Aesthetics

Picked up a new gi from bjjhq b/c it was a Hyperfly...and it had brown trim. I mainly purchased it because it will look nice with the belt. I've been wanting to try a Hyperfly gi for a while, and the price and color made impossible to ignore. The jacket is pretty long, but other than that it's a terrific fit. I love the pants. A lot.

I ordered the same gi in white.

I also recently picked up an Inverted Gear panda gi in white. Huge jacket but I like it. Pants are the ripstop material that I don't care for and will probably end up shorter length-wise than I would like after a couple of more washes.

I'm on a white gi kick b/c I'm heading down to California next month and decided to splurge on AOJ training. I'm going to try to do 3hrs of class a day for 5 days and one class on the 6th day. I'm torn over whether to try their competition class or not. I mainly want to try it to see if I can bring back some ideas to my school, but I also suspect that it's going to be a pretty hard core environment in which I may die, look like an idiot...or both. I'm going to have to mentally prepare myself to get dominated by white belts and not be embarrassed about it.

I've had some better classes lately. I seriously contemplated taking at least a month off b/c my jiu jitsu has been in such a funk, but the upcoming trip has given me a kick in the pants. I had a fantastic roll with James last week. I could tell that he really enjoyed it, as he gets pretty exuberant after a good roll. I've had decent rolls with everyone else.

My lift + conditioning has really, really helped my rolling. I never feel like I'm hitting the bottom of the gas tank, even when I'm getting destroyed. A couple of breaths after a round and I'm fully good to go for the next. That has been a nice benefit. 

Lights Out

I knew I hadn't posted in a while but didn't realize it's been almost a month.

I covered the morning class today and decided to go basic with closed guard arm-bar, omoplata and triangle. Picked up two tips that most folks hadn't seen before on the omoplata and triangle, so hopefully everyone got something out of it.

Started off rolling with big Mike. I was doing a decent job of keeping him at bay, or at least recovering guard. I tried for an armbar with decent position from guard but didn't have his posture broken so lost it. He passed, I'd get to turtle, rinse and repeat. At some point he had a choke from a top position (I don't remember what) and was bearing all his weight down. I knew it was tight, but thought that I might be able to last until the bell went off. Suddenly, I was riding my motorcycle down a sunlit road.... and then I woke up and he was holding my legs and the timer went off. First time being choked completely out.

Rolled with Zack after that who got an arm-lock of sorts, then Chris F. and Jason W. All in all I pretty much got my ass handed to me. I wasn't too down about it, as people seemed happy with the class.