The Start

In my sophomore year, I took the Judo course because the names of the waza (techniques) sounded really badass, like 大外割 (Osoto Gari), 小內割 (Kouchi Gari) etc.

The teacher in the course promoted the Judo club a bit so I checked it out, and immediately became a regular. What they were teaching in the course was really not comparable to what they were doing in the club, and honestly Judo was a lot of fun. As a kid, I always loved to roll around and jump and fall randomly on the bed and Judo was actually a lot like that, so I kind of found my calling.

At the end of the semester, there was a tiny intra-club tournament for the first time joiners and I actually got the first place (out of three people in roughly the same weight class), furthering my commitment to the sport.

The National Intercollegiate Athletic Games

The National Intercollegiate Athletic Games was scheduled at the end of the 2nd semester, and I beat another beginner (whom I had already beaten in the intra-club tournament) to secure the spot for the lightest weight class. We trained hard for it, but then the COVID cases spiked up before the game and it got postponed literally the day before we were about to travel to the game location.

The tournament got moved to the start of the next semester in a college in the same city as ours. The thing was that I hadn’t trained at all in the summer because I was in my hometown (while interning at Rushpay and taking the online Spanish course).

I won my first game in a matter of seconds for some reason. The opponent was really aggressive and kept throwing tricks at me. But when you were on the offense you were always exposing your weakness at the same time, and his aggressive strategy backfired. When he tried to throw me down, I stood my ground, and then he just threw himself down, resulting in an ippon. I honestly had no idea what happened then, seeing my opponent just fell down for no reason and the ref indicated that I won.

In the next two games, however, luck was no longer on my side. Both games lasted for quite a few minutes and they both ended with me being fully controlled by them on the ground with no way to escape for 20 seconds. My stamina really was quite poor.

In the end, I got 7th place out of the 23 players in my weight class.

Fading out

I went to the trainings less and less after the tournament. The main reason was that my stamina was never enough to support me through the training sessions. Judo was seriously the toughest sport I’ve ever participated in. The training sessions were really brutal to me. The warm-up session was a set of floor acrobatics and I felt so nauseous afterward that I ended up skipping half of the session all the time. The actual session was a set of direct fights, focusing on the different aspects of an actual Judo fight, and they were all tiring af. The fact that I was the lightest one of all the males there facing all those black belts certainly didn’t help. And apart from the suffering during the training, they always left me with pains in literally every part of my body afterward.

Because of how fierce the trainings were and that some of my courses made me unable to join some of the trainings, I just quitted.

Although it lasted only for about 1.5 years, it was truly an incredible experience. Before it, I genuinely had no idea what Judo was about. And after learning both Taekwondo and Judo, I concluded that Judo is certainly much more useful than Taekwondo. If you get into a fight, just quickly get into the range and apply your Judo techniques, taking them by surprise.