Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Training Day: Wednesday

In many ways Wednesday was a repeat of Tuesday night's training - which was perfectly fine with me. I would readily take the same class four times a week if it were possible. I'm more than happy to keep working on the same stuff over and over again until the circuits are like the "rails" of high speed Japanese magnetic trains.

So after the ankle/knee pick sprawl drill we went back to pummeling from the butterfly guard. I was working with an especially aggressive white belt, which meant that I was pretty much going at least 75% from the beginning. Fortunately, I've been here before so I ride it out and do the best that I can under the circumstances - trying to avoid the temptation to return the favor. Kids these days.

We also did some work getting the second hook against a guy in the turtle defensive position. I didn't do half bad here, though as is typical when I'm working for rear mount, I ended up taking mount and S-mount if I couldn't get the guy to roll and give me his back.

Specific training - and even the sparring had a bit of a specific training feel to it - was very, very good to me in a number of ways. I was able to hit the Marcelo sweep three or four times, winding up perfectly in mount. I can't even get over how happy I was to see this sweep work so well - which will dovetail nicely with all the butterfly guard work that Rodrigo has been having us do.

Actually, the only thing that might be even more amazing was the fact that I was able to transition nicely to cross guard in one instance and pull off a pretty complete tripod sweep. Talk about lightning striking twice. Two relatively new sweeps. Almost perfect execution in each instance.

I felt very good today. I put in my three-mile LSD workout this morning and felt fine cardiowise during and afterward - clearly it is local muscular endurance in my quads and hamstrings that needs the work more than my cardiovascular system, per se. During class I jogged very lightly during the active rest sessions and never felt as if I was nearing the edge of what I was able to do. Good, good stuff.

152.8 on the scale post-training - a crazy good number. I only ate twice today but the first time was immediately after my cardio workout and the second was about three hours before I began training. There is definitely something to the "eating as fueling" notion that can play a very positive role in helping keep weight down. Given that the tournament on December 13th is (a) on a Sunday and (b) day-off weigh-ins with a 155 ligthweight limit, I'm going to have to try and get as light as possible if I'm going to fight at 155 and under.

Right now it is looking like I'll train tomorrow night and then again on Saturday. If all goes well, there's a halfway decent chance that I'll train on Friday, also. But I can already seen one potential roadblock to that, so I'll just have to see. In either event, I'll get my four trainings in this week, for sure.