Rudy Hachache<\/a>, who represented Lebanon in the 2008 Olympics. He walks around at about 270 or 280 pounds. Big guy, but light on his feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe first night that I trained with these guys, my coach told us to split up \u201cheavyweights on that side, lights on that side.\u201d I figured that with a 270lb Olympian in the room, I was probably a lightweight. I was almost safe when I found myself being yelled at: \u201cDwan! What are you doing? You\u2019re a heavyweight! Get over there!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I slunk over, glaring at my friend Wally, who is *exactly* my weight, but had the presence of mind to hide behind someone while he sandbagged. My walk was interrupted by the interval timer, indicating the start of the first round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I looked up and saw that Rudy and I were the only ones on the heavyweight mat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cH\u2019okay,\u201d says I. Let\u2019s get this done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve never had so much \u201cnothing\u201d for three straight minutes in my whole life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The best analogy I can find is this: Imagine that you\u2019re in the ocean up to about your shoulders. You\u2019re bobbing around, having a good time \u2013 but sometimes a wave comes, knocks you over, and puts you on the beach. The first few times, you imagine that there\u2019s something you could do to prevent being knocked over and put on the beach \u2026 but there\u2019s not. This was sort of like that. I never even felt him move before I was thrown. Again and again, I would be in the air thinking \u2013 \u201cwoah, that was smooth.\u201d The best I could do was to recognize the techniques \u2013 by name \u2013 with which he owned me. I want to be clear, this wasn\u2019t a strength thing. I don\u2019t know that he used his strength the whole evening. He was quicker than me, lighter on his feet than me, technically superior to me, and oh-by-the-way 100 pounds heavier and in better shape than me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So yeah, that\u2019s probably about as close as I\u2019ll come to the olympics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the record, he also threw my coach, though I like to think that he had to work harder at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve had a story to write for a while, but haven\u2019t taken the time to put it down. Here it is: Recently, my judo club hosted the Lebanese men\u2019s Judo team for a week. Basically, we trained every night with some very high level players.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-judo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2102,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101\/revisions\/2102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}