One of the things I like the most about the Revolution tournaments being in Bonney Lake is the time it gives me to reflect on the 45-50 minute ride back. As far as I'm concerned, the Revolution may not be televised. But it should always be held in Bonney Lake.
A lot of great jiu jitsu, including a scandalous slam endured by Professor Carlos as a sealed a finishing triangle on a black belt from BTT. There seemed to be a higher than usual number of injuries, with both Brock and Nate suffering foot/ankle issues. One especially positive note were 1st place finishes by Lance and Sauleh, who is now 1-1 with Jacob from Marcelo's.
I also got another go at Jacob and while I lasted a bit longer this time, the end was startlingly similar. Determined not to fall victim to his very fast low single, I locked up and tried to play judo with him first. That wasn't going anywhere. His base was too strong and we seemed to pretty much stalemate. I pulled guard, but landed with my left hook inside rather than a full closed guard. I shifted into half guard, but unfortunately I went to my left hip instead of my right - a weaker side for me.
Things pretty much went downhill from that point. I like the decision to pull guard, but I should have gone ahead and pulled half guard, which I've done successfully in competitions at this level in the past. Also, I need to focus almost exclusively on left hip half guard so that I don't have to worry about getting to my "better side".
My second match was a little more straightforward - and my second loss of the day. Here, my opponent pulled guard after a shorter stalemate standing. I went for the Flat Pass, but didn't get FLAT so the guy had a little more mobility than he should have. Still, I came close to passing on the first attempt. The next mistake was to attack again with the Flat Pass. Here I did an even worse job of getting FLAT and he managed to attack with the triangle. I defended the triangle well enough - I was pretty prepared to deal with the potential of getting triangled. But I got caught with a strange half kimura, half straight armlock. It wasn't necessarily the tightest lock in the world, but it was twisty and I was having a hard time tracking the pressure (i.e., which direction would make things worse or better).
You have to choke my brains out to get a tap. But I've never had the loosest shoulders in the world. After a bit of a struggle, I conceded the match.
0-12? 0-13? 0-14? I'm too lazy right now to look it up, but I'm carving out one hell of a purple belt competition career. That said, I used to have a biochem teacher back in high school who said that he'd give an A+ to two kinds of test result: someone who got every question right and someone who got every question wrong. He figured that anyone who was able to get every question wrong - without exception - probably knew almost as much about biochem as the guy who got every question right.
For the record, I got a "C" in biochem. And was grateful for it.
A lot more to say about more important things, including some much-appreciated wisdom from Rodrigo. It was great to catch up with Griff and to spend some time hanging out with Brock, Rene, Tom, Lance, Pat and some other folks as the tournament played out. You forget how many people you haven't seen until you see them - one of the nice things about tournaments, they have a bit of a family reunion flavor to them that I never get enough of. I caught up with Andy Wong from Impact BJJ in Oregon who wasn't competing but was in town to support some of their guys. Their Oregon Open is in October, one month before the November Revolution. But it would be fun one of these years to take a small team down to Beaverton (3 hrs by I-5 South) to compete and support their event.
All in all, a good jiu jitsu day. I would have liked to do better, to have been able to test my best half guard against Jacob in our match and to have put my new-found guard passing confidence to better use against my second opponent. But my training for this tournament was excellent, my conditioning top-notch, and my nutrition good if not great (I was 155 when I woke up, seven pounds under). I didn't execute as I think I'm capable of. But I was definitely prepared and ready to go.
As it is, I've now got plenty of homework for the next six weeks and more than ample opportunity to improve.
Come for the story. But stay for the slide guitar.
