Jiu Jitsu Submits Migraine!

Yesterday there was a war going on in my mind.

A sinus headache was pressing down on my back teeth. There was also a dull presence in the front of my skull. Not a pounding, but a just-enough-there-to-cause-discomfort throb—the steady reminder that a migraine could blast out at any minute.

It's important to get your Latin verbs right!

To battle this, I downed 600 milligrams of ibuprofen and went on with my day, just as I always do. I am thankful that, while I get hormonal migraine headaches, I usually manage to beat them into submission with ibuprofen before they send me to bed for three days or make me vomit all over the place. Shark Girl uses ibuprofen more than prophylactically. I can’t afford to let a migraine hit while I’m responsible for getting a roomful of twenty-something teens to learn their Latin verbs. So, Shark Girl admits to popping ibuprofen at the slightest hint that a migraine might pay a visit.

But I do try not to use ibuprofen too much. They say that, in the end, ibuprofen will betray you. After years of valued service, it will make your migraines come back more fiercely. I think they call it “rebound,” but it seems more like a pact with the devil—ibuprofen will give you relief today, but then you owe your soul to it tomorrow.

That's me on the left . . .

 The previous night I had gone to sleep with the migraine, hoping it would disappear in the morning. When I woke, that dull feeling was still there, promising me that, with a too-quick turn of the head, or a louder than usual scream from Youngest Child, or perhaps not enough food or the wrong kind of food, I would be relegated to a dark room for the rest of the day. So, I did what any good Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner would do: I took the ibuprofen and went to class. 

I could feel all that sinus- and migraininess as I warmed up and drilled. When we stopped to spar, I contemplated, Should I take an ibuprofen booster? I keep a little bottle of it in my bag. In fact, I keep ibuprofen stashed everywhere—a little Ziploc pack in my coat pocket, a refillable bottle in my work bag, some in every purse. People at work know that if they need some of the good stuff, I can hook them up.

No, I decided. No more ibuprofen. The impending migraine did not seem bad enough or imminent enough to test 800mg, a threshold I’ve never crossed (I think). I crossed 600 after giving birth. They gave me a refillable scrip for these giant 600mg horse pills that conquered any pain I could imagine, and I loved it, and I loved that hospital in Boston for it. When I gave birth a second time, my new hospital tossed me a small bottle of Motrin 200mg. each. “What the hell is this?” I screamed at the top of my lungs in my beautiful, new birthing room to no one who would hear or care. “A train just ran through my vagina and you are giving me OTC ibuprofen?” That’s when I remembered that 200 x 3 = 600. Hooray for math. It really does come in handy.

Back to yesterday. Having decided on no more drugs, I put in my mouth guard, returned to the mat, and sparred. [Insert great video or dramatization or narration of Shark Girl totally kicking ass for about thirty minutes. Oh, hell, just find something cool on Youtube.]

When I walked off the mat and got ready to leave, guess what? No pain. I felt great! No headache or threat of headache. I smiled and skipped out of my dojo. Jiu Jitsu had given my migraine the smack down. I entered my home ready to embrace my perfect nuclear family. Life is really good. I heard the sweet sounds of my lovely children. Sigh. Kids are the best, aren’t they?

“I’m playing with it!”

“No, I’m playing with it!”

“Don’t hit me!”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Yes, you did.”

“Ow!”

 And then, no, please God, no . . .

 “Aieeeeeeeee!”

. . . the scream. That first-grade, piercing screech. It had a direct line to my frontal lobe. I placed my cool palms over my eyelids for relief. And ran for more ibuprofen.

Jiu Jitsu Relieves All Kinds of Stress

"Hanging out with friends, beating the crap out of each other, there's nothing more fun than that. You got drama at home. You got school. You got homework. But when you're on the mat, nothing matters. You know, everyone has their own different way to cope with things, and I guess fighting's mine." --Justin Hayes

This is a quote from an article I heard on National Public Radio a few days ago. It's about mixed martial arts as a therapy for returning vets with post-traumatic stress disorder. (Listen to it here.)

