One of the laments you hear from college professors is that every year the students get younger. That's absurd, of course. What is actually happening is that the professor is getting older while the students stay the same. However, the subjective sense of that experience is different. You don't necessarily feel older. But these kids ... they just seem younger this year than last ...
This is what I meant a few days ago about "swimming to keep from drowning." And it's really been a theme of training for me over the past several weeks: the feeling of training with guys who a year ago were like Labrador retrievers splashing giddily in backwoods creeks, who now have become, if not certified pit bulls, then at least Rottweilers with grit to spare. Every day I train with someone, a blue belt with a couple of stripes or maybe a brand new purple belt and I think, "Wow, either this guy has gotten a lot better since the last time we trained, or I'm getting worse."
The truth of the matter, as always, is probably somewhere in between (and hopefully more angled toward the former than the latter). At the end of the day, it just means going back to the drawing board of what's working and what's almost working, and continue to tweak out what passes for athleticism or cleverness or whatever until nothing but jiu-jitsu remains.
159.7 on the scale, post-train.
