Wednesday nights are set-up a lot like Mondays. Class starts at 5 p.m. instead of 6, and we do a real beginners class before moving to specifics and then some sparring.
In some ways, it was one of the most complete classes I've had in awhile. Elbow escapes for a warm-up (+1 for that!), then some sitting guard retreats, backrolls from guard pass into sitting guard, and alternating S-mount switches. Very good stuff.
The coursework was the same as Tuesday night, though we focused only on #1: back bridging away from the elbow, walking your legs free and turning in with your weight and shoulder. I'm thinking about some drills that might help with the early stages of that escape.
We also did the spider guard pass - I think I'm calling it Gangster - with the Royler finish to scarf hold. It's a really good move, and makes me think of something else that was very apparent tonight. More on that later.
We did specific work, guard/pass guard. I did terribly in my first pass at passing the guard. It's the same bad habit of extreme over-caution when rolling with new guys. The "not-knowing" makes me extremely risk-averse. Things got better my second turn, when I got to work from the guard and spent most of my time working out of the half. But my guard passing remains the glaring weak spot in my game.
Rolled with Casey after the specific. He caught me in about four armlocks from the top. It's funny; I've been rolling with Casey since he was a blue belt and I was a white belt and here we are, brown belt and purple belt respectively, and he's still killing me every time we get on the mat.
But again, the glaring weak spot. I won't say that my half guard makes me able to hang with guys like Casey or Jesse, or any number of purple belts for that matter. But when I'm in the half guard I have something that I don't have when I'm trying to pass the guard, and that something gives me confidence to at least compete against these guys when I'm in my spot.
The something? An agenda.
I know exactly what I'm trying to do when I'm in the half guard. To be sure, many times I'm not doing it very well. But if I can stop myself for a second when things get weird in the half guard, there's a good chance that I won't make a really bad mistake and a halfway decent chance that I'll actually do the right thing.
Not so when it comes to passing the guard. Sometimes I do this, sometimes I do that. I've got a few tricks that I catch guys with like the handcuff. But like my keylock from the bottom, the handcuff should be like the old shotgun in the closet: a classic produced on special occasions alone.
But there's no sequence, no set of routines and subroutines that are automatic for me when it comes to passing the guard. The other evening I had my first Ezekiel choke submission, just days after breaking it down into steps. Doing that helped me focus on the key aspects, in this case, using your head to help keep his head in place for the choke.
I need an agenda for passing the guard, "something I do" that is as signature as my half guard sweeps are becoming. As someone who likes to work from the top, having such a 50/50 guard passing game really limits what I can do.
A few weeks out from the tournament, this is probably a good thing to realize, in part because it contains its own solution. I need an agenda, a sequence that can guide my fight to pass the guard 80-90% of the time. While I've got plenty of other things to work on, there's a very good argument that figuring out what this agenda might be should be immediately moved to the top of the list.