Just the other day, I wrestled a really cool vet who felt that jiu jitsu helped him get his life back on track since he returned from duty with PTSD. He described drunken fights, bouts with the police, and lack of physical self-control, all which he felt slipped away since he has been practicing jiu jitsu. Of course, he is not cured, and still has night terrors and other symptoms. One thing is for sure, there was no choking that man out.
     "Was I at least close?" I asked him, after trying my new Shark Girl Surprise on him.
     "On a regular dude, it would have worked. But me, I've taught waterboarding and I've been tortured. It wasn't gonna work on me."

Props to you, man, and to all vets trying to get their lives back together.

Shark Girl’s Top Ten: Giving Thanks

 In the spirit of eating turkey, here’s a shout out to some of the Jiu Jitsu things I am thankful for this year:

1. Husband. He gives me time away from the demands of family to train at least three times a week. What a man!

 

2. Health. No broken fingers or toes, no black eyes, ringworm, or other mystery ailments. (Okay, if I were superstitious, I’d be knocking on wood right now!)

3. Cracking the Mystery of the Funky Gis. More importantly for me and my training partners, I corrected it! (Hint: Do not buy a Bosch washer. Sorry, German engineers. Your precision equipment can’t stand up to the demands of ultra-sweaty Shark Girl.)

4. Help! The on-line Jiu Jitsu community has been a great support, from the bloggers to the readers, to the women and men who have been like, “Dude (yes, they call me “Dude”), you are totally not too old to be rolling around on the floor trying to beat the crap out of people. In fact, let me give you some tips on how to do it!”

5. Ladies. A few more are training at my gym. Soon, we will take over the world.

6. White Belts. The newer, the better, so I don’t feel like I’m running in water when everyone at my gym improves at the same (or faster) rate than I do.

7. Time Off. I have developed the sense to stay away when I am sick. This ain’t running—I can run no matter what is dripping out of my nose. I have confidence in myself now, that one night missed will not mean a rollback of skills. So, when there’s ick to be shared, I keep it home, and, if I really need to get my exercise on, I just take it to the street or the treadmill.

8. Great Training Partners. There are even a few new extra-large men who have become my favorite training partners. They actively work technique and not muscle. They even let me get a tap instead of using muscle to get out of it. That takes a special kind of man!

9. McStephy over at You Want Me to Put My Head Where?! She introduced me to Flula Borg and I can’t stop watching him. Children of Shark Girl are also mesmerized, mostly by Flula’s use of the word “poop” and his critique of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Flula is a god to six-year old boys, if not everywhere, than at least in my house. Don’t make the same mistake I did, though. Preview his clips before showing them to children, or their cuss vocabulary could increase quite a bit.

10. The New, Secret Move I Developed. If I told you, it wouldn’t be secret anymore. So you’ll just have to train with me to see it. I call it “The Shark Girl Surprise.” Also, just being able to make up a new move is something I am very thankful for!

Now, go eat some turkey!

Breaking Out of the Box

“. . . I knew I needed to do something completely different, something I had no idea I wanted to do—no, something I actually didn’t want to do. I needed to get off track, to completely challenge every assumption I’d ever made about who I was and what I wanted. I had to do something that would quite possibly make me miserable. It could end up being a terrible mistake.”

 Shark Girl read these words today in “Regrets of an Accomplished Child” by Pamela Paul in the “Education Life” section of the New York Times.

I could have written them myself two years ago. This is how I felt when I started learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. In my very first post, I describe a middle-aged longing for something different. The blog was a way to force myself to stay in something that could have made me miserable. And, of course, if I broke an arm or lost a tooth, BJJ would have been a terrible mistake. But something drove me to get out of my comfort zone, challenged me to see myself in a different light—not the tiny woman who grew up getting good grades and going to college, finding a job, paying the mortgage and playing by the rules for women in our society. I wanted to see something underneath this outer shell, something mysterious and unexpected.

This chick can omaplata your ass off!

In her article, Ms. Paul warns against the dangers of “checking off boxes” in our lives: homework done–check; college–check; job–check; marriage–check. Box-checking keeps us focused on completion, not excellence. It is the antithesis of learning and stretching. Box-checking leads to safe choices and failure avoidance. But the very possibility of failure is what can bring the best out of us and give us a chance to excel.

