Quick review of self-defense, rear mount chokes, rear mount escape, attacking the turtle with the post and spin to the back, guard replacement from front and rear turtle.
First time at "competition training." Standing with an odd-double collar tie, then pushups, squats, guard/pass guard, mount/mount escape, sprawls, choke-crunches, rear mount/rear mount escape ... over and over, round and round.
I felt okay during the pressure of competition training. At first, I lamented the fact that I was lagging even after all the off-mat cardio work I've been doing over the past few weeks. Then, I managed to check that and to just treat these early days of competition training as a sort of benchmark. This is how I feel now. How will I feel one month from now on June 7th? How will I feel two months from now on July 17th with ten days to go before the Revolution? These are the important thoughts. Whereever I am now cardio-wise, the only thing that matters is how much better my cardio is then.
Thinking a little about my recent competitions at the Revolution, how I lost at the last even to two guys I don't for a second think outclass me, I realize that a major, major aspect of conditioning has to do with preparation and gameplanning. In other words, when you don't have to spend (read: waste) energy trying to decide what to do next (or, more often, fending off your opponent's attacks while you decide what to do next), you've got a lot more "cardio" to do the things you want to do. I've been spending a lot of time in training trying to be "Rickson": patient, breathing and staying "aerobic" and looking for an opening to slip into any one of my pre-programmed "routines": Rap Star, deep half, King Crimson, Guy La Fleur on the bottom, Scoop leg, Smash leg, Flat Pass, PTMU on top.
We'll see about this. I won't be able to tell if my raw conditioning is improving with this approach - that is something I'll only be able to know sometime during Rodrigo's 5th or 6th set of sprawls. But in terms of "rolling shape" as Ivan Salavery used to call it, staying aerobic and going Rickson and having a coherent and easily recallable sets of options may do as much to "improve my cardio" as all the miles I'm pounding away on the treadmill.
