At about 1:30 Sunday morning, the "argument against" won out and my 2009 competition season came to an end.
I went to bed Saturday night with every intention of competing on Sunday. My bags were packed, my protein punch chilling in the fridge, and the directions to Fife High School in Tacoma were at the ready on my desk.
But the fact of the matter was that the longer I lay there trying to fall asleep, the worse the idea of competing sounded.
I won't get into the whole this-and-that of it - except to say that I'm glad I made the decision I did. There was too much of a chance that Sunday would have turned out to be yet another negative experience in a tournament and that was a risk I just wasn't interested in taking.
Over the past several training sessions, a few things have started to fall into place. To a large degree, I feel like I've eased out of the disphoria that had descended back in mid-autumn when the cold season began. I'm back to focusing on some key themes, particularly action/reaction and misdirection, when it comes to both the guard and the submission game. And I'm starting to be able to connect those themes to specific situations, specific techniques - and combinations of techniques.
Maybe more importantly than anything, I'm starting to feel more and more comfortable challenging the guard from the feet. It's almost the sort of feeling I got when the half guard started to sink in as a viable "first guard" for me. Not quite the same thing. But close.
And sometime between 1 and 2 in the morning on Sunday I realized that a bad tournament performance in a few hours might go a long way toward fucking all of that up.
If things go well, 2010 will be for my guard passing what 2008 was for my guard: a time of real insight and progress. In many ways, 2009 feels like a lost year, but "transition year" is probably a lot more accurate. I've told myself that being a purple belt feels like being at the top of one pile and the bottom of another - meaning that your sense of self really is a function of whether you end up spending most of your time looking up or looking down. I'm convinced that the passage to the "other pile" is the development of a Unified Field Theory of guard passing that works for you. And starting with that sparring session on Saturday with Ro several weeks ago and including a number of key moments along the way since, I feel that theory - or my version of it - starting to become three-dimensional. This past week or two was really illuminating on this score - both in terms of some new techniques Rodrigo has been showing us, as well as my own continued efforts to win gravity's allegiance in my conquest of the guard..
So right now, what I need more than anything else (except some drilling partners) is a bummer-free zone. I need a place to try and fail and fail and build where I don't have to see failure as FAILURE - which is inevitably what error becomes when the world is keeping score.
See you on Monday.
