Leilani + gravity

I started today's training out right by falling down the stairs at Gracie Seattle. No biggie, just a minor scrape on the arm. More importantly- no one saw it happen. (grin)

We drilled grabbing half guard from standing (which dovetails nicely with the reversal that Pat taught the other day), to be followed by one of two sweeps. One toward the guy's head, and one dumping him on his butt.

I grabbed Marc to drill with. I did not *plan* to do that, because I don't want to be pouncing on that poor guy every single time till he gets sick of me- but Hostility Boy was there.. and he was at my end of the gym. So I thought, "Cripes, I need to grab somebody quick before they all get paired up, or I run the risk of finding myself stuck with Hostility Boy," So I went ahead and pounced on Marc. It was good to drill with Marc, we were able to team-logic the little kinks out of our techniques.

Positional training from half guard. We were only allowed to sweep from bottom half guard. My sweeps in general are still lame, and from bottom half guard in particular. Marc gave me just enough resistance for me to eventually get a few. The next couple guys I went with just sat on top of me like rocks, and I couldn't do anything.

A random burst of conditioning drills at the end, when we were all tired- several rounds of crunches, pushups, triangles.

Open mat- I wasn't sure if I was done or not, but I was sure I wanted a little rest, so I took off my jacket and sat on the wall. After a little bit, Pat came wandering up (fresh! He hadn't done the class!) and asked me to roll. He TOTALLY ran a clinic on me. Lots of skating around on top, lots of selections from his Bottomless Bag 'O Exotic Chokes, lots of chokes and other wrapping-ups with the tails of my own gi. That's rolling with Pat. He also used my headgear for a grip a couple times, the stinker. I think I spent about 3/4 of the roll either front-mounted or back-mounted. About the best I can say for my end of that performance is that I kept gamely fighting... but hey, that's something.

I was actually noting how blase' I felt about getting my clock cleaned by Pat this morning, and wishing that I could more effectively identify what exactly differentiates those clock-cleanings that leave me so frustrated and despairing that I could melt down, versus those clock-cleanings that leave me thinking, "Well, hey, at least I kept gamely fighting. Yay me." I really don't know what the triggers are. It doesn't seem to fall into any patterns by the identity or rank of my opponent (although there are a few people that seem to consistantly frustrate me, there are others that have had BOTH effects on me on different occasions), nor the intensity of the butt-kicking (Today's was a quite thorough butt-kicking). One of the objectives of this blog is to help me process questions like this... but this question is still puzzling me.


I was tired after that, and was about to blow off evening class and crawl into bed with a trashy book.... when I saw Stephanie's KICK-ASS "Women in BJJ" video. It stoked me so much that I put my clothes back on and went to class.

Holy gridlock, Batman, that commute is nasty. It took me two hours to get down there and 40 min to get back... for a 1 hour class. Ugh!

I walked in, and Leilani's kids got all excited. (About a zillion of the kids in Cindy's kids' class are Leilani's. The kids have class, then they do homework while Mom has class.) They yelled, "Mom, your partner's here!" One of them informed me gleefully, "She wants to work with YOU!" LOL. Good to know that some people are happy to train with me.

Cindy was talking to Lamont about something- so even though I was late, they hadn't started yet. Leilani and I started rolling while they finished up their business. The woman is already getting some Skillz. In particular, she sinks her weight down really, really well. So well that I almost had to ask her to ease up on my ribs... but I resisted, because I didn't want to discourage her from doing it- she's good at it. I can definitely see Cindy's "fingerprints on her" as CK likes to say. Leilani would grab a certain grip, and I'm thinking, "That's *so* a Cindy-grip..."

We did defenses against an armbar from guard and a spinning armbar- almost the same defense, just tweaked for positioning.

Then a little positional sparring from front mount- I honestly had significant trouble getting out of Leilani's front mount... kinda sucks for me, but yay for her! I am honestly happy to see a sistah improving like that. When I got in mount, I had an easier time controlling things, but she was doing a lot right... so I made her work for a while and then let her put me back in closed guard.

A short timed roll with Cindy. Got tooled. Fun, though.



(pic- Jesse)