crossfit was a mofo today

yeeks. Someone must've been even more pissed off at the world than me when they designed that wod.

it. was. glorious.

And ew, I reek.

Earlier this week, Murph not-so-subtly let me know I maybe might want to make more time for running intervals again in my tiny world. This will be easier to try and do once my work schedule (again) normalizes. I sadly can't deny the immediate transfer of benefits to my mat stamina from just 15 minutes of sprint intervals. But I still hate those fuckers.

My idle curiosity of the day is why so few people genuinely enjoy the study of jiu jitsu. I should probably quantify that a little better: why so few people who I regularly train with. I'm sure somewhere(s) there are plenty of people content to study it.

Meh. Maybe I'm just a perpetual student. Maybe I have to be reflective of it as I dissect game plans, trying to still find what fits for me, and what fits for which opponents. Whatever it is, it annoys me that so few people will just freaking drill, rep it out, analyze moves to figure what is going right, and what is going wrong.

I'm also rather tired with the utter myopia of people who think helping anyone else = their future losses. I've always been of the mindset, especially during those times in my training when partners were few and far between, that when you help others, you're helping yourself by making them better training partners.

I am amidst a frustrating phase where I would like to be able to nail down the stripe three material and test for it, but the start/stop-iness of being able to work on it just annoys the piss out of my compulsive little brain. I'd probably do well to pace myself with it. It makes me worried that there's not much of what is supposedly our required curriculum that I feel much connection with, in terms of my own game. I can see the move, study it, explain how to do it, but I'm not a huge fan of a lot of it.

I don't know how much of that is a testament to my needing to just shut the hell up and rep it, or force it to be my game; how much is coming from what has to be a certain native futility to enacting a game plan that is similarly forced upon everyone else I'm training with (i.e.-- we all know the same moves, setups, and counters, so how successful will anyone be); or if I'm either truly wretched at jiu jitsu, or if this just isn't going to be my game.

I'm also hesitant to proceed with testing because I just think there is so much I still have to learn. I still don't really know how to piece together my game, since so many classes work as follows: okay, here are some moves, here are some counters, let's all rep these a bit (supposedly at a normal learning pace but fuck that noise we're gonna kill), now let's try them live (sweet now we can really kill), oh hey none of them work anymore and everyone just go back to the same 3 things you always do, especially if they've little to do with what we just learned. 

No positive reinforcement of the move ever working doesn't lend itself to me really learning it, since my brain also thinks after several repositionings and tweaks and failures "well, scrap this shit."

Or maybe all of this annoyance is a sign to back burner the curriculum and just go back to studying butterfly. Or nogi. Or both. Or just move more heavy things until I'm less weak by comparison, then we can all hulk smash. pfft.

just putting in the work

got about a third of the way through my curriculum for 3rd stripe. It's been a year, so I figured I might, you know, get back on the pony about testing again... pfft.

I'm really thankful to have done a little study of Ryan Hall's triangle series, as it has helped me to at least get my foot in the door with regards to landing anything like a triangle with my stumps. I am, however, still a bit vexed by butterfly guard. I'm trying to remain open-minded about it, but the butterfly related moves on my curriculum in particular seem so ... alien. As if the position doesn't feel unfamiliar enough...

I haven't really been on top of my nogi game, which is odd seeing as the temperatures have regularly been in the nineties for a while now. One would think I'd welcome the chance to further elude heat stroke. Today was around 94. I didn't even notice it really until I went to grab dinner afterwards. Couldn't get enough water.

I am hoping to get another good chunk covered tomorrow. While I won't be able to be tested on it tomorrow, I would still like to start better committing it to memory. Maybe try and get the other stuff to stick a little better as well. Particularly the butterfly... I just can't decide if it's just not the butterfly game for me or if I just need to give it more time to more smoothly fit into my move set.

It won't go well if I don't get hydrated and rested though. Crossfit soreness started setting in this morning. At the rate this holiday weekend is going, I'll have to go back to work to get some rest.

active hooks active hooks active hooks

If nothing else, I'm going to take that point from tonight's scattered mat time.

(Context: butterfly guard)

although I'm also taking the point of properly angling my "up" leg -- I've long been angling it outwards, losing the ability to keep any sort of distance once my opponent starts to try and flatten me out, and it's also conceding the pass by making it even easier to push the leg down to the mat and out of their way.

And duh, switching which leg I'm hooking (theirs AND mine)

Key, key factors I'd been completely oblivious to (have I mentioned how wretched my butterfly guard is?), little aha moments that I hope turn into nice dividends in terms of progress.

While that progress has been slow, it has at least led to some opening up in my open guard. Hell, at this point I'm just tickled that I can get into open guard. So even if my butterfly guard always ends up sucking, if it can at least be annoying (or boring?) enough to allow me to move into open guards, that's okay with me too.

Actually, no it's not. I want to develop a decent butterfly guard. Not at the expense of anything else, and not as a baiting technique, nor as a transition to some other guard. It was really nice to be back for even an abbreviated and unfocused mat session. While I hated to, a few extra days' rest was probably a wiser idea than I'd like to admit.

