Why Keep a Judo Journal

1. Because you are a student and students take notes. At the end of a long practice or a clinic when you have learned
   

   AAU National Championships junior winners from Kansas City, 2012

   a lot of moves, one of the best ways to remember them is to sit down and write what you recall. This should be done as soon as possible after you get off the mat. Even if you never look at the journal again, just writing it once is a big boost to memory.

2. For motivation. It helps to have a map or a plan so you stay on track, and creating your own guide is one of the best ways to remind yourself of the progress you are making.
3. To watch for trends in your competition history. As you gather more information about yourself, you will be able to spot patterns that wouldn’t be so obvious with just memory. A detailed training and competition record can quickly show you where you need improvement.
4. Because the pen is mightier than the sword.

How to Keep the Notebook

The most important thing to remember is that this is your journal. There is no right and wrong way to keep it – do what works for you. These are some of the ideas I have found along the way that worked for me and my students back when I was coaching more.

1) Write comments that are meaningful to you. The ideas that people give you about the sport and about your life are going to have a longer use for you than the nitty gritty details about each technique, so try to capture the big picture as well. Here are some examples from my journals:

Hayward Nishioka: “You have to set little goals for yourself. Like I used to see if I could develop a throw that was hard enough to knock the guy out. You have to have the will to throw, to go through the person. Then you have to catch your body up with your mind by blasting in each time in practice.”

Steve Cohen: “You have to have a maximum weight, where if you get past it, a red flag goes up and you say, ‘Whoa, wait a minute.’ ”

Pat Burris: “I used to think that every time they attacked me it was an insult. I went out there thinking that judo was my life, my livelihood, and they were trying to take that away; because Judo is what makes you special and different.”

These comments weren’t just the best from all the journals, they were just one of the first pages I opened to. Stay tuned to this blog for Wednesday and Sunday updates and I’ll be posting more of these kind of conversations. Judo is full of interesting people, and talking to them can give you more ideas than a whole workout. If you’ve had a good discussion one day, then make some notes when you get home, so you can remember it.

Referee Andre Coleman giving a belt tying lesson while John Zabel naps in the background.

2) Keep a list of personal records. These are just simple markers that can keep you inspired to surpass yourself. You might record the most pushups you’ve ever done, the most throws you’ve done in a minute, or the fastest time it takes you to run to school. It could be the longest workout you’ve attended or the most weight you can lift, or the farthest you’ve ever run. Keep track of anything that will keep you pushing your limits and trying to improve.

3) Write down your goals. Make sure your goals are measurable, and depend on your efforts and not just outcome. For example, winning a match is an outcome goal, whereas making 20 attacks in that match is a measurable goal you can directly affect.

4) Keep a competition record. I noted the tournament, who I fought, what club or country they represented, win or lose, the score, and the winning technique. It may sound like a lot, but I could get this into a single line of the notebook, so that I could see the patterns pretty quickly as the year went on.

5) Build a pocket into the journal. Use duct tape or electrical tape to attach a stiff piece of cardstock on the back cover so you can slip loose pieces of paper into this pocket. This is great for tournament brackets or clinic handouts or notes you might write when you are separated from the journal.

6) You don’t have to write every day. You want to write when you are trying to figure out something new, when someone says something inspiring, or when you want to remember a new move. These things tend to come in bunches. If you write boring stuff in your journal, you’ll never want to reread it, and it gets repetitive to keep making entries. The point is to be inspired, so write things that are interesting to you.

Just do it!

Once you get started, you’ll find out some of the new benefits for yourself. Keeping a notebook is a great tool to improve your Judo, coordinate your total training schedule, and keep yourself inspired.

Max Hairshed at our wedding. If we could love God as much as our dogs love us, maybe we could have the trust I look for in The Fog Poem.

My friends are saying my poems are prayers.  It took me a long time to feel like I could trust God for guidance.  It’s terrifying to trust so much when I have been self-sufficient so long.  A while ago I wrote The Pitbull Poem about needing to achieve to feel like a person of worth. Yet as a Christian I can know that God values me just as I am. There came a point where I got too tired to fight the evil that was telling me I was worthless, and at just that point my friend Debra told me a story about a time she’d felt that way. “I just had to recite in my head, ‘blood of Jesus, body of Jesus,’ over and over,” she said. “I was just too tired to do anything else.”

The pitbull poem was the one stuck in my head when this friend wanted to pray for me one Tuesday at a class.  I think it’s about all the ego and fear and toughness and driving to achieve that I have to start letting God take away.  The Pitbull Poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ12n1B7jOM

And so this next poem, The Fog Poem, is the follow up, or the next generation or version of that idea:

The Fog Poem

If I could sit in this Fog and call out to my God maybe it would lift.

The shadows shifting, malicious and twisting, poking indecision into all my existing,

The despair heavy upon me, I don’t even know how to keep going on clean

Confusion challenging me, illusion moving way too malleably, my dreams defusing down

Into this pit where I don’t even want to move any longer,

This acid fog eating into my bones, I’m falling down as they crumble,

Facedown and pleading, nothing left I can do.

