The last weekend of tournament prep at GB Seattle. Honestly, there were fewer folks training than I expected - there are Saturdays when the entire academy is packed with people ready to train all day long. I wonder if it's the season, with many folks headed back to school (including some of my favorite training partners in 2011) or on vacation (I feel like I haven't seen guys like Glenn in years).
That said, it was great training, working with a new blue belt during the drills (Prof Rodrigo's Punch Pass to side control to mount to the tripartite choke, armbar, choke combination finish). Again, anything that gets us moving, gets us thinking about transitions and finishes is a good thing and it was very good to get more of this work under my belt.
We also did some 5 minute Shark tank training - ground and standup. It was great getting to train some standup and I wasn't quite as rusty as I thought I'd be (I do need to remember my grip breaks). I felt a little winded late in the standup, but I think a lot of that had to do with getting used to fighting from standing and not being as automatic with my decision-making.
158.0 on the scale post-train. There was some nice post-class conversation going on with both Prof Rodrigo and Prof Carlos. I couldn't hear what Prof Rodrigo was talking about. But Prof Carlos was giving us a nice tip on how to deal with the standard defense to the armbar from the mount by pulling on the guy's far elbow (or far sleeve if he's hiding the elbow). It's classic jiu jitsu. By pulling the far elbow toward you, it totally kills the ability of the far arm to pull on the attacked arm.
Looking forward to next week's training. The deadline for registering for the Revolution is Wednesday one minute before midnight. My attitude at this point is that I'm a trainer, not a fighter (more on my Teddy Atlas reincarnation in a later post). But I won't pretend that there isn't a temptation, with my sixth anniversary in the gi coming up on Thursday.
One thing I have definitely decided is that I'm going to be more active in the smaller, tournaments, like the in-houses we run every now and then. Years ago, when I first started training I thought might be cool to become good enough to be one of the top training partners for someone else who was really trying to make a move in the sport. It wasn't my primary reason for training jiu jitsu, of course. That was all UFC 1-3 and Royce Gracie. But after training for a little while, I figured that if I wasn't going to be the next Pan Am champ, maybe I could play a role in helping train the next one.
That's why one of the greatest moments in my nearly six years of jiu jitsu was the time when Cindy asked me to be one of her training partners when she was preparing for her ADCC run back in 2007. I don't know how much help I could have been, a blue belt with about two years of BJJ under my belt. But there have been few times when I've felt more "integrated" into the jiu jitsu world that I love so much.
So there's always that kind of thing. And over time, that kind of thing will necessarily be my kind of thing. But between now and then, there will probably be a few more opportunities to go for the hardware. And some of those opportunities may prove difficult to recognize until they are all but here.
