PROGRESS! -- and my first video :)

So in the last week and a half I've gotten my first two submissions. One armbar and one kimora. One on a guy who's been training on and off for a couple of years, and the kimora on a dude even newer than me! It shouldn't count but he's actually pretty good so I'm counting it.

Last night I got the first video of myself. Besides the fact that my hair looks shorter than it feels and my rear-end looks bigger in those capris than I thought...it's not a bad video ;)

Let me set it up. My rolling pahd-nah there (partner for those of you who did not grow up in the midwest or south) is in the guard position. His goal is to control me with his legs and try to position himself to perform a submission. My ENTIRE goal at this point, especially as a complete newbie, is to just get past his legs. It's called 'passing'. Stay with me folks, I know this stuff is complicated.

If I can get past his legs into side control, meaning that I control him from the side (I told you this stuff is complicated!), I will be in a better position submit him. The video actually runs out before an even cooler part where I got him in a decent choke. ANYway.

So here ya go. Copy and paste the link into your browser and it should go to my google page where you can play the video. It's 1-minute long and most of the action takes place near the end.

https://picasaweb.google.com/105558444651820709081/BJJ?authkey=Gv1sRgCLT09JCws9rghAE

THANK you for reading, folks!

AS :)

When There's Nothing Left

Tonight was a turning point. You see, I've always been awesome at starting things. I gain energy, inspiration, and excitement when something is new and different. Then when the newness wears off I get bored and cranky and I'm looking for the next challenge.

Tonight at class I hit a breaking point. I had nothing left. I had burned through my fuel and there weren't even fumes left to run on. I was forcefully pushed out of my comfort zone, and it hurt, in more ways than one.

For some reason though, at the moment when I always give up, something welled up out of my guts and came out as something like defiance and an absolute refusal to stop or rest or give in. Something that said "Learn. Fight. Win. And sooner than you think, you won't be the newest, the weakest, the least skilled. You will be strong, you will be skilled, and you will finally, win."

So from being sprawled out on the mat emotionally and physically, I pulled myself together and finished. When there was nothing left to finish with, I finished something. It was messy, a little embarrassing, and I definitely didn't win. But no matter, because I finished.

First Miss, Boo.

I 'had' to skip class last night for the first time...just felt really yucky. Some kind of disagreeable food substance was not treating me well. I wish I could be a bit more macho about it and 'work through the pain' but the last thing I want to do is push so hard that it becomes a chore and not the most fun thing EVER.

Looking even more forward to Saturday open mat. I went last week to open mat for the first time and it was amazing. It was as if everything I had (sort of) learned up to this point had a chance to congele. Also learned and practiced how to pass a guard. THANK YOU to the brown belt instructor who proactively approached me and offered a lesson. Remind me to catch your name again this week.

Passing a guard involves scootching back as far as possible while keeping your center of gravity super low. Then jumping to a wide stance, bringing a knee under to the middle of your opponent's legs, then dropping quickly to (hopefully) break their grip. I'm on the smaller side compared to most of my practice buds so I'm lucky if I actually break the guard but I can usually get it to loosen. Then with the other leg you smush them down as much as possible and work yourself into a side-guard position. From there of course I have no idea what to do. Maybe some more congealing needs to happen to bring my offensive game up to par :)

Thanks for reading, all.

Shout-Out to Travis Conley

One of the regulars at KCBJJ is Travis Conley, who just competed in the FILA World Championships in Serbia. The following post is about his entire experience there. It's long but very worth reading. It kept my attention the whole time!

Way to go Travis,

http://www.undergroundgymllc.com/node/201 

The Reason Why

So last week at class we learned how to reposition your opponent's arm to a more advantageous angle in order to...basically make them freak out and loosen their grip on you. The cool thing? When we were rolling (for real, not practice) I actually got into a position similar to what we were practicing and something clicked in my brain. I thought, "wait, this feels familiar!" and I immediately did the exact move that we had practiced! It wasn't a choke or submission but the feeling of actually accomplishing something you learn in practice in a live rolling session was absolutely thrilling! It made me realize that I am really learning something and that my brain is picking up on stuff even when I feel like a rookie slug learning how to make goo.

So fast-forward to this week and I have upped my membership to KCBJJ  http://www.kcbjj.com/ to unlimited, which means I can go to as many classes as I want to during the week. So I'm psyched! Tonight I just stayed for foundations class, and tomorrow I'll go back for training. Then I'm thinking I'll pop in on Saturday morning to practice the stuff I learned during the week. I haven't taken advantage of the open mat yet but I feel that I have just enough of a base now that I can really make use out of it.

Also, a huge kudos to the amazing stuff KCBJJ has accomplished in the past month. Check out the main page on the lower left-hand corner!

A shout out to Jason Bircher is also in order. I didn't realized when I started at KCBJJ that studying under a black belt is kind of a big freaking deal and the more I've been there the more awesome stuff I've heard about Jason from the guys who train with him. THANK YOU for making me feel extremely welcome and letting me know that I can do this. I trust him when he says that he would tell me if I was wasting my time. I'm looking forward to a lot more lernin'!

Thanks for reading folks.

AS :)

Fourth class coming up!

Well I have almost completed a MONTH of classes. That sounds a lot more impressive than just four classes, right?

Let's see...I do in fact feel differently now than when I began. Day 1 was characterized by extreme excitement and a good dose of nervous energy. Getting through foundations class for an hour and the training class for another hour and a half was pulled off based purely on those two emotive states. I rolled a couple of times in the training section of the class but only because Jason (the instructor) had me spar (I just can't get that karate out of my language) with him.

