Bestie is Back

Training has been going fairly well the past month. Consistent 3-4 days a week, ramping up to 6 days a week because my bestie is back on the mats. I'm loathe to give up the morning class, so doubling up on Mon & Wed. I felt a bit like a wreck on Thursday, but better on Friday.

I had great rolls on Monday and I felt competitive with Jason S. We had a real back and forth roll in which he submitted me but I was able to get and hold a dominant position after we reset. It's the first time in a really, really long time that I've been competitive with him. Wednesday morning was a different tale, as he pretty much wrecked me. I had Jason, Sol and Chaz back-to-back-to-back. Not much went my way for most of the day.

I finally decided to do Pans. It's a good motivator for losing the weight that I put on last year. I've been eating better (and less) since the beginning of January and have had a slow but steady progression of weight loss. I'd like to make it down to medium heavy, but I don't think that's going to happen. I don't want to compete against Nika (and only Nika) for the third year in a row, so I might go to adult. I'll probably get mauled, but at least I'll get mauled by someone new.

My mindset is pretty good so far. I'm not overly stressing about it, and really keeping the fact that jiu jitsu should be fun in the forefront of my mind. We'll see how that pans out. Get it? "Pans out"? I kill me.

More Better

How does nearly a month pass that quickly?

I've been enjoying myself more at class in the past couple of weeks. Not sure exactly what should be attributed to the turnaround, but it is welcome. I feel like my rolling is better than it has for a little while. 

Today was an off day because not only did we do takedowns...but they were Kelly takedowns... and he used me was the uke... and I was drilling with Kasey... and I had a tough conditioning workout yesterday (power cleans + push press and burpees). All in all, I was pretty spent midway through the drills and had nothing left for the rolls. Which was perfect, because I rolled with Kasey, Jason S and Chuck. Just kill me. 

I asked James to give me a bit of advice for top half guard b/c people were fairly easily sweeping me from there. A simple detail of using your trapped leg to pinch down into them has helped tremendously. I'm not necessarily making good progress from that position. Sometimes I'm able to scoot over and finish a reverse half guard pass, but it's a huge improvement from being immediately swept. 

I switched up my Fundamentals class curriculum a bit and did a "paths to back" class last weekend. I didn't have quite as much prep into it as I would like, but I was still happy with how it turned out. Chair sit side to side to retain the back, chair sit from side-control if they turn away and arm-drag from closed guard. I was going to throw in a rolling back attack at the end but we didn't get that far.

Jason is pestering me near daily about Pans. I will probably cave.

Little Talk

I was at my wit's end regarding feeling like crap after class so I asked James out for lunch last week to get some advice. I was looking for suggestions on how I could approach my training in order to see/make progress during rolling. 

It was a great discussion. I told him that I haven't felt like I've made any progress in my rolling over the past year, and the fact that I'm getting dominated by some of the blue belts makes me feel like shit. He said something to the effect of "Well, you aren't thinking about quitting, right?" and I responded that I have, in fact, seriously thought about it multiple times. He made the point that sometimes when you're improving in an art you don't necessarily improve in all areas at the same time. My overall knowledge and my teaching abilities have improved over the past year even if my rolling hasn't.

What I really appreciated about the discussion is that he didn't sugar coat things. He said that he was coming up on similar feelings because his game has stalled a bit b/c he doesn't want to "lose" to his students. He said he knows at some point it's going to happen and that it would favor him to just accept it and try new things anyway. 

I felt pretty good about things after the talk. Not amazing, but it did help. Went to morning class the next day and immediately got destroyed and felt like super poop again. I suspect that hormones are also playing a role, which is really exciting. 

Went to Sunday class for the first time in several weeks and had a good class. Didn't have a plan going in, but decided to work on the shin-to-X-guard and sweeps. Got a lot of different looks and quite a few repetitions. Had some decent rolls on Sunday and Monday morning.

I'm going to have to come to grip with the fact that my brown belt rolling ability is not going to be like Kelly, Chaz, Jason or any of the other guys' rolling ability. That is a difficult truth to accept.

Going to take a look at Ryan Hall's Arm Triangles series and probably the Passing discs again. Also picked up a couple of other instructionals that were on Black Friday sales.