PULLOUT:

To raise money for her trip to Japan, Donna Bouchard is seeking sponsorship from businesses. She is also raffling off a 100th anniversary edition Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Only 1,500 tickets will be sold. For more information, contact Bouchard or Martin Petrovich at Maine Kyokushin Karate, Norway, 743-8801.

QUOTE:

“When you get in there, and you’re actually competing against someone who really wants to hurt you, it’s life-altering.”
Donna Bouchard
Full-contact fighter
Donna Bouchard may seem tiny, but she packs an international karate punch.

PARIS – It’s difficult to imagine Donna Bouchard in the middle of a fierce, bare-knuckle, knockdown fight.

But that’s where she’ll be come November. The petite 34-year-old from South Paris will be bound for the Seventh Annual World Open Kyokushin Karate Tournament in Japan. She will be one of six women on an 11-member American team at the international tournament, the only person representing the Northeast.

In her uniform, Bouchard transforms from a slight mother of two into a fighter. Although she is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs only 115 pounds, she seems larger when thrusting at a punching bag and practicing kicks while training.

When her trainer, Martin Petrovich, tells Bouchard she can’t fight because she needs a break, she pouts intensely. She swears she has been taking it easy.

Bouchard, however, doesn’t know the meaning of that word. She wakes at 3 a.m. most days and jumps straight into a routine that involves 150 push-ups and 100 sit-ups. That’s before she goes to Maine Kyokushin Karate in Norway for practice.

And all that is regardless of whether she plans to run three to five miles that day. It’s also before she returns home to premake dinner for her family before heading off to her full-time job at a Lewiston insurance agency.

“If I didn’t have to sleep, I’d train more,” Bouchard said Friday.

KO goal

Bouchard grins when talking about her love of Kyokushin karate. It is, she explains, a “bare-knuckle, full-contact karate, which means I don’t wear any pads.” The goal is to knock an opponent out, or to make that person lose the will to fight in a competition.

Bouchard began taking karate lessons in 2001 when her older son, now 13, was troubled by bullies in school. He wanted to take the classes but was shy, Bouchard said, so he asked if she’d participate. Both her sons study karate today, she said.

There is an age requirement of 18 to fight in Kyokushin competitions, Bouchard said.

When she saw a fight while selling T-shirts at a competition in Lewiston in 2002, she knew she had to compete.

While Petrovich didn’t take her seriously at first, by October of that year Bouchard had entered and placed second in a tournament in Canada. She has since fought in tournaments from Maine to Washington state, doing well enough to make the American team that will fight in Japan this fall.

“When you get in there and you’re actually competing against someone who really wants to hurt you, it’s life-altering,” Bouchard said.

Preparations

Karate has also helped build her confidence, as well as her children’s, she said.

Because Kyokushin karate is still a male-dominated sport, Bouchard typically faces only a few competitors at national tournaments. The World Open will be a different matter, however. She expects to fight at least 10 or 15 women. And while she will be fighting within a specific weight category, she will still face women who outweigh her by at least 15 to 20 pounds.

Bouchard is now getting ready to beef up her diet in hopes of gaining 15 pounds by November. She’s also trying to prepare herself mentally. She is nervous, she said, but she’ll just take things one day at a time.

At least she has already confronted one of her terrors. Two weeks ago Bouchard broke her nose in a fight.

“My worst fear was getting my nose broken,” she said. Smiling, she added, “You wouldn’t know it because I set it myself after the fight.”

She was right – her nose looked perfect.