Olympic Hopeful

10/21

One of our guys, Jimmy, was at the Olympic training center in Colo Springs last week to try out for the judo team. They liked his skills and so he's moving down there to train and try to make the Olympic team! Very excited for him and I hope he makes it. 

Today was 50/50 day. I think my coach has a great philosophy. If you're in 50/50, GTFO. He uses it sparingly, mainly b/c it's disentangling yourself can be such a chore. We did it as part of a sweep from X guard, same sweep but taking the back, getting out of 50/50 using foot on bicep and a similar movement that pulls them into an arm-bar instead.

Lots of rolls today. Jason, Jimmy, Julio, Dennis and James. I came close to passing Jason's guard by being very mindful of his DLR hook from guard. I wasn't able to stay on top though and ended up getting arm-barred and working from the bottom the rest of the time. Jimmy got me with something too, I don't remember what.

Julio tried to guillotine me several times. When he wasn't guillotining me, he was sitting back in my guard and letting me work whatever I wanted. To no avail. I tried arm-drags, scissor sweeps, spiderguard sweeps...he shot it all down with ease. I was getting a little frustrated at myself for not opening my game and trying something different. I tried to loop choke on him a couple of times but he defended against it well.

Dennis and I had a good back-and-forth roll. When I was in bottom side I got his far-side arm across my shin and was trying to work some subs from there. Couldn't get anything that I knew, so I started winging it and apparently came close to getting an arm-bar of some sort. I don't think I recognized the arm-bar opportunity b/c I was focused on trying to make an inverted triangle happen. In any case it was good fun.

Had an ok roll with James. Kept trying to DLR to take the back and finally came close on the last attempt. He just sank down into it so I couldn't get his back, but I was happy that I seemed to have the initial concept right. He was in top half guard a lot. I found that I was controlling legs when I should have been controlling arms, or controlling the wrong leg.