I'm essentially retired now from taekwondo. It was a hobby that I practiced
from 2007 until Arjen was born in 2020, with a rough 1-year break while I was
living on a temporary assignment where I couldn't find a school at which I
enjoyed training. I was hoping that this was going to be more of a temporary
leave of absense rather than a permanent retirement, but I have not yet gotten
back into training and honestly don't ever see myself getting back into it, so
for now, let's just accept that it's a permanent retirement until proven
otherwise.
In any case, the question inevitably rises: why don't you compete? As a martial
art, and one with a thriving competition scene, a lot of people questioned why
I chose not to. The concise and honest answer is very simple actually:
It's not fun.
Some people don't find that a very satisfying answer. I don't find it
particularly satisfying myself, even though I consider it a perfectly valid
justification. But I think it's helpful to delve into why and try to extract
whatever insights I can from a situation like this.
Learning to Lose
I actually was extremely competitive when I was a small child. I wanted to be
the best in everything I did, regardless of whether it was sports, academics,
video games, or any other trifling thing. I had a particularly hard time when
my baseball teams all had losing records when I was 9, 10, 11 and 12, and quit
after that period, mostly because my batting average was about .010 over those
last three seasons. Likewise, I was very competitive in school; I always felt
like I had to outdo my peers on whatever test of smartness was in front of us -
grades, standardised tests, etc.
Over time, it became obvious how silly this was. If you're playing a
head-to-head game or sport, 50% of the teams have to lose. If you end up
winning 100% of your matches, you're probably not challenging yourself
properly. And while you may be the smartest student in a class at a young age,
eventually, you will move on to a more challenging level with brighter peers,
and unless you are the smartest/fastest/best person in the world, someone
inevitably will be better than you. And even if some day, you do manage to
become a world champion at something, everyone will be aiming to beat you - you
will constantly be defending your throne until some day, you tire or age out
or lose motivation and finally fall from your perch. Then what?
The purpose of competing is clearly not to win all the time. So one of the most
important things that I've had to learn in life is to accept and embrace
losing. Honestly, I didn't learn the importance of this until a year or two
before I "retired" so I didn't want to compete because I couldn't overcome this
obstacle.
Making it Worthwhile
I have never seen a taekwondo tournament with group stages. You are put
straight into a single elimination bracket, and there is a 50% chance that it
will be your only match, and that you will lose it. Now consider the value
proposition: who wants to waste $500 on travel fees plus a precious weekend of
life just to travel to a random place and lose a single match?
This was never remotely justifiable for me. And that's just the financial
aspect of it. Even worse is the emotional investment. You train multiple days
per week for months or years... just so you can go from being one of the 50%
who finish 0-1, to being one of the 25% finish 1-1. And the training goes from
being a labour of love to one where you eke our every ounce of performance.
Faster kicks, strength training, conditioning - none of which are particularly
fun to me. It transforms a hobby into a tedium.
And then consider the weight management. Everyone cuts weight. But avoiding
particular foods and other pleasures of life to keep your body mass down, and
then periodically cutting about 10-15% on top of that 1-2 weeks before the
tournament is a miserable experience. And to do all of this in your prime when
you could actually be enjoying life is a terrible value proposition. You don't
have to cut weight of course, but then you're going to spar against people who
have 5-10 kg of weight on top of you.
I sincerely tip my hat to whoever is resilient and motivated enough to put up
with this. But it is most certainly not my cup of tea.
And then I turned a leaf...
I became a sparring instructor in 2018. Teaching sparring
classes was probably happiest part of my taekwondo career. It actually turned
out that philosophy as it relates to martial arts became one of, if not the
centerpiece of the classes I taught. I don't mean rehashing Sun Tsu and other
over-stereotyped East Asian philosophy. I mean more overcoming the
psychological barriers that I faced
And this was what ultimately helped me get back into competition. It became
apparent after not very long that it is silly to be a sparring instructor if
you cannot and do not compete in sparring. Having ruminated on these ideas for
my entire taekwondo career, I felt that I finally had a mental model that could
allow me to take this step.
If all you care about is the win or loss, then all you see at the end of the
match is the score. In truth, the score really says little about what actually
happened. A match that ended 15-12 could have been a real thriller... or it
could have been a stomp that just ended on a sloppy note. A 17-4 match could
have been very close until the very end. The score tells you absolutely nothing
about what happened.
If you were in the match, you can ask yourself so much more. Did you play well?
Did you achieve something you are proud of? Do you feel good? These simple
questions are so much more valuable than a score or a binary win/loss. And more
importantly, in my opinion, this is the true path to growth. You see a
competition as a means to evolve and become a better person; to make a stand;
to develop a skill. These are what you really gain from the competition. You
can play well or play poorly, but 50% of the win/loss depends on the other
person and you can't really do much about that. Perhaps that is obvious; or
perhaps it's just too obvious to realise.
And this also resolves the emotional investment. You train as you like, and
until you reach the point you don't want to put in any more. You may lose. You
probably will lose! But you don't have to be disappointed because you only
made a positive investment. Sure, you won't become a champion, but there can
only be one champion in the world, and they only stand there for a very short
time. Truthfully, what you made yourself is the real reward.
I honestly never had a good answer for people who asked me why I did taekwondo.
The only reason I could ever come up with was that there were a lot of very
small reasons. This very small lesson - to take something you despise and
develop an appreciation of the positive aspects of it to make it something you
enjoy is a skill I could not enjoy before. Unfortunately, none of these small
lessons learned are particularly concise or easy to explain.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention
that with regards to the financial investment, well, I've never been to
a tournament outside of New England; and we have plenty of great ones. So that
solves that!