The main reason why I started keeping a four-week moving average of my weekly training was to deal with situations like this when I feel like my game is very much out of sorts and arbitrary.
By being able to look down at my calendar and see that I'm barely averaging more than 2x a week - and that including a few whole weeks without training over the past few months - I get one of the more helpful reality checks against the fear that I'm not developing the way I want to.
Prof. Rodrigo was making the point to one of the guys tonight, someone I've had the opportunity to train with for the past couple of days and gave me plenty of trouble from the half guard. Rodrigo was saying that missing whole weeks was a real killer and that even if you train 3 or 4 times a week, if you miss a week, it is almost like you are starting over again.
I felt as if he could have been talking to me. It's been a bumpy spring, with its set of distractions. And many of the training goals I'd set for this training year are now pretty much mathematically impossible. There may be an argument that I'd started to get too focused on the numbers and less of the quality of those numbers. But that was also during a time when it seemed like it was a lot easier to get training in.
It certainly helps to have great teammates. Every night I'm reminded of that and it is a reminder of how, once you get in the car and get headed toward the academy, you always know that things are well on their way toward getting better.
It's like a small slice of that great quote from Saulo Ribeiro, that the competition begins the moment you open your eyes the day of the tournament. You're on your way to a different place, and it is both blessing and obligation to make of it what you will.
161.3 on the scale post-train, everything but the coat. A perfectly fine way to start Fight Week (TM). The backache that usually only arrives on Saturday mornings after oversleeping on our lousy mattress arrived mid-morning today and while I was able to train around it, it doesn't seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere, either. If I'm halfway decent tomorrow, a Tuesday Live Training and a Wednesday regular session might do it for this week.
