Monday

A while back, I made a traffic stop on an elderly woman. As she looked for her driver's license, I noticed her concealed-carry permit.
"Do you have a weapon in your possession at this time?" I asked.
"Yes, a .45 automatic in the glove box," she said.
"Do you have any other firearms?"
"A 9mm Glock in the center console."
"Is that all?"
"And a .38 Special in my purse," she admitted.
I smiled. "What are you so afraid of?"
Looking me righti n the eye, she said, "Not a damn thing."
-Patrick Irick





Friday no-gi at Sleeper.

Generic armbar drills & triangle drills. Then slightly more involved: With opponent in your guard, pull elbows out to break posture, high whizzer one bicep and triangle. Then, same entry but armbar. Note that it helps to cross-grab the opposite shoulder and yank the opponent's posture down before moving your hips.

Next, with opponent in your guard- yank hir arm crossways across your chest and get your butt out to the side. Post on hir hand on the mat, get your near hook in. Take the back in various ways. One thing you can do that's a little different is to reach over hir back and grab hir far ankle. Also, try to keep your first-hook-ankle hooked around hir foot so that when you roll, you can kick that leg out straight and strech hir, and immobilize. I'm not sure this will work on a larger person, but it sure does hurt- especially when your attacker has sharp bony ankles (Cindy!)

I drilled with Jalen- I do like working with him. We knocked out the reps of everything like gangbusters, and then switched again and just kept repping while we waited for everyone else to finish; got about 3x as much done as the other pairs.

Little sparring with Cindy, Jalen, a couple of the other guys. Jalen is very close to my size and we're pretty evenly matched. I can't tell for sure if he's going easy on me- he does go quite a bit wilder on Cindy. Anyway, I seem to be slightly ahead of him in that I do get a sub on him once in a great while, and he is ahead of me in that he spends more time in dominant positions. Most of Cindy's students are also training wrestling- she has a wrestling coach who comes in- and that really shows in how they fight.

I asked Cindy to work on sweeps with me, by getting on top of me in various positions and pretending to be a white belt- so I could just move around under there and experiment with the balance. I was looking for where she could post, and trying to identify the sweep opportunities. My brain is just not SEEING these, even doing it in slow-mo with focus like this- much less live. That exercise did help, so I hape to do it some more.

It's fun to watch Cindy and Jalen spar. They get wild and grin a lot. The rougher it gets, the more Cindy grins.



Saturday lunchtime at GB Seattle. (I had a rather traumatic experience on the drive in… I handled it okay, but it upset me and I'm still upset about it days later….)
I had gotten a late start out of the gate that morning, and missed the basics class. I hustled to get there in time for competition class at 12, but I need not have hurried, since the basics class bled over till 12:20. There were a zillion people on the mat. A bunch of them left before the comp class, though.

Just sparring. Blue Dave. A white belt guy who was slightly spazzy but not so much that I had to say something. He was definitely muscling me around, though. I did manage to finish one or two subs on him, and got on top a few times, but he spent much time on top smooshing me. Angus. John. John and I went for a long time and closed down the mat. What does it mean when I'm having all these 20, 30, 40 min long spars with people and neither of us get a sub? It's not like we're never going for them. Does this mean that we both suck really bad, or does this mean we're both rock stars? It's always with the smaller guys. Maybe- as I observed the other day with that little blue belt guy who sparred me for a long time- we just (as little guys) have a certain pattern of rolling that focuses too much on escapes and not enough on other things.

John and that same little blue belt and I spent some time afterward sitting on tha mat and discussing a but about "small man BJJ", which was interesting. We also observed how you can tell the people who train MMA… partly because people like us are in the habit of submitting each other without pain, but the MMA people seem to always be very much into the gratuitous pain.

JB was there, to my complete surprise. Not gi'ed up, though. Turns out she was there because she is now dating Z. Maybe will get to work with her some this coming summer.

I've been going for leg locks over the past few weeks. I haven't finished any yet, but it's a step forward for me to be looking for them and trying for them.


I have to say I'm happy to see how many brackets there were for Ladies Of a Certain Age at the PanAms. There were really a lot of older blue belt women. In a few years, there will be a lot of older purple belt women, and brown belt women, and black belt women. It also means that if I start competing again, I might not have to fight girls young enough to be my daughters or granddaughters.


Got some more writing done, random scene bits from the middle. It would be nice to find some more of the first 1/3 of the book… but I guess any progress is good progress.