No way out of this but through this, The hardest thing of all to ask for help,

admit I’m caught again, beat again, by the same old deadly mist I thought I knew this,

So I suck up my final power to share my misery and weakness, reach out,

With the very last piece of my mind unbreached by damaging destruction and doubt,

And with a gasp, I find hands warm there in the fog, showing a way to a clearing,

How God was there all along, he was carrying freely, never been more near me,

Waiting for there to be less of me so there could be more of Him,

He answered.

He fought for me, brought a release, a new way to be free with more peace,

Stillness to my heart cracking with overwhelming love, amazing new life,

And each time I live it more, the fog becomes something I have power to endure

Sit in the darkness and say, “Here I am Lord.”

Even if my brains are scrambled, exhaustion beyond the manageable in my dreams and their demand pull,

And I’m dragged back into the Fog, I just have to call out to my God.

-Corinna West

Do you have any maps out of trouble like The Fog Poem?

Our wedding was under a bridge, the cathedral of the Riverfront Heritage Trail. It was an absolutely beautiful location. We had 126 or so people come, our biggest party ever. We throw house parties once in a while, with about 25 people, but this seemed to be much bigger. I asked my aunt who was visiting, “Is this a big project, or am I just disorganized?” Well, it was also that I made the wedding into an art show, an alley kat race, a concert, a disc golf demo, and a community fire in the homeless people’s camp under the bridge. So there were a lot of things in motion.

Here’s a review of some of the best photos. All the photos in this set were taken by Claus Wawrzinek.

This story happened this winter when it was about 30 degrees for several months with lots of snow. I had these bike parking wars going at my church because I wanted to park inside when the bike was clean so that I didn’t have to gear up and unlock in the cold. This was during the first round of my winter spiritual emergency. I went to the church and asked the church secretary to to pray for me about the demons that were bugging me. She had a good question, “What do the demons want?”

My loaded bike crossing State Line road from Indiana to Illinois. Bike parking wars make me think twice about what businesses I frequent.

The answer I figured out later, they want to fight battles and not the war. Pointless battles that just alienate people, frustrate me, and suck up my time so I don’t get useful stuff done. Battles that make me lose the overall big picture like bike parking wars. Like in my job as a mental health advocate when I say, “You are doing this all wrong.” Instead of “I know a better way to do this.”

How not to win bike parking wars:

So the church kept telling me I couldn’t park inside which confounded me as their lobby is something like 20,000 square feet. Most buildings with lots of floor space have no problem with bicycles inside.  But the Welcome Dude had told me not to store the bike inside because it made the lobby look bad. I got mad, thinking that bicycles look awesome! They should be decoration everywhere! But the Welcome Dude told me and my bike friend to take them outside. The second time my friend and I came to church, we locked the bikes together with all our our touring gear on them since we’d come in from some trip or other. So it was a 230 pounds messy combo about 6 feet long with really bad leverage from the two bikes and a trailer all attached.

I said, “Well, what are you going to do if I don’t take the bikes outside?”

He said, “I think I might just move them myself.”

I looked at that tangle and camping gear, and said, “I don’t think you can.” And I had him there! I won the battle!

So I bitched to the church secretary, “The Welcome Dude offered to physically pick my bicycle up and put it outside if I didn’t do it myself. This, to a bicyclist, is violence. It’s very close to manhandling someone’s glasses or wheelchair or cane. It’s a part of my body. The video would also make super hot social media if I felt like posting it on pro-bike channels. None of his opposition has made sense to me. Last night’s rationale for kicking me out included liability if kid touched it or cluttering the lobby.”

Up the bike trail in winter in snow in St. Louis. Many times cities can become more bike friendly with facilities that eliminate bike parking wars and other barriers.

Why this approach to bike parking wars doesn’t really work:

But I guess I lost the war, seeing as the reason I was in church was to get help from all the people that had been super helpful in getting me through a very tough time. I was there to learn to be more Christian and all that, and not petty and angry. It’s like the saying, “It’s easy to beat people, but hard to win them.” And I guess the real war is winning souls or at least our own advocacy agendas as a whole.

I was so pissed that I didn’t hear the first half of sermon, until the pastor started bragging about how the church overcomes obstacles to worship. I told my friend, “Like bike parking.” and we both laughed and high fived and that broke the spell. So since this ended up a pissing contest that is just frustrated the Welcome Dude and me, I asked the church what to do and they found me a closet to park in. Which didn’t work that well as the closet kept getting locked with our bikes in it, but it’s all fine now since it’s almost summer and I don’t have to prep to ride at 30 degrees any more.

Better ideas for bike parking wars:

I guess some better ideas would have been not to try to trap or embarass the Welcome Dude, but to make friends with him. To use the chain of command, to stay calm, to appeal to reason and the financial interests of the organization. All of which I did later but since I came out fighting first, none of it worked that well later. Although once months later the Welcome Dude, whose name turned out to be Ryan, let me bring my bike into a church class I was taking so I could work on my brakes during class while they were playing a movie.

