Decided to give the early session a shot again after spending most of my time over the past few weeks on the late shift. And as luck would have it, Sauleh was there training - taking advantage of the fact that he's taking some time off to finish his MSU dissertation to get in a little extra training time.
I got to do both the last bit of the lesson with Sauleh before we rolled. It was the first time I ever got to train with him - something that's been a little odd insofar as we've been moving through the ranks of GB Seattle at the same time, competing at the same tournaments, yet never once (before today) actually trained together. As I admitted to someone a few years ago, I've competed against Sauleh more times in intramural tournaments than we have trained together.
Our training roll went about as expected, with Sauleh's spider game from the bottom and very Rodrigo-like top game pretty much equally unstoppable. Sauleh is probably the one person whose top game is most similar to Prof. Rodrigo's and, by comparison to that agility, I pretty much feel like Big Mac after a long lunch at the churrascaria (no disrepect to Mr. Theodoro, intended).
Following up that ample appetizer with an entre of Prof Carlos made Wednesday's trading quite a meal (and no, I haven't eaten anything all day but a handful of grapes, hence the relentless food metaphors, I suppose). My initial reaction was to plan a return to the mat tonight. But the reality of the matter is that I've still got too much going on at the Asteroid to get away with skipping out again tonight.
I'm hoping that I'll be able to get on the mat tomorrow morning. I felt very much out of sorts training today - typically when training with folks that are significantly better than you - and feel a little desperate in terms of patching and repairing what's not working. So it goes on the long road toward getting better.
161.3 on the scale-post train. Holding serve.
