Bujinkan rant

This is mostly going to be a rant about how much I dislike training with the guy I trained with last night, so you have been warned. Unfortunately for me, my choice was either the newbie who gave me the massive bruise on Monday (who now bows to me when he sees me. wtf?) or training with this guy, Ro. Neither was a good option, but J. took the choice from me, much to my annoyance.

J: It looks like you're training with Ro. *sees the expression on my face since I could have trained with J. since Jack was teaching* Hey, Ro., looks like she doesn't want to train with you.
Me: Let me show you a secret ninja sign *gives him the fingers*
J:* laughs and walks away*

See, Ro. is a nice guy when he isn't training. We've had some good conversations. However, as soon as he starts training, it's like a switch flips in his brain and he goes berserk. Nowadays, he gets in a few regular training tries before the switch flips, but it's still largely the same result. He also only does this to people he sees as weaker than him, namely women and shorter, young guys, and anyone who beats him in a fight. Since he's 6+ft tall, stronger than me by a large margin and in his 60s, I fall into at least two of those categories, and I really hate him for it. See, training is about helping your training partner get the most authentic experience of the technique possible. This means throwing your head back when your partner's fist touches your face cause in a real fight your head would go flying back, and that you attack like you mean it, but not at full speed because this is training and in a real fight, everything speeds up due to adrenaline anyway. It means going with your opponents attacks when they're not using full force because you know in a real fight, they would, and it means pretending you don't know where the person will attack you from even though you've seen the attack three times already. Once both of you have mastered the 'technique' you're working on, you may want to play around and have your partner fight back or look for ways to take you down, but Ro. is far from being at the level where he can do that.

Ro., on the other hand, especially as the night progresses, just throws himself into attacking you basically. So for example, the technique was having your partner swing a baseball bat at you, then you step in and catch the arms/hand before the swing can complete, from there, you let the momentum of the person swinging work for you and took them down in various ways. What did Ro. do? He took the swing, I stepped in and caught it, and he took one hand off the bat and tried to punch me in the face. I had a short rope in my hand and threw it in his eyes, and he backed away saying, 'Why did you throw the rope in my face?' 'Because you tried to punch me instead of the technique!' Now, you might be thinking that I should be ready for anything anyway (and oh look, I was), but that's not the fucking point of training. The point is to try out the different scenarios/techniques and plan for what is most likely to happen in real life. In real life, the person swinging the bat at you is going to keep trying to hit you with the bat, not let go to punch you. Nor will they usually be strong enough to pry their hands out of where I was bracing my own hand to stop him from swinging further (the way our techniques work is that you keep your touch very soft so ideally, the person wouldn't even know your hand was there... if I touch your wrist gently, you don't fight, if I grab it, you do, ne?) He did this to me several times over the evening, though most often it was when he attacked that he'd change things and just try to barrel me over with his brute strength and long arms (he likes to envelop people with his arms, then go for their face/head... I was not taking this and drove my elbow into his chest whenever he tried it, but that didn't deter him from continuing to try).

His other annoying thing is that he holds onto anything you're fighting with with all his strength regardless of what you do. Sometimes this can be negated, but unfortunately for me we were training with swords and his had a tiny hilt that his hands completely covered, making it really difficult for me to get any grip on it or the leverage I need. Even worse, whenever Jack came around, Ro.'s grip would loosen and he'd be compliant (and the same with any techniques he'd resisted doing with me). Fortunately, Jack knew about this (cause M. complains of the same thing whenever she's stuck training with Ro.) and showed me an alternate that didn't involve pushing myself against the guy's strength when I complained about it, but since he wasn't always around, I was left to try lots of useless things... It's hard cause I know things that would have gotten him to cooperate, but they would have involved seriously injuring him. It's so frustrating because it's just training. It's not a serious fight, yet nothing short of serious moves will get him to move, and if I did any of those, I'd be worse than him. All I want to do is train, but instead I have to fight with this asshole just to try out a simple move. And Jack's on the side telling me to use my height, and I fucking did, but Ro. hates it when you succeed at something so the minute you try to replicate it, he breaks kamae or technique to try to fight you and since he knows where you'll be, you get to fight off his attack rather than see if your technique will work a second time.

I've decided I'm never training with Ro. again. I'd rather watch other people train, or offend him by trading with someone else then train with him. Putting up with him is not worth it.