So happy to be training again

After about three weeks off the mats (because of a bruised butt aghhhhh) I finally got to train again today.  First Crossfit, which was hellish, then gi this morning.  It sucked. I’m exhausted. I’m going to be so sore tomorrow. I’m so so so sososossosososossoo happy.

Costa Mesa today

Today we are going up to AOJ to train. I have had three hours of sleep, give or take– and the phrase “give or take” is really not one I like to use when the grand total hours of sleep is three. Oh well, time to take enough c4 to give a horse a cardiac arrest. Yaaaay.

My life is a serious roller coaster right now, but I should be thinking about training, not all the drama. Sigh. Oh well, what is life without adventures?

We’ve got some really big names on the mat these days, it’s really good training for sure. I am caffeine rambling. TOO MUCH COFFEE

I can’t breathe, and it’s putting a serious damper on my training.

My body feels great, guys, and you know how rarely I say that. I came in at 10:00am this morning READY TO GO after two days off (I baked for two days straight, people). But then my upper respiratory system was like, “we’ve just had a conference and decided that you really don’t need to be able to breathe this morning” and so I couldn’t.  It was annoying and irritating and I just wanted to smash bitches train hard, but the fact that I couldn’t breathe was making it really difficult.

 

Gotta HTFU, I guess.  Today’s schedule:

10:00-11:00am Drills, rotation sparring

12:00-2:00pm Competition class– this was 2 straight hours of calisthenics, sparring, and psychological warfare.

6:00-8:00pm evening class, could be anything. Probably an hour of drills, hour of sparring.

Tomorrow, it’ll look like this:

9:00-11:00am Drills, sparring, general insanity.

12:00-2:00pm Competition class. Will probably be awful.  We took a few weeks off of comp training after no-gi worlds, and the way to get us back into competition training seems to be with the most miserable workouts I’ve ever experienced.

4:00-5:00pm either drilling or lifting.

6:00-7:00pm wrasslin’

7:00-8:00pm No-gi class

8:01pm passing out on the mat

I think I can win the Trials if I train smart. I don’t want to burn out this time around though.

 

 

Still grumpy, but moderately optimistic.

It’s Friday, and Metamoris is this weekend, which is incredibly exciting. Also, once it’s over, I think the overall stress level in the gym will drop a little bit.  Who knows, though?  All I know is that I’ve been training 3-4 times a day for the past week and my brain seriously feels like it’s on total autopilot.  These workouts vary in intensity and length, of course; it’s not like we’re on the mat trying to kill each other for two hours every time we decide we need to train.  But a good drilling session can be pretty intense (and long, at least an hour), and the Tabata workout/circuit training can go straight back to hell where it came from.

The weirdest thing is that I don’t feel particularly tired when I’m training (with the exception of my little meltdown on Wednesday) I just feel like I’m… going. And I’m going to go until it’s time to stop, then I’m going to stop.  There’s no variation in intensity for me in class because I feel like if I take my foot off the pedal at all the car is going to stall. Then the car is going to crawl onto the couch and take a nap. Seriously, who put that couch in the Academy? I love it so much, but it tempts me every day into its soft arms in the afternoon sunshine. Sigh. Love the couch.  But I digress, which is a terrible habit of mine; the purpose of that statement was to say I’m pushing and pushing through class because if I don’t push I’ll just quit and become a Ph.D student.

Post-circuit training yesterday.

Ever get so exhausted you’re simultaneously a little punchy and really grumpy? That’s the story of my life in the past week or so. I just want to be left alone, but at the same time I want to be around my friends; it bothers me when they make fun of me about stupid shit, but I don’t want them to stop; I feel like I’m a bundle of confusion and stress all wrapped up pretty.  Mostly people have been leaving me alone which is what I need, I think. I’m an introvert at heart, and sometimes I get overwhelmed by being around people all the time.

