"And the sky was made of amethyst ..."

Credo

My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault's ocean: out there is the ocean's;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

--Robinson Jeffers

"Don't Be Like the One That Made Me So Old"

Three Weeks Out

Gone Fishin'

Six years after our last vacation to San Francisco, me and Mrs. Burien Top Team are taking this vacation thing for another spin, this time to our sister city to the south: Portland.

No training on this trip - although I know there is some great grappling in the area. Pure R&R. Walking, reading, eating and relaxing for a couple of days to get in some badly needed recharge of the batteries.

I feel as if I'm on the verge of a major breakthrough in my guard game, so maybe this vacation comes at a better than expected time. Monday starts the Eight Weeks Out to the November Revolution and I'm looking forward to spending the next two months turning this breakthrough into a real bullet in the chamber.

The Road to November

Back to the Lake - Singing Not Dancing

(Man) Without a Face(book)

Wow, I've been on Facebook for less than a month and my account is already having issues?

I'll have to remember that when those guys go public.

"The Ground is My Ocean"

New Kind of Same

Fight Speed

There is no room for slow in a fight and in this final two week training block prior to fight week you will be focusing all your efforts on increasing your work rate, i.e., the speed and power you're able to maintain throughout a fight.

Go

Threshold Training: Week 7 and the Speed King

Technically speaking, I'm in Week 7 of my EightWeeksOut for the first Revolution tournament of the year in March. But because the event was rescheduled for a week later, my training camp has gained a week. So while I'm in week 7, my program is still in week 6, with three weeks to go.

The next two weeks are Fight Speed weeks leading into Compete Week. The goal during those two weeks is to really push the pace in training, to try and work at ever more intense levels from every position. There is a pace to be kept, for sure. This isn't about going berserk. But it is about looking to all observers like a man with a plan, and than plan should be evident to anyone paying attention.

This week I've started the Fight Speed version of matwork (TM). Here, instead of doing 3, 4 or 5 sets of 20 reps, I'm doing 10 sets of 10 reps, with the same two-minute break in between sets. The goal here is to spend less and less time grinding out reps and more and more time exploding through them.

What's nice is that my ability to recover has improved significantly over the past few weeks. Right now, I'm able to get my heart rate to drop by more than 40% within 90 seconds of ending a threshold set. In other words, and using today as an example, I had an avearge heart-rate of 160 bpm immediately after finishing each set. In 90 seconds, my heart rate had dropped by an average of 42%.

When I started the threshold training part of the camp, the recovery drop was closer to 30% (31.6% to be exact). My goal is to get it to 50% over the next three weeks or so, focusing on the 10 x 10 matwork (TM). I think I'm scheduled to do one more grinder session of 5 sets of 20 on Thursday. But after that, it's all speed work from here on out.

Please, Please, Please ... No More Knees

I don't see myself insisting on this when training with guys during Open Mat/Live Training. But from now on, with the consent of my training partners, no more "starting on the knees".

My training partner and I can start in guard (preferably). Or we can start in half-guard. Hell, I'd rather start in mount or back control than start on the knees.

When I think about the time wasted "pummeling" for position on the knees sometimes, my mind reels. Nothing in competition, nothing in self-defense resembles this - at least not in my experience. Standing gripfighting and pummeling? You bet. That's great training.

But I'll admit that this "on the knees" thing has been something that's bugged me about Open Mat / Live Training for years. And given some of my biggest current (and forever) challenges, now is probably as good a time to maximize my Open Mat / Live Training sessions by treating them, at least in part, as opportunities for guard/pass guard specific training for the foreseeable future.

For Every David, a Goliath

"And if the boys wanna fight you better let 'em ..."

"Some People Tell Me Home is in the Sky"

For every Revolution, a song.

Training Day: Friday

Was feeling more than a little beat up after Tuesday's training, so I took a few days off to heal up ahead of the tournament tomorrow. Being pretty much right at my weight limit, I figured a Friday session would help me lose a few pounds and sharpen up a little bit before the event.

161.8

Not great, and I won't be eating much today, but those are ye breaks. I've never missed weight in the five years I've been competing - and I've had to make more significant cuts in the past. But every time seems like the first time when it comes time for lose lbs and there's nothing about caloric restriction that I enjoy - especially headed into the weekend.