Day 2 was actually harder because I KNEW what I was getting into and I am much more prone to fearing the known than the unknown. I made it through and actually rolled quite a bit, leaving me absolutely exhausted. That was the day I learned what, "I'm going to wipe the floor with you" really means.

Day 3, last week in other words, was a mixture. I was still a little nervous but by then was getting a handle on the attitude of some of the guys in the class. I'm not going to name names...mostly because I can't remember them, but some of the guys are extremely patient and will let me go as slowly as I need to get the technique perfect. I'm afraid I take serious advantage of them!

So tonight completes my first month of training and I am PUMPED. Not only do I know what's coming, but I am also excited about it! I don't know about you, but I HATE exercising, and the conditioning that we have to do before each class is my least favorite part. But I'm kind of getting a handle on it and it's not so intense any more. I really, really, really, need to condition outside of class. Working on it! Actually, I'm working on the attitude that goes along with regular conditioning. (Stupid exercise. Why did it have to be invented in the first place?)

So today for lunch I had a protein shake and half of a baked sweet potato with butter and salt and a couple sprinkles of brown sugar. Also made myself an extra 12oz of coffee to make sure my energy level is good after having a pretty intense couple of days of work. I've purposely scheduled Wednesday afternoons to volunteer at the front office of my church so I don't have to go directly from work to class, and I get to spend three hours on my butt which feels like a luxury after cleaning what feels like 15 toilets and sweeping 3lbs of dog hair off of hardwood floors.

Later I'll have to write about my little ritual before class but that is for another time.

Tonight, if I get there early enough to have a couple minutes with the instructor, I'm going to ask him to help me develop a couple of goals to work towards. I can't do anything for long without a goal in mind! Need something to work towards, even if it's a reach.

That's it for now. Adios my friends, and thanks for reading!

P.S. If you did in fact make it to the end of this post, I highly appreciate it. The blogs that I have enough attention for are usually funny and mine are definitely not funny. I mean, come to think of it, I might think less of you who actually made it through this entire, boring post. Seriously...

Lesson Learned -- EAT

The one tough thing I heard about before getting into BJJ was that normally the classes are late-ish at night and that it's difficult to 1) sleep well so soon after a hard training and 2) figure out what to feed yourself before and after.

Some of ya'll who know me know that I try to eat a 'primal' or 'paleo' diet and have been for the past year and a half. The difference in my energy level and mental clarity have been astounding and I'll never (permanently) return to a "SAD" -- Standard American Diet. I'm nowhere near perfect but even being 70%-90% paleo has helped me tremendously.

Given the fact that the primal diet tends to be lowish-carb, there is a bit of a learning curve when beginning a super-intensive sport like BJJ. The one man who has helped me understand this balancing act better than any other is Robb Wolf. I would highly recommend his website, www.robbwolf.com. He also has one of the best podcasts EVER called "The Paleo Solution". Here is a link to an article posted in the past few days about a paleo athlete: http://robbwolf.com/2011/09/08/paleo-athletes-uncovered-olympic-hopeful-ursula-grobler/

I sure hope I get this next part right! His basic philosophy is that being paleo is 'carb-neutral' and that you should simply feed your body the amount of carbs it needs to sustain the type of activity you are performing. If you are a fully converted fat-burner, your body will burn fat as it's primary fuel source and you can add the amount of carbs in that will support your higher output activities. The difference here from mainstream diets is that usually that number of carbs is still far lower than most people live on right now. The number is very different for different people and activities. He recommends that, if you are going to eat a higher-carb meal to help recover from an intensive training session, do so in a window pretty soon after training. That helps your body partition them correctly to build muscle instead of what they usually do, which is spike your insulin levels, which in turn store fat.

The flip side of that is that if you train intensely and do NOT eat afterwards to recover, your body will use up it's glycogen stores (that's sugar stored in the liver) and then start using the protein from your muscles to rebuild. Not good!

Anyway, I hope I got that science at least partially right! I've only listened to about a hundred of his podcasts and I'm just going on memory here...

So you're probably asking WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS FREAKING POST?

Okay, wrapping it up here. Last night I got home from my 2 1/2 hour class and didn't know what to eat. It was 9:30, I was dead-tired, and to top it off I had to get up at 5AM this morning for my business networking group. I was already wound-up from class (yes you can be tired and wound-up at the same time) and knew that if I ate I would be laying in bed trying to get to sleep forever. I had made bacon and eggs for breakfast around 7AM, ate a baked sweet potato with lots'o lovely butter for lunch around 1PM, then eaten a quick handful of almonds and dried cranberries for a snack about 6PM, 30 minutes before class started. So, not a lot of food. And I was hungry. AND I didn't want to eat. So...I didn't. I drank a bit of 'So Delicious' Coconut Milk to calm my stomach and then went to bed.

Fast forward to this morning and I am WIPED OUT. Note to self: I must find something to eat when I get home that will satisfy my hunger, help me recover, AND not keep me up for half the night because my body is going nuts trying to digest it. I'm thinking a small piece of chicken or a little beef is something that wouldn't mess me up too bad but we don't always have something like that just prepared and ready to be heated up.

So there ya go. Just a thought, albeit a very, very long one.

If you have insomnia tonight, just come back and read this and I'm sure you'll be cured.

Thanks for reading everybody!!

AS:)