Posted by johnnox on MadonnaNation board

From The Mail, Feb 16

ON GREY February mornings a familiar figure in a flat cap and tracksuit is to be found slipping unobtrusively into a Judo and Karate club in one of the less fashionable roads in Fulham, South-West London. To say that the Budokwai club, the oldest Judo institution in Europe, is a little bit on the basic side is an understatement.

It has bare bricks, the doors are covered in peeling white paint, and there are institutional metal banisters throughout. One visitor likened it to a Victorian prison.

And yet Madonna, probably the most famous woman in the world, is a regular here, and has hired a personal mentor -- a sensei, to instruct her in Karate.

This, it seems, is Madonna's latest enthusiasm -- and she is proving an apt pupil.

After trying a succession of sports it is probably not a surprise that she has ended up with a martial art; it is, after all, a far better fit for her aggressive, risk-taking personality than yoga ever was.

As a trained dancer, experts say she is particularly good at the rhythmic element of karate, which is crucial to successfully executing various kicks and chops.

'She is a very serious student of karate,' says a Madonna associate. 'She's enjoying it a great deal.'

True to form, she has been striking the poses for some time. On her Drowned World tour three years ago she performed a series of karate moves, inspired by the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Now, though, she is learning the Japanese martial art in earnest.

The singer, who is close to completing work on a new album, is planning to have a karate-inspired video for the first single; given her track record in spotting and starting trends, perhaps the sport will enjoy a sudden surge in popularity later this year.

But why karate? And what does it say about Madonna, a woman whose drive for physical perfection has left her, at 46, with the physique of an athlete, but often exhausted and prone to debilitating back and knee injuries?

Probably the most intriguing element in her enthusiasm for martial arts is the influence of her husband Guy Ritchie.

Their marriage has been marked by the ebb and flow of common enthusiasms and projects, and this latest hobby for Madonna shows that she is utterly determined to find some common ground with her husband -- even though they are by her own admission a complete mismatch on almost every level.

After the disaster of her film Swept Away (which he directed) and the disappointment of her attempt to take up hunting (of which more later), Madonna thinks that she at last has found an interest she can share with Ritchie.

It is one of the few parts of their diverse lives which they can connect through, alongside their common devotion to the Kabbalah, and the shared enterprise of raising their son, Rocco, and Madonna's little girl Lourdes.

HOW intriguing that now, as she accepts that she may never manage to have her longed-for third baby (her age and gynaecological history tell against her) she is cementing her union with Guy in another way.

The couple have been trying in earnest for almost two years to conceive a brother or sister for Rocco, but despite visits to various fertility clinics in Los Angeles, and despite following Kabbalah teachings to help them, she has failed to fall pregnant.

It has been a source of deep and bitter disappointment to them both, and has, at times, brought Madonna's insecurities about her age (and the ten-year age gap between her and Guy) to the fore.

So the decision has been made to find things they can do together to help to sustain the marriage.

Guy doesn't like to simply trail in Madonna's wake and be backstage on tours; And she has found that appearing in Guy's films is not a happy way of being involved in his life.

Hence, it seems, her appearance on the dusty floors and sweat-stained changing rooms in SW10.

Guy Ritchie has been a martial arts enthusiast since he was a teenager, and was a black belt in the Japanese sport before they even met.

SINCE tearing ligaments in his knee many years ago, he has transferred his allegiance to Judo, and regularly visits the Budokwai for sessions where he has had five-minute bouts with, among others, William Hague.

At his suggestion, little Lourdes attended 'Budokwai for toddlers' classes. Elle Macpherson's son Flynn is understood to have also enjoyed these sessions.

Over several years of his association with Budokwai, Guy has become a loyal customer and something of a friend to Ray Stevens, the club manager who is also an Olympic silver medallist.

Guy sent Brad Pitt along for training in advance of filming the bare-knuckle fight scenes in his film Snatch.

He is so keen on judo that he designated a room at their country home Ashcombe Park, as his oriental sports den. At weekends, he invites his friends to have a grapple with him. It occupies a place second only to shooting in his affections.

And so, a little more than four years after their glorious winter wedding in Skibo Castle, his wife has decided to join him in this typically macho hobby.

Let's hope that she enjoys it more than the shooting. Madonna, you will recall, tried very hard to like it before admitting defeat. She enrolled for instruction in clay pigeon shooting at the West London Shooting School in Middlesex, just before their wedding.

By autumn of the following year, they had bought Ashcombe Park, a beautiful house on a 1,200-acre estate renowned for pheasant and partridge. It was Guy's treat: Ritchie, for all his Mockney posturing, was brought up at Loton Park, on the estate of his stepfather Baronet Sir Michael Leighton, and he wanted a traditional country home.

'Guy has a childhood fantasy because he lived on a country estate for about six years and it was the best time of his life,' Madonna said at the time.

