Sorry, Ed

Learn to take a beating.  Learn to take it personally; just personally enough for it to drive your desire for improvement.  –Leaahh




I'm making an antlered headdress for the Hunt. Real whitetail sheds, fake ivy, garnets. I tend to heavily favor citrine when it comes to working with stones, but for some reason I'm all over the garnet for this particular venture. It looks like little glittery drops of blood- yet the purplish cast gives it a subtlety that appeals to me, and I expect it will work out to great effect by firelight. I looked up the properties- it's known as the "warrior stone". Heh.

If you ever go to the Puget Sound area, and you have any interest in such things, here's your Mecca- Earthlight Rocks and Minerals. I try to not go in there very often. My credit card begins to whimper in pain as soon as I step over the threshold. Their prices are actually pretty good... I'm enough of a rockhound to know.... I just can't control myself!
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No-gi, GB Belle. Single leg takedowns. Single leg takedowns with guard pass. Takedown spars. Then positional training with rotating partners: from front mount, back mount, Del a Riva, more takedowns.

It was quite an aerobic class, and pick-on-Kitsune-day continued through this class and into the next one. He did the "purple belt, purple belt." thing again. Well, I'd rather have him riding me than giving up and walking away, which he will do on very rare occasions when you're just too inept to bother with any more.

My ribs were doing okay (takedowns notwithstanding), but by the end of warmups for the following
"black belt" class, the room took on the appearance of rotating slowly- and I was beginning to wonder if I was too tired to continue. If we'd done more positional training for the next hour, I think I might have had to bail. However, the next bit turned out to be more brain-straining than body-straining (altho there was some of that too).

Del a Riva guard. Do not sit up- remain on your back. Take your hooking foot and stick the leg out straight so that you are scissoring opponent's far leg. At the same time, switch your grips. Now, take the other foot (the one you thrust against the knee) and bring the leg around in a big circle over your own arm and behind the opponent. Let go of hir ankle and grab the back of the belt. Kick both legs forward. Your hook feet are inside both of hir thighs. Now you have back mount. Don't forget to complete it by getting both hooks situated correctly.  (Carlos: "Keetsune- how many points?" Kitsune: "Uh, four." Carlos: "NONE, because you only have one hook een.")

Next: Del a Riva guard. Same scissoring variation. This time, keep both of the sleeve cuff gips that you already have, and cross the opponent's arms. Use your legs to load hir. Now you have 4 different options on which way to unload. Thrust opponent's X'ed arms the opposite way that you are thrusting hir body. Dumping hir over your head allows you to coninue the roll and finish in front mount. Dumping hir between you legs- if you tip hir body to one side and make sure you have the arms situated correctly- puts you in back mount.

I was a terrible partner to Ed tonight. I needed some help with the techniques, I kicked him in the forehead once while doing that big leg-circle, and then I hurt him by dumping him clumsily over my head. I realized a moment too late that I was rolling right over his face, and scrambled to move my weight, and didn't even notice that I was doing something worse to his ankle at the same time. I apologized all over the place, but I still felt reeeeeeeeeeeeeally bad. I definitely get clumsier when I'm tired- I think I was edging over the line of exhaustion that was beginning to make me an unsafe partner.

Sore and exceedingly exhausted now.

Further refinements- baseball bat chokes

Players tend to get attached to fancy techniques and fail to recognize that subtle internalization and refinement  is much more important than the quantity of what is learned…. Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential. - Josh Waitzkin, “The Art Of Learning”

"Bunny Jiu Jitsu" is now blue.... women are invading the ranks of the colored belts in tsunami waves....

Monday evening gi at Sleeper. More neck-squeezing today!

A couple of the same ones we did last week.

Then: You have butterfly guard. Snap neck and bicep down. wrap around head and one arm, gable-grip under opponent's chest. Use the butterfly hook on the side that you have the arm trapped to flip the opponent over. You can run around and entangle hir legs with yours if you wish. Then "RNC" grip and squeeze. This would work for no-gi as well- it didn't use any part of the gi.

Sony caught some flak for being "too nice"... Finally, someone else in here is "too nice"! I think she's even "nicer" than I! She has lovely choke placement, even if she lets go too soon sometimes. Her side control is very good as well.

Lamont is using some calisthenics counts to perch kneeling on one knee with both arms spread out, heels of hands up, eyes closed. He absolutely refuses to tell me what he is doing. Thus I am free to speculate that he is rehearsing a marriage proposal, trying to spin Spiderman silk, or doing a chi exercise which involves attempting to vaccuum Dragon energy out of all of his classmates for his own use.

Rolls with Cindy, Sony and Eric. Sony escaped all of my KOB attempts with alacrity today. I front mounted her about a Brazillion times, and made her do clean upa's with good hip pops and no stinting the arm or leg captures. (I saw Terry doing the same thing to her later, and I called, "You're going to be upa'ing in your dreams tonight!") After she upa'ed me off, I scissor-swept her and front mounted her again. It took her a while to start defending the scissor sweep with any success- or at the very least, scramble after being swept and not just lie there and let me regain front mount.

