It's a purple belt world.

Standing up to a person only draws a line around your territory. Defending it is what keeps you safe.  –Marc MacYoung



Sunday: 134.2

I know intellectually that pop bloats you, but it is truly astounding to what extent decreasing (not eliminating, just decreasing) the amount of pop for just two days has deflated the appearance of my protruding Buddha-belly. I swear, dieting would be so much easier if I was more vain about my appearance.

But here's something that actually MIGHT inspire me: concealing my pistol in its belly-holster may be easier if my belly is flatter. Yeah, that's it.

Also, when I lose weight, my boobs get smaller. Lord knows, life is better on the martial arts mat with every cup size lower.

Unfortunately, past history has proven that for me- unlike most people- eliminating pop altogether does not result in immediate weight loss.

Monday: 135.6
Tues: 135.6

Eggs- it's what's for dinner. And lunch. Tonight my assistant informed me that if I didn't lay off the carrots, I was going to turn orange. I informed her that I was okay with that, as long as I am FIT and orange.

Thurs: 136

I've been really really good all week with food. Less food and wiser choices. Slightly less successful with pop, but I did cut down.

Leslie, Casey and Cindy are all injured and off the mat. I'm feeling grateful and privileged at the moment that I'm not on the bench, because I know well how that feels.

Thurs lunchtime BJJ in Bellevue.

(blue belt) Jay, looking up and down the line: "We're the only two blue belts??!"
(blue belt) Nick:  "Guess so."
They look left at the three or four white belts, then they look right at the eight or ten purple belts.  Jay mutters something about "...........purple belts....."
Kitsune: "It's a purple belt world, Jay."
Jay: "So they tell me, Kitsune.... so they tell me."

Standup drills- double legs, single legs, sprawl on opponent's failed double-leg and then spin around to the side and take the back. Carlos suggested pulling the guy into your lap instead of jumping on hir back.

Opponent kneeling, you in butterfly guard. Cross-grip the arm and yank hir to all fours. Sink one leg into a deep half guard position, then take hir back either by climbing aboard or pulling hir into your lap. I do not feel comfortable with this technique on someone bigger than me (which means 99.9% of people). Once I have that leg sunk in there, all s/he has to do is sink down on it, and I am pinned on the bottom. If s/he's going to be mean, s/he can just keel over and capsize on top of me and crush me like a cockroach. I am in a position with a very limited set of options, and have no mobility to get elsewhere.  Even John was like, "I guess this isn't really workable for your body," after we messed with it for a while. I won't say of a technique, "I _CAN'T_ do X with my body" because every time I try to go there, Cindy (who is as small as I) does it with no problem. So I won't write it off.... but for my present level, this doesn't seem like a good one.

Positional sparring from the above position. I sucked from heep half, but I am pretty good at escaping back mount- even after explaining to John exactly what he needed to do to stop me.
A couple of spars.

Thurs evening BJJ in Kirkland. I haven't been to Kirkland in ages, and I miss Dave. I miss Cindy too, but Mondays and Wednesdays are not good for training, with my present work schedule- I haven't seen her in a couple of months.  :(

Warmups at Kirkland are longer and more tiring than they usually are at Bellevue.  It's a good thing  (pant, puff).

Pummeling.  I suggested to white belt that he not bend at the waist, but bend his knees if he finds me too short to comfortably pummel with. He did not straighten up. Okay, fine, buddy, take it or leave it. I don't care. I'm going to guillotine the snot out of you if you do that while we're sparring.

Flow drill: You on your back, partner standing, your feet on hir hips. S/he grabs your legs and tosses them to one side, steps to your hip. You shrimp out, cross far leg over top and replace guard.

Guillotines from standing; operating from failed double-leg.

Keylocks from mount. Dave suggests that if we're having trouble getting opponent's arms off hir chest, to first press the elbow down and then lever the wrist to the side.

Same entry, then opponent tries to roll away from your keylock. Transition to S mount, do not change grips. Clasp hir arm to your chest and straighten your back. Transition to armbar. You still do not need to change grips. Found myself wanting to, but tried to resist urge.

Same entry, now try to bow and arrow hir instead of armbar. Variation: windshield-wipe your shin against hir back and sit, pulling hir into your lap. Kick that leg out and place it over hir arm.

Also note: it is helpful to take up any slack in that pantleg before securing the grip near the knee.

A few spars.

Really tired. This two-classes-per-day thing is not easy. I am going to try to do it again tomorrow.

