Felt great to get back on the mat tonight. I actually didn't feel too off my game - in part because I'd been watching so much jiu jitsu over the past few days and working on Burien Top Team 2.0: Beyond the Half Guard. Of course, the irony of tonight's training was that I learned a total of three new sweeps for the half guard - all of which look like they can be incorporated fairly seamlessly into what I've been doing out of meia-guarda.
Tonight Prof. Rodrigo showed us the Xande half guard sweep and the Shaolin sweep from half guard. They really work very well together, starting with the knee shield and then feeling for the movement that will tell you whether to go forward with the Xande or backward with the Shaolin.
Good training tonight overall - especially after being off the mat for a week. That's probably a testament to having done this jiu jitsu thing for a little while now. I know it's always been a weird feeling to get to train with a black belt who hasn't trained in a while or is only training 2x a week and to feel no significant slack in their game, no advantage I might have gained after a couple of months of furious 4x/week training. In that way, jiu jitsu is a lot like swimming or music or fluency in a language other than your native one: once it becomes a part of you, it's a part of you. And that's nothing that a week here - or a month or even a year there - is going to change.
159.6 on the scale post-train. No doubt some of that is "cold virus assisted". But I wouldn't mind hanging around under 160 for a fortnight.
