Back to Sparring After Four Years Off

I wasn’t sure I was going to fit into my hogu (chest guard) before I went to my first sparring class in four years.

Some people I know have complained about the “Covid 20,” the weight they gained during the pandemic. I also gained twenty pounds during the pandemic, but it wasn’t from overeating comfort food. In 2021 I committed to recovering from a thirty-year eating disorder, which, much of the time, involved restriction of food. I cannot convey the difference in mental clarity and lessening of anxiety I felt just by eating full meals and snacks. I didn’t realize how bad my eating disorder was until I started to see differences in recovery. And some of this involved gaining weight. I worked very hard to overcome the mental weirdness around it and learned to welcome my changing body.

The hogu fit, but that wasn’t my biggest concern. Although I’ve crossed the thresh hold of jump kicks, regular classes with other students, and ground fighting and takedowns after my knee surgeries, I hadn’t yet gotten back into the sparring ring. Like ED recovery, there is also mental weirdness about injury recovery, as I’ve explored many times on this blog. I also don’t enjoy and am not as good at sparring as I am other things, so I have a bit of an aversion to it.

Sparring has all those fun sports movements my surgeon first rattled off when he examined my maimed knee, namely “cutting movements,” which are quick changes of direction. You see these in football, tennis, soccer, and I’ve experienced it in taekwondo. There’s a lot of anxiety in knee recovery, especially fear of re-injury and having to go through the long recovery all over again. For the most part I’ve gotten over it, but that didn’t stop me from putting off sparring for as long as I could.

So I went to the beginner class. 

There were two little white belts, and a sweet-natured yellow belt girl who may have been twelve or sixteen. I can’t tell ages with pre-teens and teens who are as tall or taller than I am, which is most of them. Coach Melanie has entered the chat.

I don’t want to go back to the level of teaching/coaching that I did at my old dojang, but I do enjoy helping out on occasion. It was fun to do some drills and let the kids use me as target practice. I tried out changes of direction, quickly shifting my weight, being off balance, and staying light on my feet. My knee felt fine, and my confidence was soaring.

It felt great! I figure I’ll do a few more of the beginner classes to get my body used to that type of movement for another month or two and then join my usual color belt and black belt classmates later in the summer. I felt so elated after that first class I had the Pokemon theme song running through my head in the shower (sue me, it’s catchy), and a very clear thought arose:

“I want to test for third dan…like, in the next year.” 

I haven’t thought much about my next test since my injury, but moving around and dipping my toe back into sparring was like placing that last piece into a nearly completed jigsaw puzzle.

I’m ready. Let’s train.