More KOTH

7/24 - Downtown - Evening

On a bit of a whim, I decided to do the evening class since it was too hot to do much of anything else. Normally I'd spend time with the dog in the yard or take her for a walk, but she had no desire to do either in the heat. So I figured I'd try to redeem myself from the manhandling earlier in the day. Not a good mindset to go to class in.

We drilled takedowns, specifically ankle picks. I felt ok about these, primarily b/c they aren't hip throws. We did a fun a little drill where one person would lay on the mat and two others were standing 10' away. The fourth person would front roll over the person the middle, pop up and perform a take down. Turn around, front roll over the prone individual, pop up, take down. Three minutes of that was a good a little workout.

We spent the remaining technique time on using laterally bumps from guard to get a stalling opponent off base and either shoot for a triangle, kimura, or hip bump sweep.

The roll portion was my nemesis, KOTH passes and sweeps. I started down and had a couple of new white belts that I easily swept. Then it was Ian, and I kept ending up in submission positions instead of getting sweeps and he passed. He's a quick study, but I should have been able to sweep him. After that, the onus was on me to pass my opponents and it was the usual debacle. Of course the better players end up on mat in KOTH, so after a relatively short time you're going against the best in the class. But once again, I felt like I wasn't posing much of a challenge. I don't expect to "win", but I don't want to feel like I'm an easy mark for other blues. In this case, I don't want to feel like they can do pretty much whatever sweep they want on me anytime the mood strikes them. It makes me feel like I'm not at an appropriate rank. By the end of class I wanted to rip the stripes off my belt. It's easy to tell other people to not stress about their belt color and/or stripes, but more difficult to put into practice. As a side note, Julio (brown) did a brute force tomoe nage type sweep that was just ridiculous.

In sum, I didn't leave class feeling better about myself. James did say after I swept one of the newer white belts that I was transitioning well between open guard and closed guard. He said that I'm clearly more comfortable with closed guard sweeps, but that it's good to move between the different types of guards and give people different looks. So there's that.