But today is Friday, everybody. Happy Friday. Know why Friday is awesome? Not because I don’t have to work tomorrow– I love work.  No, Friday is awesome because tomorrow I can go into the Academy (LOL OH GOD WHY) and just drill. Then we will go rock climbing, because Saturdays are not BJJ days.  Except for when they are.  Tomorrow is going to be interesting because I have been roped into doing a documentary about my life/training and such. Considering the fact that I’m pretty damn camera-shy, this could be a painful process for everyone involved.

 

I feel (BJJ) pretty

How I feel every day.

My life has been a series of geographic relocations on a global scale. As a result, my BJJ training has been so fractured and so varied that it used to be really hard for me to look at my style and say “yes, I got this technique from this person, and this technique from that school.”  I’ve always been a mishmash of different techniques gleaned from trying not to get squished and different schools and teachers.  I’ve always had good basics, really solid fundamental techniques, but after training at Atos for a while, I came to realize that having good basics isn’t enough.  I came to realize that the fancy shit doesn’t just exist because people wanted to look awesome in tournaments, but because they needed it to outdo someone with good fundamentals.  I was suddenly faced with the prospect of deconstructing 10 years of technique and rebuilding it piece by piece. It was a daunting task, to say the least.

It all started with a Berimbolo, for me. This technique, despite being something that should have been working for me, was as much of a failure as my triangle. My legs are too short for a traditional approach to de la Riva guard, but Berimbolos should have been right up my alley. Should have been, but weren’t.  I worked for weeks on Berimbolos, failing miserably into leg-drags and reversals and other terrible positions. I persevered past the point where logic should have kicked in and told me to cut that shit out because it wasn’t working, because I wanted that damn movement in my game. I was tired of getting destroyed every time I tried it. My work paid off, eventually. I don’t default to Berimbolos, but I can do them if the occasion calls for it, which is still more than can be said for the whole triangle situation.

My reaction every time it works.

But now that I’ve been here awhile, I have changed. Atos is written all over my game; you can see it in the way I play guard now (my guard has improved approximately one million percent).  You can see it in my passing, and in the aggression I’m finally starting to show.

I made the mistake of telling someone I was going to “smash bitches” and I haven’t lived it down.

I’ve been working on my rolling kneebar/rolling kneebar sweep and I’ve been hitting it on everyone. Once people figure out how to stop it, I imagine it will stop working so well, but I finished my opponent in no-gi Nationals with it, so I figure it must be pretty good.  I’m starting to develop that pretty-looking guard game that I admire so much in the Mendes brothers and the Miyao brothers, and in a lot of my teammates (Liera Jr for instance, but others as well; we have some blue belts that rock beautiful guards). I’m really proud that I’m starting to look like them.  I totally drank the Atos kool-aid, and I can’t fathom that being on any other team would feel this good. I feel like I’ve joined a cult.

Not even mad.

Competition Class

Competition class and I have a really strained relationship. I love it– but I hate it. It’s always hard, it always gets my blood pumping, and I’m always ecstatic, pissed off, or crying afterwards. On the toughest days, it’s really a crucible through which you must pass to be good in competition. I know it’s good for me, because I’m awful in competition, but that doesn’t make the class itself easier.

Remember in the sixth Harry Potter book when Dumbledore told Harry he’d be giving Harry private lessons, and Ron and Hermione thought that he’d be learning all kinds of advanced spells and curses and stuff? But then instead of advanced magic, Dumbledore teaches him about reality? About past mistakes, and how they bleed into the future and color future realities?

This is how I thought about competition class. I thought it would be all about advanced techniques and learning things and the like. But it’s nothing like any of that; it’s about going until you want to throw up and then going some more because in competition you don’t stop when you want to throw up. 

On Monday, we did some sparring. We started standing up, and one person was informed they must do takedowns, and the other must pull guard. Continue until points or submission, then stand up again. Three minutes pulling guard, three minutes doing takedowns.  Sounds fine, right? We did seven rounds. No water breaks, with running in between the rounds. Everyone sat out one round, but everyone also did six full rounds of this.  After that, we did regular sparring. It was hard, I was angry, everyone was grumpy and grousing. This kind of thing is only going to get more frequent as we get closer to the big competitions in the fall.  I can’t decide if I’m excited or nervous or what.

