Wednesday evening

(Being in a) Hard Zone demands a cooperative world for you to function.
A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options- one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals. Making sandals is the internal solution. Like the Soft Zone, it does not base success on a submissive world. - Josh Waitzkin, “The Art Of Learning”



Tonight the excruciatingly delicate spun-glass primrose of my BJJ ego was shattered into a million agonizing shards by the toxic bowling ball that is Leah.

Really, it's not her- it's me. She subbed me several times in two minutes without seeming to work very hard. She trained at Gracie's for a year, took a year off, and has just started sporadically training again; meanwhile I have been busting my buns 3X plus every week the whole time, and I feel like I ought to be- if not beating her- at least holding my own. I got really frustrated, to the embarrassing point that everybody noticed. Dan was really nice about coming over to try to buck me up. But I had to call it a night after that. It was definitely one of those days where I had the "No matter how long and hard you work, you are just *NEVER* going to stop sucking this bad" tape on endless loop in my head.

One of the hardest things for me to deal with is that I am technically at the front of the rank line here much of the time, and it's like an acid splash on my self-esteem every time I have to line up before and after class at the head of a row of people every one of whom can effortlessly kick my ass (and spent the intervening time between lineups doing so). It's a mortifying joke, and I burn with shame. It's almost as bad at Gracie's; there are usually at least a few people ahead of me there... thank God we're not being forced to line up by rank order in kung fu any more. I don't think I could stand it.


Anyway, before that farce took place, we drilled escapes from side control some more- which is good since I need more work on that. Still need to get my shoulder hunched up higher upon attaining the underhook. Also need to get to the knees faster and smoother- still a bit slow and clumsy. Additionally I'm still having some hesitation over which underhook to go for- there's that left/right confusion again- but we drilled it enough today that I'm hoping to be a bit more confident on that now.

At the last class, I sustained a mild rib injury to the side OPPOSITE by "rib out"- and almost the exact same situation, although so far it appears to not be as dire (Thank you Lord). No radiating nerve pain, and I was able to do army crawls today with just a small amount of pain from either side. I'm feeling gun shy about rib injuries now, though... Every time someone makes a move toward side control, I hunch up reflexively with a Black Crane elbow/knee guard frame-up goin' on.