For me, Jiu Jitsu was breaking out of the box. I had no expectations of even liking it, never mind being good at it. It scared me to even go to class. I had to psych myself for a half hour to get out the door.

I could write a cheesy litany of things jiu jitsu has taught me. Indeed I started one and then stopped when I realized how much cheese was dripping off of it. (You’re welcome for my editorial restraint.) Probably the most important thing I have learned is what it is like to “play,” that art lost when we enter middle school and become self-conscious and start to notice that the world has its own ideas for us, and no you can’t be an altar girl.

I could have played it safe; I could have taken a Zumba class (or maybe Boot Camp, if I wanted to be a little edgy). I would have stayed fit and even enjoyed it. And I wouldn’t have learned anything.

How to Protect Your (Kids’) Candy on Halloween

We here in the Northeast are celebrating the retreat of Frankenstorm tomorrow night by hitting the streets  and threatening folks for candy. But beware! Many hooligans are poised to steal your (kids’) candy without putting in any of the hard work of verbal coercion and knocking on doors.

Here John Machado shows you some armbars to protect your little goblins:

 Please do not use your jiu jitsu to get candy. That’s just wrong. Have your own kid and steal theirs.

 And finally, if you want to do some of the tricking, watch this:

 Have a safe and happy Halloween!

Shark Girl’s heart goes out to all of you who have been affected by Hurricane Sandy.

My (Short-Lived) Life as a (Soft-Core) Porn Star

Last spring Shark Girl found herself really busy. Too busy to blog. As I watched my stats dip from disuse, I decided not to check my blog at all. I mean, who cares about stats, anyway?

 

 Finally, when precious time came back into my life, I gingerly clicked my blog and braced myself for zero stats. To my surprise, my graph had been skyrocketing for over a week! What the deuce? What has happened since I last visited you, blog?

Out of curiosity, I checked my traffic sources and found that an older post had been receiving lots of attention, and most of it was from a little message board.

Don’t do it! You’re whispering out loud to yourself. Don’t click on it! It’s like the girl in the horror movie who you know is going into the house alone to investigate. You, dear readers, know I should not click on unknown websites, and you are shaking your collective head in dismay and terror. But I did. I did click on it. You must know I did. And I explored that message board. It was all about women and bodybuilding. I posted a thank-you. The message boarders received me friendlily. Maybe too friendlily.

I kept getting traffic from the message board. Why are they so interested in my stupid story? I wondered. I dug deeper into the site, curious to know more about the place. Most of the posts were from men, and some of them started asking more personal questions. Hmmm . . . this was a little strange. And then it dawned on me—this was a fetish site.

A fetish site? I was being highlighted on a fetish site? Now this was something really new for me. I’m about as sexy as a carpool mom on Saturday morning (cf. Chess Hot). Never have I been the subject of fetish. So, now I was slightly stunned and I must admit intrigued.

When I shared it with Sister of Shark Girl, she got really excited. She started drawing up plans to go big with this whole thing. She now wants to monetize Shark Girl BJJ and sell subscribers videos and other stuff. (Sister is the corporate one; she often runs with ideas and takes them to their money-making end. Like the time we picked up stray balls at a nearby golf course and sold them back to the golfers. This is why she works in banking.)

Anyway, the buzz has died down. As the weeks roll by, I get fewer and fewer hits from my little message board. But I will never forget that, for a while, a short while, I was not some suburban mom dragging my kids to activities and losing my shit at overflowing toilets and battling boys. I was not waxing my mustache and hiding grey roots. I was a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Goddess who could sweep you into submission, put on a rear naked choke, and never, never let you forget you’re a ...    

 

 bloke?

 

Oh, and don’t worry. I’m not going to go all soft-core on you. I can’t sell videos and remain anonymous. But I think this whole experience has added to my caché: International Woman of Mystery and Soft-Core Porn Star. It has a ring to it.

Prepare to Meet Your Doom!

A training partner shared this with me recently:

It would be so much funnier if I didn't feel like Artie most of the time!