Do What You Can

There is an old saying that if you want for training conditions to be perfect before you begin practicing, that you'll be waiting a long, long time.

Below is an excerpt from The Business/Judo of Life, which is authored by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars, who among her other accomplishments, happens to be Ronda Roussey's mother. The full post may be read here.

World judo champions are a small club and I don’t fit in. Let's look at what some other world champions did post-competition

• Mike Swain - owns a company that sells mats
• Jimmy Pedro, Jr. - sells mats and runs a judo club
• Kayla Harrison - competes in mixed martial arts
• Yamashita - something judo with the IJF

Okay, I’ll be honest. I’m so not in with the cool crowd that I have no idea who won medals or what most of them are doing. Travis Stevens got a silver in the Olympics (I think) and now does judo and jiu jitsu clinics. Some guy in Canada got a silver medal a while back, I only remember he was nice because - Canadian  - and I think he does something with their national sports program.

Then there is me. After the world championships I went off to get a Ph.D. , specializing in Applied Statistics and Psychometrics. I’ve founded four companies and spent most of my days writing software, meeting with investors and potential customers, writing budgets or writing up results of quasi-experimental designs for grant reports or academic journals.

It’s not that I don’t like judo or think it’s a good thing for people to do but I’m pretty busy. You don’t see Bill Gates out on the mat, now do you? (No, I’m not Bill Gates but I’d kind of like to be, except I’d like to not be a guy and keep my kids.)

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DO WHAT YOU CAN

Some of this came about because I did NOT have the advantages that “kids these days” swear they need of just doing judo full time. Since I was working full-time during my competitive years, there were a lot of times I couldn’t be at the best judo club, or sometimes any judo club. I learned to do what I could.

• Can’t get to practice? Get up and run sprints in the morning before work.
• Can’t get to practice? Lift weights at the gym near my house.
• No one near my size/ age to train with? Ask the guys at the Naval Training Center to run matwork drills on them over and over.
• No one really interested in training seriously at the club? Ask each person if they’d mind taking 25 falls for in a line so I can get in 200 throws.
• Injured my knee and can’t do standing technique? Do dumb bell curls and exercise to build up my hands and arms for gripping and chokes. Do sit-ups. Do matwork drills.

I don’t remember anyone ever specifically teaching me this. I think I just figured it out through necessity of wanting to win and being in a lot of situations that were suboptimal for making that happen.