A great day on the mat today. If I've said it once, I've said it a 1,000 times, there is nothing better than trading on Saturdays.
Today we had a whole slew of folks from Gracie Barra Lake Stevens. One of the nice things about Saturday training is that it gives a chance for some of our out-of-town teammates to join in. There must have been 40 or more people on the mat today. It was packed.
I arrived a few minutes late (imagine that), so the two techniques I got to drill were the butterfly guard passes: the same-side backstep pass and the Hioki pass. One of the things that all this reminded me was that passing the guard, in part, is a lot like setting up and attacking with a submission. You want to come up with creative and surprising ways to lure the guy into defending with the type of guard that you feel most comfortable passing. You may think that you'll never have the opportunity to attack with the Hioki pass, for example, because you don't have a lot of opponents who play butterfly guard. But there are ways of moving that can bait a guy into positioning his guard in a way that allows you to attack with a pass as if he were using an actual butterfly guard.
Anyway, thoughts to keep in mind. Got in a lot of great training, including rolls with a brown belt from Lake Stevens, Dylan, as well as with Jeff (who is only one step away from getting his black belt, BTW), Allison and Casey. Trying more than anything else to stick with my gameplan w/re2 the half guard and managed to get in some halfway decent guard reguarding. But one of the more pleasant surprises was a collar drag from closed guard that got me to the back more than once. Definitely something to keep in heavy rotation going forward.
159.3 on the scale post-train. I'm doing more calorie restriction than I probably should, but to the extent that such restriction is part and parcel with both the Warrior Diet and rumors of living forever (or at least to 100), I'm likely to stick with it.