I also felt turdish. My training partner I'd mentioned a couple posts back apologized for making me angry. I felt decidedly assesque for getting angry as much as for making someone else feel like it was their fault I got angry. Maybe I'll mellow as I enter my 40s. Probably not, but let's hope... 

Hoping to pick up a few gis from alterations tomorrow morning, and to commence with rotating them in so I can properly review them here. But I will say, I recently picked up the new backpack from www.originbjj.com and it is wonderful. There are a host of lovely pictures there, but what I would like to stress here is that this is a large backpack. To me, the pictures made it look small, but it is FAR from small. Granted, I'm not winning any slam dunk contests, but still. I was concerned that I would have to start packing way more spartan than I normally do, NAY. This bag can hack it.

I'll try and get some pictures for scaling purposes here before too long, and do a more dedicated write up. Also for their gis - I'm aiming for a progression of them, and noting improvements they've made over the 3 models I have.

feeling anemic.

adding more iron back into my workout mix. While I really dig the oly lifts in crossfit that I do, I feel as though I could lift more weights. I'm getting no younger, and there's no sense in giving up what muscles I have/had to atrophy and aging. The question becomes where do I cram this into the schedule? It'd be pretty boss to be able to stash a barbell or even a kettlebell at work, but I figure that's probably out.

one way to find out. what's that old saying? "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission"

at any rate, I think this cold is gone enough that I can resume training now. We'll see. Probably work some curriculum and nogi today percraps. I'd do well to have a little more of a gameplan in place before I go cruising down the hill. I imagine my training partners would appreciate that as well. In keeping with what I pondered last post, I'm picking ONE dvd. ONE dammit. And rolling with it.

that ONE dvd shall be.... uh.... well hell, I'll just start with Chris Brennan's nogi guard passes. Let's go watch some tape and take notes, people! (and drink more coffee)

afterthought: more reviews pending.

I'm being a greedy gearwhore. I really should share more, as I've stumbled across some really great (and some really meh) things lately. I'll try my best to get pics snapped and posted along with my tangential reviews.

Great things: Origin BJJ, How to Defeat the Stronger Opponent, CEP compression, and more.

overkill on materials

like anyone who spent either too much or maybe not enough time in college, my usual approach to anything I'm not getting is to study it more. Read more about it, research differing methods, looking at it from every possible angle - even the ones I know aren't necessarily correct or useful....

I'm wondering if this is maybe not the greatest idea with bjj/grappling, since it doesn't usually foster any sense of focus with me, and instead I end up swimming in a sea of a zillion different sweeps, for example.

this happens when I'm rolling, too. My timing goes out the window while my brain displays an hourglass rotating over itself, pondering the next move(s). It's rather comical, in that mentally I'm conjuring just a pile of different options/counters/attacks, but in so doing, I never get to pull the trigger on any of them.

I'd like to be able to put blinders on, but then I'd just become predictable, and probably bored as well. I'm awful at that -- I want to see it all.

What I really need is that chair from The Matrix. Just have some needle jammed into my brain stem and cram all these instructionals I've amassed into my head, perfectly assimilated. Man, that would be awesome.

Prime example: I mentioned trying to study up more on nogi, which I'm presently rather wretched at... I pull out the library of DVDs (which is really, really obscenely vast at this point) and start pulling out options. I'll spend an hour or two watching these and it'll help. Five minutes later, I'm looking at Roy Dean's nogi series, 4 from Chris Brennan, 2 sets from Pablo Popovitch, Saulo's Freestyle Revolution, 3 sets of Marcelo Garcia... yeah sure, all in a couple hours I'm gonna watch and absorb that. Pfft.

Ideally, I would love to be able to just plow through every single one of these. Study them. Take notes. Take them to the mats on open mat days and work through them. But that'll take weeks. Months, actually. And during that time, I can't rightly just "turn off" the gi end of my game. So, I'm splitting my time b/t the two.

And unlike the general demographic on the mats, I'm not getting any younger. Thirty-eight is just months away. I've managed to turn my biological clock into paranoia about my jiu jitsu progress. Lovely.

But I guess blinders is what will have to happen. Pick one. One instructional. Work through it. Work with folks to quickly determine what's working, what isn't, and move the hell on. 

meh. dumb colds.

with any luck, I'll feel normal tomorrow and can resume training. I sacrificed this weekend to the alka seltzer gods, so I find it only fair that they leave me some better health under my pillow this evening.

then again, I did basically try and triple my typical time on the mats per week. (dumbass, you ain't 20...)

repeat to self: train smarter, not just harder.

that said, it's time for another dose. hopefully there will be less pouting this week. I'm really hoping to see/make some progress on nogi, butterfly (all around, gi and nogi) and establishing some new patterns. Rolls are turning out the same way too much, and I guess while that says some good things, I tend to think it says more bad things with regards to inertia in my progress. Or maybe more a testament to my being too chicken-shit to change things up from what works.