Hey look- some actual jiu-jitsu!

I drove all the way into the city at lunchtime only to find that Cindy's class was cancelled- how's that for lovely timing?!?

Wednesday evening BJJ at Gracie Bellevue. If you've seen the Robin Hood movie with Kevin Costner... it was a pretty bad movie, but one cool thing I remember from it was Robin wading ashore from a ship after being imprisoned out of country for years. He was so happy to be back in England that he dropped to his knees and kissed the wet sand. I felt like doing that to the mat tonight. But it seems like a good way to get an infection, so I refrained.

The heater was blasting, and I have been on the bench for two and a half weeks- the warmup almost killed me.

I was the highest-ranking student in the room tonight. That still feels bizarre. Lots of white belts, lots of baby blues.

You can tell it's competition week. Prof Carlos was driving us. Lots of cardio drills tonight. Mostly stuff that I normally wouldn't have too much problem with; but I was flagging tonight due to my out-of-shape-ness.

We didn't really get a new technique drill; we did some review reps on two basic guard breaks from earlier in the week (both of which I've seen before, luckily, since I wasn't here earlier this week).

A little positional sparring- pass guard vs sweep only. I was working with white-belt Carlos; his base was really good and I couldn't sweep him although he's only got about 15lb on me. I complimented him on that, but warned him to not let me keep grabbing the half guard. I was able to pass his guard; it was nice to not have to worry about the triangle.

One of the things I like about Prof. Carlos' teaching style is that he always makes me feel that he is geniunely delighted to see me show up for class. He asked me where I'd been... I was expecting him to roll his eyes about the stupid little finger injury, but he put on his Serious Face and told me to drink fruit juice for inflammation. A long barely-intelligible discussion followed, in which he used the word "shit" while talking about flushing toxins out of the body, and groped for a more acceptable English word, and apologized when he couldn't find one. Okay, I'm up for juice, juice can't hurt- especially as housemate has a cold which I don't want to catch, and I also donated blood this week. I can tell by the way my head feels that I haven't been careful enough about rehydrating.

The second hour was "competition training" hour- I'm not sure what happened to the Wednesday evening no-gi, as it is still on the schedule ALONG WITH "Competition Training". Anyhow, I did not want to test the finger with CT quite yet, so I slipped out.

When I got in the shower, I was interested to see a layer of dead skin on my injured finger peeling off in one big piece, encompassing the entire outermost finger joint. I had noticed during the first week of the injury, when it was swelled up like a sausage, that the skin was whitening as if was dying from being overstetched. I guess that even the low-key amount of rubbing on gi and mat tonight was enough to slough it off. The finger did okay tonight, but I was being careful- and it was more cardio drilling than grappling, so it was a good way to start easing back in.

(pic- Dave, aka SIDE CONTROL)