Not too long ago, I spent nearly the final five minutes of a very long roll with easily one of the most talented people at the academy with my eyes closed. I was off-balance, stuffed, stranded, redirected for more than ten minutes and it was as if a flip switched. I just reached a point of pure futility and, without a second thought, decided to embrace it. "Who you gonna believe," asked Futility, "me or your lyin' eyes?" And I said, "You sir and/or madam. Every single time."
Fortunately, it wasn't the first time I'd trained that way. It was the first time I'd ever done so spontaneously and the fact that it came on like an automatic "hail Mary" response would have been a little scary if it weren't for the fact that, all things considered, a "hail Mary" seemed as good an option as any.
It's hard to describe how grotesque my jiu-jitsu feels sometimes. "Nasty, brutish and short" to steal a phrase. And too often I'm seeing that vulgarity exposed and exploited as I end up "surviving" in triangles or back mounted for minutes on end fending off chokes.
My training frequency is back up where it needs to be (4-week moving average of 3.5), and there have been a few moments to be sure (the spin move and the Toquinho). But those moments are purely in their earliest stages of effectiveness and have yet to be tested on peers. That's as it should be, but my jiu-jitsu feels old and overdue for changes and additions. And there's never time enough for repair. I feel like I need to be shipped away to a jiu-jitsu camp for a month, three times a week training, five days a week, maybe once Saturday morning to keep from getting stale over the weekend ...
Until then, I need to focus on November 12. Nothing really matters over the next month but my performance on that day. Thinking of how wretched my last several efforts at Bonney Lake have been should be motivation enough to do anything.