I can’t say I like this class, but I appreciate what it does for me mentally. We do another drill that I really enjoy; it’s a guard/guard passing drill. Three minutes on the top, three minutes on the bottom. We go normal speed until we’re told “GO HARD” and then we have thirty seconds to sweep/pass/submit/whatever. It’s supposed to mimic the last thirty seconds or minute of a fight, and man is it an adrenaline dump.

In other news, I really need to figure out some way to deal with my hair. It’s getting too long to just put in a ponytail, and putting it in a bun just means it’ll get stuck if I get put in triangles.

And that’s how I became a full-time gym rat.

I will be working part-time at the gym starting on Monday, doing marketing/sales/PR/event planning for the gym.  Train from 12-2, work from 2-6, train from 6-8. It’s pretty much the perfect job for my life right now.  I guess when it rains it pours though, because after weeks of absolutely nothing I’ve been getting offers left and right. This is a really cool opportunity though, because obviously– training all the time. But also, it’ll let me get my hands into all the different aspects of the business, something that most of the jobs I was looking at wouldn’t have me doing for 6 months to a year.  So… awesome! I am employed!  I’m employed by people who are going to enable my addiction to BJJ!  Perhaps less awesome? Unsure. It’s going to be a lot of work, I think, but at least it will be enjoyable work.

Regardless, I am excited. I have been irritable for weeks because I’ve felt like my technique was broken but it wasn’t broken, I was just trying new things that weren’t working for me yet. They’re working better now. I will do a proper update later after I come home from class tonight. Now it is time to go out and brave the SoCal traffic in hopes of making it to no-gi class in time.

Walking the line between hardass and stupid…

This is something I struggle with.  Seriously struggle with.  I am constantly in the “HARDEN THE FUCK UP YOU CAN DO THIS SHIT” mindset (and I apologize: I have a mouth like a sailor, it’s bad news for a kindergarten teacher), but recently I’ve come to realize this isn’t such a good thing. Or maybe just that it’s not ALWAYS a good thing to push your body to its limits.  But I do it anyway– I have this intense guilt about not training.  If I’m not in the gym rolling around, I’m at gymnastics or I’m out for a run.  I know it’s all in my head, but I swear I can feel my muscles deteriorate if I take a day off.  In BJJ this manifests itself in my sparring– sparring for an hour, two hours straight without a break just because I need to prove that I can hang with the best of the boys.  But it’s also a personal competition with myself (and I always seem to lose… go figure).

I’ve been sick for three weeks now.  It’s not a major sickness, just a cold that’s lurking in my chest and won’t go away, but it’s irritating.  This always happens: if it’s not bad enough to knock me out entirely, then I will train anyway, good ideas be damned.   As a result, I’m usually grumpy and half-sick around this time of year.

It makes for a frustrating training schedule. Or a non-existent one.

Last night was my first night really back in the gym since… maybe three weeks ago. I’ve been flirting with the idea of training for the past few weeks but it just wasn’t happening.  I would go to class, go through drills, spar maybe 20 minutes and just want to die.  I was getting frustrated and disillusioned, which happens to me more than I care to admit. So last night, when I could finally train again, it felt amazing.  I hate taking time off, but I love the euphoria of coming back after a hiatus.

Last year around this time I was over-training like crazy (sometimes twice a day, seven days a week, plus weight lifting– bad idea, kids) and it ended in a dislocated patella and six weeks in what I “fondly” refer to as “the robot leg,” a thigh-to-ankle metal brace that allowed me to bend my knee only thirty degrees; in other words, just enough that I was unable to walk down stairs normally without tripping and falling down said stairs.

After the second time I fell down the stairs in public, my doctor got worried and decided that since I was not about to stop jumping down the stairs on one leg, I had to carry a cane/pimp stick to avoid  falling down and smashing my head open. Although the pimp stick was good for smacking around pushy Chinese people and getting a seat on crowded trains, by the end of the six weeks I was in the brace I was ready to kill someone. It has been my goal in life ever since this incident to  never let this happen again.

This year, I am going to try to walk the line between hardass and stupid a lot more carefully.