Anatomy of a slump

Ultimately what I believe, or don’t believe, doesn’t really matter. The only thing that beliefs do for me is close my mind to different possibilities. -Daniele Bolelli, On The Warrior’s Path


For the next little while we are going to be taking a detour through SlumpLand.  I apologize for being more dull and depressive than usual. However, if you are new to your MA journey and have never had one of these before, please do stick around and watch the show. It's important to understand that this is part of the MA journey, and that they suck, but they do go away.  I see a lot of people put down by their first serious Slump to the point where they quit. Don't let it get you.

So the worst one one of these that I've had thus far was in Kung Fu, and it lasted a full 7 months. Man, did that one bite. Most of them tend to last a few weeks. I can only speak to my own experience with them- maybe other people's slumps are different. I haven't figured out, as of yet, how to make them go away. Fighting harder as they descend seems to make them worse. The law of negative returns kicks in. It's like the Universe has decided to tap me out, and the Universe is a 350lb black belt with PMS, so struggling against the inevitable seems to only prolong the process. Tap tap tap. There ya go, Universe. You win. Now let's restart.

The last time I had one of these, I had finally figured out that part about "fighting harder only prolongs the process", so instead of spending a long while denying what was happening, and then struggling in futility and frustration like a fly in a web, I simply acknowledged that I was having a slump and validated my emotions about it. Then I tried a fresh tactic. Instead of increasing my training hours, I cut out all sparring and just did drills for a few weeks. I think it's critical to **NOT** stop going to class. Your conditioning goes to hell, if nothing else. TV and video games start to look attractive again. Your diet goes out the window and the weight starts coming on.

Positional training actually is worse than free sparring at this point.... unfortunately, while it's fairly easy to avoid sparring for a few weeks (with the exception of the odd class where the teacher decides that's all we're doing for that day), it's impossible to do just drills and opt out of positional sparring unless I want to fake an injury. Being a straightforward person with a low BS tolerance, I don't want to go there. So there will have to be some positional training, but I'll just have to deal with it as best I can.

Avoiding sparring and just doing drills minimizes the amount of failure that one has to deal with on a daily basis. It breaks you out of the Deadly Failure Spiral. It's critical to be able to deal with failure- in MA, getting our asses kicked repeatedly is how we learn- but when you're in SlumpLand, it's difficult to keep this in perspective.

Tonight- after pummelling, keylocks, figure-4 armbars and the same takedown we did this morning- I had to do positional sparring with Dave and two medium-sized white belts. Now, Dave has been a prince to me lately, and he only wants to help, and I truly appreciate his efforts. But I've been doing BJJ long enough to be able to tell when you're handing something to me. It doesn't make this better. It was actually easier to cope with being smacked down soundly by two white belts than it was to cope with Dave dialling his performance to just a half notch above mine and then handing me a guard replacement at the end. But it's the thought that counts, and I have enough presence of mind to will myself to accept it- if not with as much grace as I would wish, at least without openly snarling at him. I once got snippy with Ben during a Slump- this was like three years ago- and I immediately felt awful about it and still do to this day, so I try really hard to be mindful to not take out my frustrations on my teammates.

I'm hoping to come up with at least one new tactic to experiment with during this Slump. Still looking for a method to actually make it go away.

Izzy got her first stripe today, which is awesome.
 

More front mount

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to be over,
it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.




4:30pm basics class: Adrian is out of town, so we had no teacher today. Open mat. I rolled with Lindsey for 40 min. It is so unusual to work with someone who is lighter and weaker than myself. I used strength/weight a couple of times, but I was very conscious of doing it. It was unsatisfying. I let her put me in bad positions- especially bottom side mount, since I hate that. I felt less intimidated trying to work from that position with her, since I knew I could probably just Donkey-Kong her off at any time. I attacked her feet, but was not able to finish anything. She is very flexible, and her technique is good. It was a good time.



^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Study Hall. It was just me and Kelly. Awesome. We started rolling to warm up. I haven't worked with her in a long time, but she has a history of sorta physically and psychologically overwhelming me somewhat with her aggressiveness. Maybe she was going lighter or something today, but it didn't seem quite so bad. She was still getting the better of me, but I didn't feel steamrollered.


The Prof asked her what she wanted to work on, and she said she was having trouble with front mount. Whoot! So we worked on that.


Carlos suggests that we not plaster ourselves to the opponent, but stay mobile on top to defend getting rolled. Kelly apparently has a similar problem as I do with being TENSE and stiff and trying to strongarm people who are a lot stronger.