Here’s Max singing to Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Tin Pan Alley” while he runs upside down:

How he got mauled by a pitbull:

About two months ago I got accidentally exposed to a hallucinogen and I ended up staying out till 4 am till I started winding down. I came home and slept until maybe 8 am the next morning when the kids got up.  I realized I wanted coffee and we didn’t have any and anyway the kid with autism needed to get out of the house. We
went for a walk with Max, who is now an old, old dog who can’t make longer trips than the three blocks to the store now, anyway.  On our way back we went by this bulldog that I’d met the day before that seemed super friendly.  I thought the dogs would want to sniff noses we went over there to do that.  The owner said it was an English Bulldog but I thought it was just a fat pitbull so I might refer to the dog in various blogs either way.

Molly, Max, and me swimming in Hillsdale Lake.

Well, the bulldog play bowed like she wanted to sniff noses but then when Max got close she just jumped on Max and started shaking him like she was shaking a rabbit to break his neck. And my poor Max is the sweetest dog ever and would never hurt a fly and is now so feeble he can’t even get on my bed by himself. So I tried to break him getting mauled by a pitbull, or the dogfight, or really it was just a death grip. And I couldn’t kick the dog off but luckily I remembered my Judo moves and I got the Bulldog in a choke figuring that if she couldn’t breathe she couldn’t bite. So after a while she let go but then I couldn’t move because both my dazed deaf dog and my kid with autism were still standing within reach of themselves being mauled by a pitbull. Neither one would run when I told them to. Finally another neighbor was walking by and helped pull them out of reach so I could release the dog and sprint to safety along with the bag of coffee and broken eggs. That was the whole point of the trip before Max got mauled by a pitbull, of course.

Max, Emily, and me at Quindaro State Park. I never thought he’d get mauled by a pitbull.

So this all happened through my incredibly altered and foggy brain that I’d messed up partying too much the night before. I haven’t done that again since and vow not to again. So we took Max to the vet and told them he’d been mauled by a pitbull and they said he’d be OK. We got some resources from the Humane Society about how to help rehab the nieghbor’s dog so no one else would get mauled by a pitbull. They said not to report the bite or the Bulldog was going to get killed. So then I spent the rest of the weekend wrangling the the neighborhoood association who wanted the Bulldog killed since a little beagle had already been mauled by a pitbull at the same house.

But I didn’t want the dog to die because it was a great dog 95% of the time as long as it wasn’t around other dogs.  And the Humane Society lady who does a lot of pitbull rehab said that the problem is the owner, not the dog, and taking the dog away wouldn’t motivate the owner to learn better dog training skills, just make her even more defensive. But I couldn’t for the life of me communicate all that to my family and neighbors and I was terrified that the Bulldog’s blood would be on my hands for making the mistake of pulling Max into her yard and her territory.

In the end it mostly worked out where nothing at all changed but at least the owner said she was interested in training. But this was all a lot of drama and trauma and excitement to handle on an addled brain. And that’s that story, I guess…

Even if my dog got mauled by a pitbull, I still love the breed:

Taking Back the Dreams:

What Happened with the Taking Back the Dreams Poem:

This poem was written to people who didn’t really believe in recovery. My friend Al Henning, who died of depression heard the part of our ability to dream in color, and he said at one point, “Oh, I’ve been dreaming in black and white.” He was so discouraged thinking he’d be disabled for life that he stopped trying. He was also a person who was afraid to be happy, afraid to be OK with himself, and that was hard for him. He found taking back the dreams impossible, partly because he had never been very clear on his dreams in the first place.

Many of our call line staff were working on taking back the dreams in their own lives

The funny part about the Taking Back the Dreams poem is that I designed it to be performed at day programs because at that point in my life I was working at an advocacy organization running a call in support line and I went to all the day programs in town to recruit volunteers. I found that these poems were a  big hit.

I have some lines about, “Stuck in the system – some dreary nursing home somewhere/ Groups all day long, but no one to say aprayer, to teach me to swear, to dare me to compare/ My life to where I want it….”  These lines were put in directly to make fun of the day programs, which are really just cash cows for the mental health centers since most centers have known for a long time that supported employment gets better results.

But I just said “nursing homes” instead of day programs and no one ever caught that I was making fun of the actual places that were inviting me in to perform. Instead, the inmates just absolutely loved it and thought it a very hopeful poem. It’s a very tricky balance.  You want people to start Taking Back the Dreams even though they may not believe that recovery is possible. So how do you incite people to want to leave a program without letting the staff of the programs know that’s what you’re doing?

The key is “Plausible Deniability”: I don’t have to make my art completely without incitement – I just have to make it so that staff watching can deny the incitement that I caused. Most staff hope that they are promoting recovery and are a bit cynical about their programs’ actual ability to do this, so most are OK with new ideas.

This poem ended up being a great launching point to further work I did later. It worked out really well for my career, plus since it was online, it netted me my first keynote speaking engagement.