04/12

This month started with a contrasted low high.

At the end of class on monday, Christian sat Valentin in the middle of us all and he was tasked with sweeping his opponent, we’d go in one after the other. I went first and got swept after a minute or so. Next up was Fred and they fought it out for a good 10 minutes before he could pass. And after that, for whatever reason, Christian told me to go against Fred, who had to sweep me.

He usually dominates me, no questions asked, but at that point he was exhausted from the fight against Valentin. We started the scramble and after a minute or so, ended up both standing. Fred is a competitve judo black belt, so I was pretty sure I’d get destroyed soon enough. But as he controlled me with one arm, I noticed his second arm was down and without much thinking jumped for a flying triangle… and landed it cleanly, amid the “ohs” and “ahs” from the people watching.

Now it apparently looked very cool but I felt very uncomfortable afterwards with people praising me. Fred deserves much more credit than I do for landing one fancy move on a tired opponent. But in hindsight he didn’t seem to be much affected by it, so that was a relieve.

On the same night I also subbed Christian twice and was generally on fire.

Then on tuesday, it was a very bad day. We did positional sparring from half guard, which we had been studying for a while now. I thought I had finally grasped a couple of things about it but with the pressure of an attacker I got swept over and over again. I just desperately suck at this position it’s fucking crazy.

And during normal sparring I worked on my stand up. Fred gave me some very usefull tips; I can see he’s happy to see me so interested in judo and I sure am glad I have someone that can troubleshoot what I do. I’m still mostly unable to take someone down but I’m feeling slightly more dangerous than before.

23/12

This month has been a struggle. When I work on things I don’t know very well I get smashed over and over again, when I use my go totechniques I feel bad for being lazy. I landed a double leg the other day, but aside from that I’m still worthless on my feet. As I was rolling with Cyril the other day, I realized I was using the exact same techniques I used a year ago and without much more success. Overall it’s been a bit of a slump and for the first time I didn’t feel totally like training — but I still went.

I’m hoping that I’ll be back on track after this christmas break. Rested and motivated. Reaching a plateau at some point was inevitable I suppose, but I now need to power through it.