She bought a Barbour tweed hunting vest, moleskin Burberry trousers and a pair of shotguns from the Queen's supplier Purdey & Sons, at a cost of Ł20,000.

She later added a Ł975 cashmere field coat, kneelength breeches and a Ł65 cashmere shooting cap.

In their first season, Guy and his friends, such as Vinnie Jones and Marco Pierre White, would have hunting parties almost every weekend during the season.

Madonna tried to join in, although apparently she was an 'absolutely rotten shot'. But it went against the grain and she was never fully comfortable in the laddish atmosphere which prevailed.

'I skip the huge breakfast,' she confessed. 'Once you eat it, I don't know how you can get up and move around. So I have my macrobiotic soup and then I go out and shoot some pheasants.'

By the following year, the lady of the house was happy to leave the boys to it -- she found it brutal and a bore. Her Kabbalah teachings led her to think that the souls of the dead birds might come back to haunt her, and the singer, a deeply faddish woman, tired of Guy's huntin', shootin', fishin' lifestyle.

THE couple became absorbed in making Swept Away, and the marriage entered a rocky phase, with rows on the set and in public in London restaurants, where Madonna was seen looking teary-eyed, and Guy tight-lipped.

They appear to have learned a lesson about working together: Madonna has the tiniest cameo part in Ritchie's new film, Revolver, a role which was filmed mostly as a little marital joke between them because she came along to the Isle of Man to keep him company during shooting.

And now that her Re-Invention tour is over, Madonna has the time and leisure again to become absorbed in new projects. She is still, by all accounts, devoted to her yoga, spending two hours every day working out.

Her incredible keep-fit history has allowed her to stay the slender size eight she attained shortly after becoming famous.

But it has not been without its consequences -- on her last tour Madonna required the services of a chiropractor to crack her back nightly after the incredible contortions she put herself through -- starting with that yoga crab which made her look like a bendy doll at the opening of the show.

Her knee had to be strapped up and, between dates, she looked exhausted and grey-faced. Some experts feared that she was suffering from training fatigue, a condition which occurs when the exerciser doesn't allow enough down time between sessions.

Her PR people always insist that she is 'fit and well and in perfect health'. What is clear is that Madonna has spent an extraordinary part of the past dozen years devoting herself to exercise.

Her minimum amount of exercise during that period (excluding pregnancies) has been 12 hours a week, which works out to two solid years since the Blonde Ambition tour of 1990, the time when her devotion to working out really started to take hold.

She was devoted to jogging in the early years, running around ten miles a day in the early Nineties, always accompanied by a cadre of hefty bodyguards. At this time she also got into weights.

She met Carlos Leon, the father of Lourdes, while jogging around Central Park. As a fitness instructor, that meant they always had something -- apart from sex -- in common.

While pregnant with Lourdes she would do 45 minutes on a Stairmaster every day -- a punishing schedule which she couldn't let slip. 'This baby is, well, not destroying my body but altering it beyond recognition,' she ruefully observed.

Pilates was her next enthusiasm, and its gentle stretching suited her better in the post-Lourdes period. Then came a fondness for the more vigorous Ashtanga yoga, which is an excellent cardiovascular workout and also builds muscle.

She does this in the gym at her home every morning, and has done since the end of the Nineties, for between two and three hours a day.

This is a phenomenal amount of work and time to pour into any sport, and has allowed her to become one of the most advanced Ashtanga yogis in Britain. She is on the 'Third Series' which is equivalent to being an Olympic standard athlete.

ASTONISHINGLY, this is not all she does: she also jogs, pumps iron and swims. She has even tried a brutal-looking wooden rack known as 'Gyrotonic expansion' -- at a cost of Ł350 for ten private sessions -- designed to stretch and tone muscles, and exercise joints.

As a result of her hard work, she looks extraordinary. Last summer when she wore a skimpy dress she revealed rippling, lean, heavily veined biceps, muscular shoulders and a masculine-looking chest.

The question, really, is why she does it?

For Madonna, who has been famous for more than 20 years, has been punishing herself physically for almost that entire period.

Yes, she has the same slender physique she had when she started out, but she has gone far beyond just keeping up with the unreasonable standards of thinness required by the entertainment industry.

Her devotion to exercise has outlasted every friendship, love affair and professional association. It starts to look more like a compulsion than an enthusiasm after all these years.

Madonna, who recently admitted to being an 'ego driven nutcase' would probably sardonically agree. For, beneath the businesswoman is a nice Catholic girl from Bay City, Michigan, who grew up without a mother, and has always been prey to doubts and fears.

'That is why I work so hard,' she says. 'I work at not being selfdestructive. My nature is to fight back -- to fight those demons.'

And karate is simply the latest weapon in that fight.