Where to start with this Saturday's Revolution?
Top of the list, we lost the Adult Team Gi Championship to Lotus Club. I don't know how close it was. We did really well with blue belts, picking up 7 out of 21 possible medals, but really struggled at white belt where we only picked up one. Purple belt was also a rough division for us, with only Brock managing to medal.
My division, Purple 162 and under, was stacked with 12 competitors - by far the largest division I've been in for years. I didn't end up fighting Enoch until my second match, after closing a relatively close opening match to the eventual 3rd place winner from Megaton-Gracie Humaita (takedown and guard pass versus my takedown).
The Wilson fight was very much like a lot of my old blue belt fights. I spent entirely too much time in the guard and eventually got reversed. I ended the fight in a pretty bad position - though not especially vulnerable to submission. Still, it was a pretty subpar finish on my part.
I'll fill in the details over time (or maybe not). There were a few big mistakes - one of the biggest probably being my paranoia about making weight (I weighed in at 159 with my gi pants on, 3 pounds under the limit) and my forgetting to eat after the weigh-in. In both my fights, I hit the wall somewhere around 5 minutes in. I'd been winning or at least tied up to that point in both instances. But when I was done, I was pretty much done. I think there were probably tactical things I could have done that would (or might) have mitigated things. But that's another conversation for another time.
If nothing else, I no long suffer from the delusion that I'm completely outclassed by the average guy who competes at my level. With all due respect to my victorious opponents, I was in or winning both fights - at least up until I didn't.
There a few things I'll be working on over the next few months. But the vast majority of them were things I had planned to work on any way. For one, I really need more flexibility of attacking options from the half guard that I feel comfortable with. To that end, I'll be emphasizing the deep half and the hooks guard, especially transitioning from regular half to hooks guard. These options will deal with the most common challenges to my half guard right now.
Conditioning wise, I'll start an 8 week general conditioning camp on Monday the 22nd. Nothing but aerobic capacity and tempo training for eight weeks. Over that time, I also hope to switch my BJJ training schedule to MTRF, with the occasional Wed or Saturday live training thrown in, maybe.
So that's it for the spring run. Not an awful outing on my part, but clearly plenty of room for improvement. I also want to add the fireman's carry/kata guruma on the left side as a nice takedown when I switch from my right grips to my left grips. That is something that appeared as a vulnerability on Saturday, even though my standup was pretty solid (again, at least until it wasn't.)
Taking Monday night off. A little soreness in my bad knee and in my right quad that cramped pretty hard last week. I'll be back on the mat Tuesday.
