Still Here

Yes it's been a month since my last post.  Them's the breaks.

Fatherhood is weird.  It's good and everything, but there's this small person who never leaves and can't do basic things like, you know, eat on his own.  Or speak.  But it's good.  He's wonderful, and his mother is a saint who lets her husband go to jiu jitsu three times a week.  It's phenomenal.

Training----training is very different from what it was in the fall.  We still cannot get a steady group of guys to come to class.  It's alright, as Klint does things other than instruct for his living.  [That part, actually, is great; that means that we know he's there because he wants to be.]  But it is always frustrating in that we always training with the same three or four people and aren't getting looks at different styles all the time.  And as lucky as I am to have my main training partner be a black belt, it is pretty hard on my ego to be unable to see my game develop because he's always taking it up the next step to keep me working harder.  And then when I'm up against the rest of the guys, the lower blue belts and white belts, I'm so excited to be the hammer instead of the nail for once that I don't take the opportunity to work into and out of different positions.  So really, it's me being stupid.

A few weeks ago, Klint turned Saturdays into no-gi.  So we train in the gi Mondays and Wednesdays, and make use of our rashguards on Saturdays.  This Saturday, for once, we had a class full of higher belts.  There was one teenage orange belt, one high white belt, myself [2-stripe blue], two purple belts, two brown belts, and two black belts.  And I got to train with all of them.

Jared, the non-Klint black belt, is a freak.  He is simply unreal.  He kills hooks before you can place them, he gets to side control before you realize he's passing, he uses only as much energy as is strictly required, and makes you use much, much more.  So I got throttled by him for a while.  And I felt like I could do nothing, like I was just flailing and donkey-kicking out of fear.  And when we finished, he was very complimentary.  He asked if I like no-gi, and I have to say that I don't particularly.  I feel like I am just uncontrolled and all muscle.  But apparently, I'm the only one; Klint even texted me later to say that Jared was impressed.  Andy was watching and said I did much better than he was expecting.  I don't know how to take that, so I just say thanks and move along.

I also got to train with Tony [purple] and Gina [brown] during class, working on guard retention and recovery, and then with Jeremy [purple] and Casey [brown] after class, working on---well, just working on training, I guess.  Some strikes, some gutters, a few uncomfortable positions later, and I was suddenly late to get home for a thing.  As I left, Klint and Jared and Casey and Jeremy were going over positions and techniques, and I wanted just to stay for the next two hours and keep learning.  But family.  You know.

Son

This is him at 2 minutes old.  Give or take.

Hands up, elbows in.  He's a natural.

Yeah, about that whole "free time" thing....

My lovely wife and I just had our first child.  And by that I mean that she had the kid while I was there trying not to scream like a small weasel.  It was weird and terrifying and great and all those things.  And now we have this little guy at home, and we're ostensibly responsible for him in every way shape and form.  So that means less time for things.  But she's guaranteed me 2 nights of jiu jitsu a week.  So we've got that going for us.

Which is good, because this afternoon Klint is testing a few of us.  And that means I get to train.  Sadly, the boy is a little too small for the mats right now, and the wife doesn't want to take him out in this weather.  Which is understandable.  So he'll have his first class later on.  Maybe Monday.

More.

Klint has cut back on our classes.  We just don't have enough students to justify all the time we're taking the classroom.  Which bites a big one.  Now he has class Monday and Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings.  So it's three times a week.  Unfortunately, Tuesday and Thursday nights were the nights when we had the separated room all to ourselves the whole night, so we could stay and train and drill as late as we had energy.  Now, we have to share our training space with others.  Which, really, isn't terrible--hell, it might even bring a few of them into class to train.

Today, Klint brought his friend Jared in to teach class.  Jared earned his black belt from Dave Camarillo at the same time as Klint.  He trains up in Brainerd (see also:  arctic wasteland).  He was preceded by the myth. We started training after he had to take a lot of time off for some injuries, and therefore we never had a chance to train with him.

I don't even know where to begin.  He is indescribable.  His technique is phenomenal, he is humble and intelligent and exact and---really, just awe-inspiring.

That meant that today, I went to Gina's class from 8 to 930, rolled for a half hour at 1030, then to Klint's/Jared's class ended up going from 12 to 3.  To be fair, a lot of that was Klint and Jared showing each other new and different techniques.  But that was just as good as class.  And jesus I'm tired.

2012 Goals

Everyone talks about making lists of goals so that you can reflect on them and return to them over time, see how far you've come in actually achieving them.  I don't know whether that's true or not; I hadn't looked at my goals for last year until five minutes ago.

1)  Keep training.  Seems simple enough.  We have a kid coming in short order, and I'll be starting a grown-up job in a week.  All that means that my time won't be as flexible as it has been the last several months.  And my improvement will probably come on a bit slower.  Because I won't be able to get to, say, five to six classes in a week.  Because life takes precedence.  But.  I want to keep training and keep working to get better.

2)  Compete at least once, hopefully twice.  I don't particularly enjoy competing.  It teaches me a lot, and watching myself compete (as painful as that is) shows me where I need to focus training and what parts of my game I have developed.  But the build-up and the distance we have to travel because we have very few tournaments in town and the toll of all that hard training---that's rough.  And with a life outside of the academy, it's hard to properly recover.  I pile the pressure on by not really taking time off and going right back to the mat as soon as I'm home, the mat where I can't train light with my main training partner because my main training partner is my instructor and he doesn't go light with me.  But the benefits of self-awareness and honest assessment outweigh the inconvenience.

