Spaghetti and Push Ups, or Did you know I cancelled my very first class?

Signing up for my first class in Poekoelan Tjimindie Tulen was a bit of a leap for woman who always wanted to be an athlete, but who had never come closer than racing sailboats as a kid.  I realized that week that I had no idea what to expect.  So, I called a guy friend of mine who I knew had started training about a month before and I invited him to my place for spaghetti dinner (I make a mean spaghetti being Italian and having my great aunt’s family recipe).   

He came over to my small apartment and over dinner we talked about our college theses, life, etc. and then I subtly directed the conversation to “how did he like his martial arts classes?”   And there it was, he loved them.  He lit up talking about it.  Then, described it as the hardest thing he had ever done.  The warm up he said was incredible.   They had to do all these push-ups.  There were flat hand push ups, finger tip push ups, knuckle push ups, bouncing knuckle push ups, knife edge push ups, tiger push ups.  And then it hit me, I didn’t really know what a push up was.

Let’s be clear, I am a woman of a certain age, a member of the first generation of women to experience Title IX, which was passed in 1972 and was just being implemented when I was 10 years old and in fourth grade.  Title IX is the Federal civil rights legislation that required schools and universities to provide equal opportunities in sports to women and girls (it is actually broader than this prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded educational program or activity).  I also came from a conservative New England community. I didn’t know, for example, that in 1984 girls were playing hockey for their own high school teams until I got to college and saw them playing women’s college hockey.  In my high school, we had cheerleaders for our boys’ hockey team, but no women playing hockey (except me chasing the boys in my figure skates on the pond by my house when I was about eight).

All this meant that the closest I had come to a push up was to remember from when I was 10 that the boys did them when they took the President’s Physical Fitness Test along with something called pull ups, while the girls did sit ups and hung from a bar as long as we could. 

I hustled my friend through the remainder of his spaghetti dinner then asked him to show me one of these mysterious push ups.  He dropped down from his chair and began doing push ups on my kitchen floor: flat hand, finger tips, knuckle push ups.  “Wow, that was great. No dessert, right? You’re training.”  I rushed him through the door and locked it behind him. 

Then I got down on my hands and feet for the moment of truth.  I tried a push up.  I went down, but there was no up.  I tried again – same result.  There was a down, but no push up.

I was scheduled to have my first Poekoelan martial arts introductory class the next day.  I called and cancelled.  I told them I would reschedule. 

Remember I am if anything a plugger.  I spent the next week practicing.  Everytime I finished writing a paragraph of my thesis, I would get down on the floor as a sort of perverse reward and try to do a push up.  At first I had to start at the bottom, no down, just see if I could push up.   It took a few days, but by the middle of the week I could go down and up about 4 times, by Sunday I could manage about 8 of something that I thought was a good semblance of a push up.  At 10 of these seeming pushups I called and rescheduled my intro class.  

That Thursday I went to my first class.  The woman who led my intro was just fantastic.  She could do all sorts of amazing things including walk across the floor on her hands and feet in a low tiger push up position.  I was dragging my stomach along the floor in an exercise they called slug.  But it was fun and I was laughing at myself.  By the end of the intro we joined the rest of the class for strengthening exercises, sit ups, leg lifts and the infamous push ups.   And lo and behold, unlike my male friend’s big build up most of the beginners were just like me, struggling to do the pushups. 

I learned a big lesson about fear, embarrassment and self-consciousness. If you want to learn something new its best to just throw yourself into it.  Everyone starts from the same place, the beginning, or the bottom in the case of push ups.  As we say, nothing you can do in that place is wrong, there is only learning and getting stronger.

Years later, my male friend and I were both preparing to test for our brown sashes in Poekoelan Tjimindie Tulen.  I had him over again for spaghetti dinner, where he confessed that he had recently been reviewing his notebooks from the beginning of his training in preparation for our test.  He said he found pages and pages about how hard the push ups were and especially the finger tip, knuckle and knife edge ones – something he didn’t let on at all during that first spaghetti dinner when he was pounding them out on my kitchen floor to impress me (maybe even intimidate me a bit).   This leads me to another big lesson; don’t compare yourself to others. The best way to learn is to the beat of your own drummer.  Remember, anyone who has gone before you, has stood where you are now.   And finally, push ups and spaghetti don’t really go together.  Tomato sauce is much better with a glass a wine and chance of dessert.