As Ice Cube said, I gotta say it was a good day

Great ways to start your post-chore Saturday morning - a text from one Butch Hiles saying "I'll be at the gym in 15 minutes, if you can make it"

HELL YES I CAN!!!!!

What followed was the least hellacious nogi session I can recall in years. And that is a wonderful statement to be able to make after weeks/months of feeling incredibly stupid with my nogi game. There's still plenty of room for improvement, but it was nice to just not feel like I was wasting my time.

I thank wrestling for a lot of that. As I'd hoped, the mentality there is bleeding over. I kept a loop playing in the back of my head "move forward, never backwards" "get fucking meaner" "control the hips/head" and "move move move" -- again, room for improvement, but something piercing my thick skull is always a good thing.

Later, trying to work on some single leg X guard was frustrating, but that's just going to be something that maybe comes around later on. I maneuvered over into it at one point rolling, but that was from someone standing in my open guard. And that's fine. But trying to swing around and into it when my opponent is kneeling is just going poorly. For now. It'll evolve. Some more drilling, who knows where it'll emerge as an entry/option.

I'm adding it to the bucket list along with tornado guard and berimbolos as something that I think may someday be cool to add to my game, but aren't ideal right now maybe, given my body shape/limitations.

Guillotines also snuck in today, which is not something i normally go to. Again, wrestling's influence. And I was so shocked to see it so naturally fall into place- I'd only worked on some front headlock escapes this week, and thereby some guillotine type moves. With short T Rex arms, I tend to bail on chokes early, if not outright ignore them (stupid, I know), but now? We'll see. I still wish I had longer arms to achieve Brabos and their ilk.

That's okay, I'm sure my training partners wish I had longer arms too. With my blatant disregard for most armbar attempts, I'm sure I'm due some payback there.

Guard passing got sloppier as time passed. I was lazy, stuck with standing guard passes at first. Foolishly chose to start trying kneeling passes only once the mats were slicker than snot on a door knob. Really need to develop some discipline there to work hard for the kneeling passes, regardless of height differentials.

On the way out of the gym, it was also really cool to have someone tell me they tried a simple open guard concept/suggestion and have some success with it. It wasn't anything earth-shattering - "just play around with your grips/hook placement when they stand up in your open guard" but seeing his eyes light up explaining how he'd gotten a sweep from it... this coming from someone who'd poo-poo'd the idea of open guard being an option. Pretty sweet.

Now I have to decide: wash these grappling clothes or burn them? Yuck.