Things I wish I’d known before I decided to try this top level judo thing

Despite the following lessons, I have no regrets:

• Good judo doesn’t mean you win fights – this is something that few people outside the top level understand.  Some aspiring judoka have better technique than world medallists, and get themselves to the stage of having excellent strength and conditioning.  Even with great technique, a thorough understanding of how and when to apply techniques, and hours of video analysis, they might still not be able to win at the international level.  Experience, tactics, and mental toughness seem to be far more important factors.  Some of the most successful competitors in the world don’t have ‘good’ judo, they don’t throw with beautiful ippons most of the time (don’t get me wrong, they could throw the average club black belt with anything they choose at any time they choose).  Often athletes get by with good tactics, grips, and experience.  Many of them don’t know the entire gokyo, can’t do kata, and have no idea about mutual benefit and maximum efficiency.  Sometimes the ‘best’ judoka are horrible to fight, not in a beneficial “s/he’ll throw me loads” way, but in a dangerous “s/he’ll injure me” way.  That’s what makes top players who display amazing judo in international competitions so special.  This is the reality of top level judo as it is now.
• Many athletes don’t particularly like judo – they like winning and happen to win often in judo, or they like fighting and happen to do judo.  They won’t continue in judo after they finish competing at the top level.  In the richer countries some are good enough at judo to keep their funding, but don’t really care enough to train hard enough to be successful.  Successful players at the the top level can be boring, unintelligent people, or selfish, or nasty, or arrogant.  They can also be clever, funny, happy or kind.  They are just people.
• Take out health insurance – you will get injured, and public health systems in many countries are not ideal for athletes needing to make a speedy recovery.  Injury can be minimised, but not completely stopped.
• Rest the mind and body – you will burn out if you keep going forever.  I see young, enthusiastic athletes now say that if you can’t keep training it’s only in the mind, but that’s not always true.  It is important to find your limits, and not cross them too often.  The body cannot go on training indefinitely, and although you do need to push yourself harder than you could ever imagine, you must keep up the rest.  Keep activities up outside of judo, have non-judo friends, and a backup plan if you don’t continue judo for whatever reason.  Make sure that you are not only thinking about judo.
• Make sure you have a support team – from the above, you will sometimes push yourself past your limits, and at these times you must have people to catch you when you fall.  Don’t believe you can do everything by yourself.  You must be the driver, but you need backup.
• Don’t trust anyone completely – many (I believe most) people will be kind and genuine and want to help, but (apart from those who are malicious, and there will be many of those) people might not have the same point of view as you, and intend to help but actually hinder.  Think things through yourself, be careful what you say and to who.
• Judo people are crazy, you can’t make ANY more generalisations – I used to think that judo people are all kind, friendly, and hold other naive beliefs.  The judo community is as diverse as the world wide community; you can find any type of person who does judo (Putin, Bin Laden).  The only thing we all have in common is that we are crazy enough not to mind being slammed into the ground repeatedly.
• No one knows everything – no coach knows all the answers, no one can fix all problems.  Some people work better together than others, some coaches can get one player an Olympic medal, and make another, more promising player quit judo.  Even the perfect coach for a given player won’t always have answers.  Players must evaluate the information they get from every source, and take what’s useful, and store the rest away for a rainy day.
• There are no secrets, no shortcuts, only hard work – particularly in the case of people starting out at the international level, it is often believed that there is something – a particular workout routine, weights programme, running distance, training method – that will drastically increase performance.  This is simply not true.  There is a place for most sorts of training, and different things can be beneficial at different times to different people.  Suddenly doing a particular workout will often only produce results for someone who had previously been doing nothing, or something different.  You can only get to the top level through spending hours over many years preparing your body to cope with the demands of international competition; refining your skills and tactics to be able to have a plan and execute; working out what you need mentally at competitions through trial and error; and most importantly doing randori and shiai with players of a better level than you for many hours each week for years.  There will be very few exceptions to this.

I’m happy to have followed this path, I still love judo.  I’ve learnt so much, and have no regrets.  I’ve met amazing people, and have achieved things I’d never have dreamed of.  Young people wanting to follow this path (and other people who are curious), please do take note.