're at right now.  It started yesterday.  It's nothing too serious, just a head cold, but I feel the urge to knock myself in the head with a sledgehammer just to get some rest. 

M'hijo did take a 2-hr nap yesterday, while Sahsez played at a friend's house, so that was a blessing.  He's down right now and as soon as I finish this post, my morning pages, a neo-citran, and a bowl of chicken soup, I'm going to try to sleep again myself.  He'll probably cry for me just as I finally drift off!

This is a particularly bad time for me to be ill because I am supposed to be getting things ready for our trip.  We leave on Saturday morning, theoretically.  Possibly Sunday.

Oh, the tournament.  It started badly, with us arriving late due to very slow service at the cafe we'd gone to for breakfast.  My fault for not really taking the 10:30 start time seriously and showing up at eleven, betting on none of my divisions being called that early.  Well, guess what?  I missed my patterns division by ten minutes.  So I was upset, but actually, the other people in my division were all in my club (three others) and they all got a medal, so  it worked out well.  I do regret that I wasn't able to perform my pattern in the tournament environment, because that is a bit scary to me and I wanted to get over my fear.  I'll have to wait a few months now until I get another chance to do that.

Then, we had four or five glorious hours or waiting!  "Hurry up and wait!" is how one of the competitors put it.  It was a bit tricky having both of my kids there, and being all antsy about competing, and also not wanting to get worn out amusing them and carrying M'hijo around and stuff.  I ended up relying on Tobias even more than I thought I would.  He was a good sport though, chatting with all the people from the club, even though he doesn't know most of them very well, and taking M'hijo for little walks and keeping Sahsez from going ballistic.  Still, I won't put them through that again.  It's just too long and boring a day for them.  This may mean no off-Island tournaments for me until M'hijo weans, but oh well. 

Finally, I got to fight.  Only first, I had to receive a medal.  See, it turned out that at my rank (beginner) there was no one else signed up for sparring.  So I won a gold medal by default.  Not exactly what I had hoped, but what can you do?  I'll just assume that if there were any other competitors at my level, I would have beat them. 

Luckily, there were three other competitors one level up, so I got to fight.  I lost a fight and won a fight and this gave me a bronze.  Then, because I was a "gold-medallist" I qualified for the women's sparring grand championship round, where I lost again.  But hey, I got three fights!  That's pretty good.  It seems that most people's main goal with the tournaments is not necessarily to win a medal, but to get as many fights as they can.  Of course, you are more likely to get more fights if you win a fight, but in my case, I lucked out with getting three. 

I expected to be nervous of fighting in front of so many people.  I wasn't.  I really hardly even noticed the people around me, just my opponent.  I think my coach probably had to call me over three times before I noticed that he had called a timeout to talk to me, because I was just so engaged in the fight. 

I expected the fights to be of moderate or low difficulty.  They weren't!  They were so much harder !  What really surprised me was how poorly my cardiovascular held up.  I think I'm in pretty good shape right now but man, halfway through each match, I was breathing very heavily and wondered if I'd be able to continue.  But there's something about the ref saying "FIGHT!" that has the effect of turning off my tiredness.  One second, I'd be thinking "Naptime" the next, I'd be on fire again, trying to score like my life depended on it.    

I expected the fights to be about as fun as sparring class at the club.  THEY WERE SO MUCH FUNNER.  Even when I was losing badly, it was just so neat.  I get almost as much pleasure out of someone else getting an awesome point on me as I do getting an awesome point on them, so the only really bad thing about my sucking was that the matches were over more quickly. 

That said, all I can think about is the opponent that beat me (I fought her twice, she won twice) and how I'm going to beat her next time.  Unfortunately, I won't be training for the entire month of October, and then there's NaNoWriMo in November, and then Christmas, etc. etc., but my club is hosting a tournament in February, and man she'd better be there.  I may not beat her in February (after all she'll be training too, it's not like I can expect her to take a break and let me catch up) but I do intend to get a few more points on her. 

I've been puzzled about something I've seen in  sparring: it's the hug at the end.  A hug with a stranger that you've just been pummeling for two minutes.  What is the deal with the hug?  I wouldn't hug a stranger who hadn't just been trying to kill me, so why would I hug one that had?  The kids sometimes do it, the men usually do it, and the women ALWAYS do it.  But why, I've wondered.   Surely a bow and a handshake or a high-five suffice to show "No hard feelings, good fight".  The hug seems like taking it a bit far.

I now have the answer to this mystery!  The answer (for me, anyway) is that during the fight (presuming no one's fighting dirty), paradoxically, you actually build up good feelings for your  opponent, so that by the end of it, you like them so much you can't help hugging them.  It's such a strange thing.  It feels like when you hug a boy after you dance with him, even if you don't really know him.  It's like "We've done this thing together, and it was good, and I want to thank you for that and show you that I appreciate you and like you". 

Or the hug could also mean, "Oh thank you so much for not breaking my nose!" Which no one did.  Thank God.