3)  Train outside of Minnesota.  Training away from my home academy is always fun and educational.  It also means that I'm not stuck in the great white North all year round.  I want to get to Marcelo's, to Ryan Hall's academy, to Dave's in Pleasanton and Darcy's in San Jose, not to mention a handful of others.  So if I'm traveling, the gi is in the bag.

4)  Work my weak positions so I'm comfortable.  Inside closed guard, passing, half-guard.  It's only three. Shouldn't take that long.

5)  Work the belt.  I don't want my purple yet.  I'm not ready for it.  My game is smoothing itself out and I can feel myself becoming more fluid, but I have entirely too much more to learn to be thinking about that promotion right now.  I have one stripe on my blue, and that's more than anyone else at the academy.  It means a lot that I have that after less than two years training.  Keep the head down, keep working and learning.

Words

We're in the Black Hills for the holiday.  his means that, unfortunately, I won't get to train again until Tuesday.  This is sad.  I even tried to get in touch with a few academies in town, but none of them are going to be training while I'm in town.  In case that changes, the gi, rashguard, and belt are all in the trunk.

I told Brenna earlier this week that she has no idea how much of my thinking time is spent on jiu jitsu.  On the way through South Dakota, we were listening to Radiolab, my new podcast addiction.  We were listening to the episode on Words.  (Here is the link; if you haven't listened to Radiolab, it's probably the smartest thing on the radio right now.)  In this episode, they were discussing the idea of whether language is what allows children to think better than rodents, and later, whether language prevents us from feeling as much emotion as possible.  [Rereading that sentence, it's terribly written and only kind of explains what I want it to, but we'll see if I can make it better.]  One of the stories focused on a woman who was having a stroke, and she wrote a book about the experience.  The left side of her brain was shutting down, and she lost all language.  In those moments, when only the right side of her brain was operating, she said it was indescribable (not the least because she didn't have language) and allowed her to feel in ways that the logic and design of language prevent.

There was another bit about neural connections, and how evolutionarily advanced it is to be able to form the thought "left of the blue wall."  Both rodents and humans have the capacity to define the noun and adjectives in that phrase ("wall," "left," and "blue"), but for some reason, rodents are unable to build the connections necessary to define an item's location in relation to a differently colored wall.  [Again, bad explanation--listen to the radio show.]  So it's as though each of our brains has these islands that define colors and directions and objects, and language (prepositions, in this particular case) allows us to connect those separate islands to one another.

So we were driving the expanse of nothing that is Dakota Country and I started thinking about how my training has been going lately and the feedback that Klint has given me.  I know a lot of techniques.  I can talk about (and even reasonably teach) armbars, takedowns, triangles, kimuras, the Camarillo switch, chokes---when I write it down or try to explain it, I realize that it's a lot more technique than I expected.  I have these islands of technique, and a few bridges between them that I constantly use.  (And this is where the two parts of the episode combined to fuel my thoughts.)  But I'm scared to turn off my left brain when rolling to see whether any other bridges exist for me to use.  Occasionally it happens---I'll do something that's really good and that I didn't expect, but I don't remember what I did so I can't replicate it or even explain it.  But that is what my jiu jitsu needs right now:  less left brain.  In jiu jitsu parlance, I have to flow with the go a bit more.  Stop thinking about it and just roll with the roll.

It's hard.  I have a rather overbearing brain--I want to understand everything that I'm doing, and shooting from the hip in these situations, especially when I'm up against Klint, means that I'm going to have to lose a lot and that I won't enjoy the time I spend training.  Which is simply a fact of life.  And I should get used to it.

Why Not To Be Upset With My Progress

This conversation has happened a handful of times in the last three months:

Them:  You have really good movement.
Me:  Thanks, I appreciate that.
Them:  How long have you been doing jiu jitsu?
Me:  It will be two years this coming February.  So around 20/22 months.
Them:  .....That can't be right.  You're much better than that.  Did you wrestle?
Me:  For a year in eighth grade.  So kind of, but really no.
Them:  That's not fair.

I wish I could take credit for it all on my own.  I can't, and I refuse to.  For starters, I still think I'm not all that good.  I have a few tricks, and one or two standard attacks and set-ups that I always look for.  But I'm not a monster on the mat by any stretch.  Also, my progress is almost entirely due to Klint's instruction.  He's a technical madman.  Every lesson takes the minutiae of each technique, explains why it's important to the particular combination we're working that day, and at the end, goes from the six-inch view to the thirty-thousand-foot view.  From explaining why the elbow control helps more than wrist control for this one set-up to why we should attack constantly and how that affects not only our game, but our opponent's defenses and concentration.

And it all shows in my training.  So that's nice.  And though I'm frustrated and feel stagnant, it seems that I am the only one who thinks that about my game.

I imagine this is something that everyone has to go through during their training.  At least, everyone who isn't BJ Penn (or some other equally ridiculously prodigious grappler) and has to suffer through life with regular concerns like a job and familial obligations.  We're not learning knitting or how to make a collage.  We're fighting.  It's hard, and sometimes it sucks.  But you're not always the best judge of your own progress.  That's something worth remembering.