I can do a 3 Minute Plank. Booyah!

You don't stop fighting until the fight is over. You don't need to go down just because you have taken a few hits. As long as you believe you can keep going you will. If you do go down, you are still going to win because you are going to gnaw through his Achilles' tendon and bring him down to where you can rip his head off. -Greg Hamilton



I had to take a little break from the 30 Day Plank Challenge because I caught a cold. It was too painful to tip my head forward because it made all sorts of bad things happen in my sinuses. I got back to the planks yesterday. The goal for that day was a  3 min plank; I would have been happy matching my previous 2.5 min. To my surprise, I was able to do the entire 3 min!

Between the 4lb I dropped when I had food poisoning, and the 4lb I dropped on CK's Cauldron-O-Vegetables Diet, I am down to 128. (I weigh the same as Chrisanne- hee hee). 4 more to 124, which is my ideal tournament weight. Probably won't get there before Proving Grounds, but that's okay- it probably won't matter for Proving Grounds.

I will almost certainly have to resort to Slim Fasts to get/stay at 124... As in, probably a tiny breakfast, a Slim Fast for lunch, and a miniscule dinner- permanently. I am still resentful that I have to stay below 1000 cal per day, but I think I am moving to a place of accepting that this is my reality. There are plenty of things about my reality that are not fair. This one- I can either keep denying it and be chunky, or I can just buckle down and deal with it. It's largely mental, anyway. It's difficult to resist snacking at work. If I am really good at work, then I feel all hungry and deprived when I get home in the morning, and I eat bad things before bed. So the trick is going to be eating enough at work that I don't want to binge in the morning, but not so much that it goes way over my calorie load.

I controlled myself in the grocery store the other day. That's another key. I'm usually pretty good about not buying crap on impulse, and I usually keep the fast food under control, so if I just don't have junk food in the house then there is less temptation. I have been buying one small treat when I get groceries.... this week it was a chocolate covered cinnamon roll- instead of buying a box of cookies or bag of candy or something evil from the bakery.

I've also managed to trim a couple of sodas from my daily routine- not enough to win me any trophies, but one or two... which is more progress than nothing. This part is more about my sleep than about my weight.

One more factor- I've been going down to the River almost every morning, which has the double bonus of getting me away from the refrigerator, and killing a few more calories scrambling over rocks and dragging driftwood home.

Thursday BJJ at Bellevue. All spars again. Griff was there, but I didn't get to roll with him today. I asked everybody to take my back, stay really tight on there, and sub me. That they could choose to let me go if I did an actual technique to escape, but to not let me just twist and squirm out of there. Again, a few of them tried to be a LITTLE tighter, but they are still going too easy. It is possible that the only thing that is going to make them ratchet it up is if I start going harder, being more aggressive and actually trying to sub them.

For the final spar, I tried to get Luiz, but someone else snatched him from under my nose. By that time, the only guy left was a very big, muscular white belt. I stalled at the water cooler briefly, glancing at Carlos... he will often switch people around when he sees that it's just me and a humongo white belt.... but Carlos was not in a mind to bail me out today, he just stood there with his stopwatch in his hand, looking at me with his eyebrows up, like "What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?" (Only he would have said  "eengraved eenvitation"). So into the breach I marched, resolutely.

I guillotined the big guy and tapped him right away, then he got serious. I kept him off me with spider guard most of the rest of the time. He got into top side control once, and then just backed off and wanted to restart, because he doesn't know any subs from there yet. I told him to just try to flatten me out on my back (I was on my hip with my knees curled under), and that kept him busy for the rest of the match.