Cross-collar choke from mount: keep elbows in- I knew this, but apparently I'm still not doing it adequately. Roll hands inward, pull elbows to belly button, you can also lift the person's head off the mat or bow your own forward.


Keylock from mount. Carlos suggests that I try pinning opponent's hand to the mat further out than is my habit. When I tried this on Kelly, she was tapping pretty promptly with only a tiny lift to the elbow.


Ezekiel from mount. Hug opponent's head with left arm. Place your right hand at opponent's ear. Left hand grabs inside your own right sleeve cuff. Make a blade hand with little finger toward opponent's tender, juicy throat. squeeze. You need not grab anything with your right hand- keep it in a blade. If the opponent rolls you, you can finish the choke during the roll (Carlos demo'ed this on both of us... I now have a headache just from being Ezekiel'ed by him two or three times).


We also did some positional training from side mount. When in top side mount, every time the opponent moves, use that opportunity to suck up more space and get tighter.

Monday morning

The 70-80%  level of technical excellence can be achieved relatively quickly; however, to attain the remaining 30% or 20% requires a disproportionate amount of time and effort.  Tony Gummerson, "Teaching Martial Arts"

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!  Bryan has been promoted to black belt!!!!!!!!!!
(and I missed it! *sniff*)

Griff black-belted as well.



Thursday FOD: Kiu 2

I spent all morning at the allergy doctor.... only to be told yet again by yet another White Coat in yet another exam room that- despite the fact that we can cure some cancers and give people robotic eyeballs and all sorts of wonders- there is no help to be had for me. We can try allergy shots again- but no, sorry, they have not changed from a quarter century ago. So if they didn't do diddly squat for you then, you can expect the same (non) result now. Once I get re-employed (and re-insured), I might go ahead and get the shots again just for sh!ts and giggles, but the doc was no more optimistic than I. I'm just F'ed.

I know there are people who *do* have cancer, or were born blind, or with no arms or legs, you know, *REAL* medical issues who would rightfully tell me to quit being such a whiny baby about my stuffy nose. But ****DAMN**** this sucks!!!! I wish I could BREATHE!!! This is not fair!!!!!!   WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! (Throws rattle and pureed carrots, bangs furiously on highchair tray)

Side note of humor- when they poked allergens all up and down the insides of my arms- and the two "dust mites" spots instantly swelled up in blisters and developed angry pink coronas the size of golf balls- the nurse came in with a tube of Benedryl and asked "Does it itch?" I had to laugh, although I did restrain myself from replying, "What do you think, Sherlock?!??!"  It was kind of nice to see my cats exonerated, at least (altho getting rid of the cats was never on the table).

Not so humorous: Housemate has been coughing up a lung for a month, and I've been congratulating myself on not catching whatever she has. As soon as that nurse walked in, he was coughing, and I thought, "Uh-oh....." After he had spewed his germs all over the exam room, he left me in there for over an hour to marinate in it. Then of course, he was the one administering the scratch tests. There was a Purell dispenser on the wall, and I did my hands half a dozen times, but tonight my throat feels a little sore- so I think he got me. Now, can I fight off the dreaded rhinovirus or will it tap me out?  Decided to skip class tonight so as to not regift germs unto my teammates, should I indeed be infected.

Friday: Ugh. Sick. That is all.

Saturday: Second verse, same as the first.

Sunday: WIP- I have finally figured out how to get rid of the corpses.

Monday: Lunchtime BJJ at GB Seattle. I got to call Bryan "Professor" and watch him make a passing-a-kidney-stone face.

Also- Pat is now brown, and Jimmy Lee is now brown.

Knee- I was hoping that my knee would have healed fully during my rhinovirus hiatus, but it still winced a bit when I placed that foot on the opposite knee.

Standup: pummeling, clinch, inside reap. Feedback- don't curve body to the side, drop the knee that you're reaping with to the mat.

Armbar from mount drills. I am starting to see that one of the reasons I rarely go for these is that I am paranoid about hitting my classmates in the face with my shin or (worse) my heel. Angela instructed me to be tighter, especially with the foot placement. Being loose and sloppy decreases chaces of an accident, but it increases chances of the opponent escaping.

Keylock from mount drills. I managed to whallop Angela right in the mouth with my elbow, then I got really timid and slowed way down.

Positional sparring from mount- escape versus armbar or keylock. My go-to mount escape is not the greatest on an opponent with short legs. On top- I think S-mount is the key to my top game. I need to find ways to expand my options from here.