Eric and Cindy both leglocked and footlocked me upon request, and I tried to escape, with lukewarm success. Eric let me baseball bat choke him about 4 times (both with gi tail and without- I didn't get a chance to try to the gable-grip collarless version, must remember to work that one too). He was running away from them, and prompting me to plant a foot behind his head to hold him there while I finished. I also tried to employ the refinements that Jesse suggested yesterday (more elbows together, more sprawl to the mat, you don't necessarily need to get all the way behind the guy's head).

I was worried about my knee, but it did mostly okay. I was even able to run laps and do (shallow) lunges. The only time it really whined was once when Eric put it in half guard. It hurts now, though. Limping a bit.

I asked Cindy about that spider guard sweep. She confirmed what I had already pretty much decided- that, like kung fu throws, you aren't going to just go up to someone who is standing there flat-footed and try to do this to them. If I'm playing spider-guard and can get the guy to overbalance forward, or commit to a weight-forward attack, then I can do this sweep. Cindy was also pulling her knees abruptly to her chest to overbalance me, then sweeping. That might work for me, especially on smaller guys, but I am going to have to make sure I'm sufficiently underneath them first... and also take them by surprise.

I did have to sit out the last match.... because I thought if I rolled one more, I was gonna upchuck.

A bitch to sweep

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”

End day 4 of JJJC, and I'm already starting to fret a bit about the possibility of my brain getting overloaded, LOL.

I almost wimped out of evening class; I was tired- but I dragged myself in. I admit that it was partially because I was excited to report back to Adrian that I have been hitting his gi tail baseball bat sub on everybody and their sister. I only stayed for 4:30 basics.

I'm very happy I went in; it was just the teachers plus me and Albert- I love it when this type of thing happens, and you get essentially a private. Also, what we worked on- I think this is an important piece for me.

From spider guard: Get sleeve cuff grips, get one standard spider guard foot-on-the-bicep, circle the other foot to the OUTSIDE and hook the toe very high on the back of opponent's bicep. Not quite in the armpit. Make sure all this is nice and snug. Opponent should not be able to move hir arms around. 

That second leg is what I have been missing- I frequently get spider guard with both feet on the biceps, and I can hold it and hip all over the place and monkey around for a while and feel very comfy, but colored belts will eventually pass. Now I will start working with that second foot behind the bicep, and see what else I can do with it. (LEVEL-UP!) As an open guard player, anything I can do to level-up my spider guard is big.

Anyway: Although of course pushing the bicep-stepped foot to the ceiling to sweep is the standard, surprisingly you can do it either way. I have worked a few spider guard sweeps before, and always swept the opponent in a sideways cartwheeling motion. With this one, since the opponent has both feet free to move around and post, you really want to sweep hir either directly over your head or slightly diagonal- definitely aiming to face-plant hir somewhere above your shoulders.

Just keep everything tight, go down with one foot and up with the other, and bring your feet forward. If it doesn't work, edge your butt underneath hir more. As you sweep, you roll as well and come up on top.  The sweep will also work if the opponent is on one or both knees.

Albert drilled first, tried for a good while and utterly failed. There was a lot of pressure on my biceps- and for a while it felt like he was trying to pull me in half- but my balance was going nowhere. I didn't want to just stand there like a doofus while he struggled in vain, but remember- sweeps not my forte, and I had not the skill to ID what he was doing wrong.

Eventually Adrian took him away and JP came over to drill with me- "Maybe you're just a bitch to sweep," Well, lo and behold... yeah.... I appear to simply be a bitch to sweep from this position. He managed it a few times, but he struggled a lot. Again with the pressure on the biceps (owie!) The few successes were painful crash-landing faceplants for me. I said, "I'm not actively resisting... I'm not trying to be a dick or anything." and I wasn't. I'm a cooperative drill partner. But seriously, I did not feel myself being tipped.

After all this, when my turn came, I was filled with anxiety and pretty sure it would not work... but it did. I don't like the "unorthodox" side much, but it's nice to have that as an option to suddenly switch to if the guy is straining against Plan A. Also, I doubt I'm going to be able to make this work against a strong heavy guy who is resisting. But I'll have to see if I can come up with any chances to try it in the next couple weeks.

The final 1/3 of class was just me and JP rolling, and that was not quite so much fun. He was muscling, subbed me over and over, and spent a lot of the time front mounted on me. I also had a knee up in his guard a lot- I wasn't *trying* to grind his balls or anything (again, I am a considerate partner), but the rougher we got and the more I tapped, the less inclined I became to deliberately go out of my way to give up position just to be nice and redirect my knee from his groin.  I'm not sure if he was going rougher because he thought I was doing that on purpose.