You Gotta Fight! For the Right! To Partyyyyyyyy!

So, I am now about 5 weeks into working out at the Grappling school. There was about 2.5 weeks lost in the middle there, when he closed for vacation. Then, I got sick for a week. Uggh, did I feel awful. I think it was just a bad cold, but it was the worst I had been sick since about last May. So, couldn’t work out at all. But got rolling again last week.

It’s really been a good time. Everyone there is very positive and helpful. We usually practice drills of some kind, like armbars or triangle chokes, for about the first 2/3 of class, after we’ve done some kind of cardio (remember the laps after dropping those danged medicine balls??!!). Then, we’ll “roll live rounds”, which basically means trying to submit each other and use some of the techniques we’ve learned.

I always lose, sometimes pretty spectacularly. There was night when I rolled with a guy who must have literally been half my weight and much shorter. He tapped me out three times in a row very, very fast. The little sucker could get around behind me and rear-choke before I had time to realize it! But it’s a lot of fun, and I always try to learn from it. They say that you tend to make certain mistakes over and over and over until one day you figure out how to not make them — diving into a guillotine choke is a big one for me, for example, as is not shrimping to the side when the guy has side control on me.

Sometimes, I get so sore that it kills me. One night, we did calf raises. Everyone else did 500 — I was able to do 400. The next day, I could barely walk. Then the next. Then the next. It took me almost a week to recover from that one! I shan’t push myself that hard again — I overdid it a bit, didn’t I? I know I am getting more flexible, though, and strength is increasing. So, it’s all good.