What an interesting night. Greg warned us from the beginning that it was going to be a rough night; it was no lie. It was good to see Ken in class as it's been a while, although we didn't get the opportunity to train together. Warm-up and stretching went as usual. Greg must have still been recovering from being sick because he didn't participate.
Greg had us think of a personal technique to work on during the warm-up and then we drilled it with a partner for 10 minutes. I chose the cross-grip to omaplata that I've had some success with and chose Jordan as a partner. It ended up being quite an ab workout to constantly shoot my hips and legs up into position. My main focus was getting my arm out from the underhook on their leg to around their waist, so I had Jordan try to step over my head after several reps to make it more difficult. One thing I learned was if I shrimp away before trying to free my arm it puts the weight on the underhooked leg, this allowed me to free the arm. So I'd say it was a successful exercise. Jordan trained kimura from guard and did a couple of setups from hip heist to me just putting my hand on the mat. He appeared to improve.
Next Greg had us in 2 lines across from each other starting with 5 on each side. He dropped the bomb of 9 minute rounds of rolling. We did 3 rounds of 9 minutes then 2 more rounds of 7 minutes. So 41 minutes of grueling rolling. I won't go into the specifics of my rolls because I don't remember much. I rolled with Jordan, Fuji, Patrick twice, and Robert R. I did my best to pace myself and probably got submitted 2 times.
There were 2 unfortunate accidents that occurred during the class. Gina and Ken collided heads during a roll and both shed some blood. Gina had to get some stitches and you can see a picture and read the rest in her blog post. They were both out for the remainder of the class. Then during our 3rd round I believe Mike's head ran into Fuji's knee and he also sustained a cut and black eye. It's very odd for us to have this many injuries in one class.
It's pretty amazing to see the responses to the injuries on Facebook. The uninitiated friends of Mike and Gina are posting things like "OMG, why do you do jiu jitsu again?" or "Oh Michael smh" (which means "shaking my head", had to look that up). It sucks that this is there impression of BJJ. If only they knew what a positive thing this is.
I seriously considered skipping the beginner class. I was dead tired, but Jerad threw down the challenge and said that he was going to stay. Then me deciding to stay guilted Adam into staying. Greg was nice to those that did both classes and let us skip the warm-up, so Brian did the floor stuff by himself. The class consisted of the basics of X-guard. We started off by getting there from a defended butterfly sweep and drilled the entry for quite a while. I had no concept of time and had to struggle to get off the floor for each technique. My left knee bothered me a little bit in X so I tried my best to keep it to my good side. My knees and the rest of my body were bothering me a little bit in general. I was glad that I brought an extra gi top as it did make a difference in class #2. We trained butterfly guard with 2 minute rounds and switched top and bottom.
When I got home I was dead to the world and it took me a while to get something to eat but I felt better after that. I considered not going to class today, but I woke up feeling great and refreshed so I'm going to see the week through with both classes tonight. I welcome a day off Friday though.
i think that my cut will have healed enough by next week to allow me to train.
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