Sometimes You're the Hammer, Sometimes...

Hey man, get out of my head!

Sometimes You're the Hammer, Sometimes YOU'RE THE RANDOM PIECE OF FRUIT. Last night I was the random piece of fruit, but it was good (I learned some things).

As we started the evening's rolling, I was picking my partners to work specific things (primarily open guard against bigger guys) and things were going along pretty good - a decent amount of success and some "negative reinforcement" when I messed up (side control under someone who has almost 100 lbs on you is not fun :-o)

Needless to say I was already feeling pretty "hammered upon" as we wound down when Professor called out "...alright, against the wall. It's time for a Match of the Night!" The Match of the Night is something we do getting ready for tournaments - A full on, knock down, drag out, don't be "nice" tournament match with a referee scoring and the rest of the class split up to coach one contestant or the other (with tournament crowd noise blasting on the speakers). I was called out to match up against one of our guys who is fighting this weekend. I was tired after pretending to be a big guy in my earlier rolls but I thought I was up for it. How wrong I was!

In the moments before we got ready to square off, I realized I didn't really have an "A Game" to bring. The past few months I've been working on my C, D, and E Games trying to bring them up to a B level and I'm not sure what my "A Game" is morphing into at this particular moment in time. My opponent was someone that I have problems with most of the time unless I just really dominate on aggression and hustle. In other words, to win, I needed a full on aggressive A Game from the get go. So, I started trying to build a game plan on the fly.

When we shook hands and he started dancing around me with way more enthusiasm than my already squashed body was mustering, smashing him into submission was looking like wishful thinking. So, I decided to play defensively and pull guard. By strange coincidence, pulling guard happens to be my opponents A Game. Guess who pulled guard successfully? Yep, he did. I spent the next few minutes getting swept and defending submissions one after the other. I never mustered a sliver of offense the entire match.

And lest I sound like I'm making excuses, "I was tired, blah, etc., blah" - my opponent has been preparing well for his tournament this weekend and probably would have won handily anyway.  What I wanted to convey was my mindset and how it affected my attitude and choices:

1. I didn't have an A Game and so tried to create one on the fly
2. Because I wasn't committed to my game plan I abandoned it at the first whiff of difficulty
3. Once I adopted a defensive mindset, I was locked into defense - I might survive, but I would not win a tournament match
4. Even though I knew my opponent, he was one step ahead of me the whole time (because he was working his game plan from start to finish)

I haven't had a mental fail on this level in some time. It was good to have it exposed so I can make sure I can find my happy place and have confidence in it when it counts in the future.

Getting Wrecked

I got absolutely WRECKED on Monday night.

I was having one of those "off" nights to begin with but started feeling a little bit better during the Fundamentals Class. Moving on to the Advanced Class for the evening we worked on a basic back take from reverse De La Riva which meant a lot of inversion and movement on the back/shoulders - something I really need to work on because I absolutely suck at it.

This really gave me an ego check. The white belt I was drilling with is flipping around upside down with great movement like he has been doing it for years and is some distant cousin to Gumby (you go Austin!), while I felt like a feeble old man who can barely get enough rotation to execute the technique poorly much less nail it.

Then it was time for some rolling.

We work a series of 3 minute rounds with 10 seconds to change partners in between with one person starting in the reverse De La Riva. So this should be a great opportunity to really work the sweep while rolling if you are at least starting in the position. Well a great opportunity unless you're me. I didn't even come close to hitting the sweep once and had a hard time making it resemble anything like a real guard. All of this sucked, but the best was yet to come.

 The final round was 15 minutes starting standing and we were supposed to avoid going to closed guard. I paired up with Ethan, a blue belt who has been visiting with us for a couple of weeks. I fully expected to get beat as Ethan is young, strong, smart, has good wrestling, and a competitive spirit (and is an all around great guy) - but I didn't expect to get absolutely wrecked since Ethan had been training hard for a couple of hours before I even showed up at the gym that night. He's gotta be a little tired right?

I'm sure he was tired but it didn't show as he soundly thumped and submitted me (what 5 times?) over the course of that 15 minutes. My somewhat fever-dream recollection had me get grips to pull open guard, where I wanted to go straight into a tripod sweep, but Ethan came down to one knee in base negating my sweep and promptly passed and tapped me with an armbar. I think in the next series Ethan jumped into closed guard and after some scrambling tapped me again with an inverted armbar. I pulled open guard again and Ethan defended again, I tried to pull him into a triangle but he had his knee in up to his chin so I couldn't get my hips in - got passed and choked from mount this time (I think?).

My broken big toe still won't bend enough to let me shoot so being the creative mastermind that I am, I tried an arm drag into a side clinch - Ethan based well got an underhook on me and sent me up and over for a beautiful throw landing with his shoulder in my ribs. There was a huge whooshing sound as all the air in my body forcefully exploded (or maybe that whooshing was just me sucking all the real Jiu Jitsu out of the gym). After a brief pause to make sure nothing appeared broken we rolled some more and I eventually had to ask Ethan to just take top side control on my opposite side because any pressure onto my ribs on the other side was making me nauseous with the pain (pain I can handle but yakking on the mats is just too much embarrassment). Spent most of those last few minutes under mount fighting off chokes (with very little success).

So all and all a pretty sorry showing. And to add mental deficiencies to my physical deficiencies listed above, I can't wait to do it again!

(note: I thought about using a Thesaurus to find some replacement words for all the times in the above post that I used some form of the word "suck," but I decided not to cloud the clarity and overall brilliance of my suckage :-))

(note: to those that asked, the ribs aren't broken but are bruised pretty good - I'll be on the mat Wed.)