Not entirely sure how I feel about tomorrow's event: better prepared, but less enthusiastic is probably the most accurate. I've probably never had a better sense of what I can do, what I plan to do, but training with so many advanced brown belts and black belts over the past few weeks has led to an attenuated confidence as to what I'll be able to accomplish when the time comes. Hence the "enthusiasm gap." I couldn't be more grateful for the fact that brown belts will start off pretty much right at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow since there are no black belts competing. I have no idea what size my bracket is, if I am in "adult" or "masters" and, to be honest, I'm not sure how much I care. It would just be something else to think about that isn't my gameplan.

I'm going to leave it at that before my growling stomach turns me into a Revolution eve Grinch. Hopefully I'll have something interesting to say in about 24 hours.

Between the Dogfight and the Deep Half Guard

With four weeks to go before the November revolution tournament, I'm in a pretty good position to start focusing in and scaling down my game. It really is a matter of programming yourself, of eliminating every thing that doesn't contribute to the goal of getting to the side, pummeling for the underhook, whipping up and forcing the Dogfight or diving for the single leg game of the deep half.

Working with a white belt a little bit after training on Saturday, I was able to work some half guard passes that Rodrigo showed us years ago but that I never really put to work in practice. It wasn't much, but in that three minutes I trained that one guard pass more often than I had in three years.

To the extent that my jiu jitsu is single leg/half guard related, there's no reason not to master as much of it as I can. And a large part of that is simply sticking to the lesson at hand, day after week after month.

The same is true with the game from top. I'm starting to get a nice little suite of techniques that I like from certain positions. Now is the time to develop "the sensibility" as Rickson calls it, the invisible stuff.

The most interesting aspect of jiu-jitsu is – of course the techniques are great – but the sensibility of the opponent, the sense of touch, the weight, the momentum, the transition from one move to another. That’s the amazing thing about it.

That and the PDA are what can minimize the difference in age, strength, speed or even skill. It's what makes it possible for Rickson Gracie to still amaze brilliant jiu jitsu martial artists half his age who are steeped in the most innovative technical manuevers of the day.

I'm not saying that I can be as talented as Rickson Gracie. But I haven't had to compete against anyone as good as Cobrinha or Marcelo or Roger, either.

Burien Top Team the White

Just got outbid on a brand new blue Gracie Barra gi over on ebay. I'd never buy a blue gi under normal circumstances. But the opportunity to get a new gi for half price was pretty hard to resist (and the free shipping was a hell of a kicker).

So I'm just treating this as another sign from the jiu jitsu gods that this jiu jitsu wizard will remain in white.

I Was ...

I don't know if it's just in being sick and trying to actively recover from my shoulder injury. Or just the general, snarky, smart-ass tone I feel as if I hear and read in just about every opinion on every thing I come across. Or the routine depersonalization of 21st century wage employment. Or even just the end of summer and the coming long days of autumn.

But I can feel more than a modest amount of negativity creeping in around the corners these days, and I need to remember that identifying that enemy will go a long way toward winning any fight with it if it ever does arrive in range.

Being at the Seattle Open last week - in my guise as coach rather than competitor due to my lingering cold - was exactly what the swami ordered in this regard. Outside of my family, of course, the academy is really the only other place where I feel right, where I think that what should be valued, more often than not, will be valued.

Sure, I've had my moments of frustration - as you would in any family. But there has never been a time when I didn't know that, with a little time and a little patience, everything would work itself out for the better as long as I kept at it, and remained focused on my goals and values in the context of the best the academy could provide.

There are a lot of reasons why I began training and a lot of reasons why I continue to train. But one of the most recent reasons has to do with the lifestyle, or what I've come to interpret "the lifestyle" to be as embodied by those I admire most who live it. And while some of the expressions of this lifestyle - in GracieMag, for example - lean a little toward the corny sometimes, compared to the mental sh#t that I live from time to time (with apologies to Trick Daddy) "corny" is looking better every day.

As the wise men say: I'll be who I be. But hopefully a little less. And hopefully a little more.