That's how many times I trained. The Monday after the Revolution event on the ninth (see "0-2") and the last Thursday of a leap year February.
Truth told, I had a great training Thursday night. I'll post the specific coursework separately, but we did some nice fundamental top game work from side control to mount with americana and armlock attacks for the class, then Stephan led the advanced training session where we mixed stand-up and ground sparring and switched partners.
My cardio was great. I was exhausted by the end. But I'd done the whole session from warm-ups through post-advanced class sparring with Stephan. It's got me rethinking the whole conditioning thing, which is another topic for another post.
My technique was off, of course, though I did manage to get a good americana late in the evening from top half guard. For better or worse, that's my submission. It's like having a good, go-to-the-basket move: it's not always there and you can't force it. But when it's there, it's there on anybody.
To the point: I'm not going to have the luxury of being able to decide in advance when I'm going to be able to train and when I'm not. The last two weeks--from the trip to New York to the post-trip follow-up assignments--blocked out the whole middle of the month. While I can't believe that kind of workload is going to be typical, it does suggest that I'm going to have to be opportunistic and train when I can as opposed to when I've set time aside for training based on an arbitrary schedule.
If that means Monday morning/Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, so be it. That's far from optimal, but if that's what it takes to get my 3 square meals of jiu jitsu a week, then that's what I'll do.
That means the more writing I can get done on Sunday, the better chance I have of getting on the mat sometime Monday, day or night. If I can stay one day ahead--or even half a day, really--then I should be able to get in the other two days one way or another. But getting a jump on the week by training on Monday (instead of assuming I'll be able to wait later in the week) is the way to go.
Great post-training weigh-in, too, by the way. 159.0. I did do some conditioning in the near three weeks I missed (12th through 27th). But a lot of it was definitely caffeine and caloric restriction in the post New York period, so to speak. I hit the scale at about 155 this morning on the home, "unofficial scale", an unbelievably good number. Maybe getting under 150 for the Submission Wrestling League event on May 3rd (just over two months away) won't be as impossible as I'd started to think.
