Ride Before the Storm

Wake up, beautiful weather outside.

Eat breakfast, and BOOM!!! thunder.

Race to work on motorcycle before rain falls. Make it just in time.

Rain rain rain...which stops before I leave for class. Lucky me.

Jerry taught today, and I was really looking forward to his passing concepts. He is very good at immediately controlling the legs from a standing pass and making your legs feel useless. I've tried to pick his brain before on whether its a grip strength thing or if it's more a matter of where he's applying pressure and in what direction. 

He started off with warm-up drills (arm-bar from guard, omoplata from guard, americana to arm-bar from mount) and then got into his X-pass. I've drilled it a bit before, but it's been awhile. I felt like my weight was too far forward, even though I was trying to stay fairly midline. I'm not sure if it was a perception issue on my part or if my weight really was too far forward. He had us pushing down with the lapel grip, which subsequently brings you forward. 

We did some drills if they curl up tight as you try to torreando, which didn't quite seem realistic, but motion of using their legs to spin them side-to-side is legit. 

Positional rolls with Sarah and Chuck to either sweep or pass, depending on if you start on top or bottom.

Rolls with Jerry, Savannah and Sol. Jerry pushed the pace, so I was defending quite a bit. He was doing catch and release on submissions to keep the roll going. He had top position for most of the roll. Afterwords he said my ability to regain guard was strong, which was funny b/c I doubt that I legitimately got back to guard. 

Savannah is starting to work an open guard game now, so I worked several different passes with little success. I got the Dern pass once, but couldn't finish much of anything else. I really, really need focus on passing for a couple of months (at least).

Sol was working a gi d'arce from top side when my fingers got caught in an awkward position in the gi. Had to tap b/c y'know, digits are important. We reset and he got one of my lapels and fed it to his other hand behind me while I was in half-guard. I was completely stuck in my pass attempt, but he was nice enough to show me that the arm was wide open for attack.

In the last two rolls I felt like I was moving constantly in a manner that I knew was counter-productive to me being successful in accomplishing my goals. That is super frustrating, and I don't know what the factors are that lead me to doing that.