Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Progression..

I have officially given notice to Tony, the kajukenbo instructor at the kajukenbo academy. (The class Robert teaches is at my regular gym, or I should say "was"-- due to declining enrollment, it was cancelled, so Robert gave me and two others to HIS instructor Tony.) It wasn't easy, because I genuinely enjoy the camaraderie I feel there, and I will miss the personalities. But this month I have felt even more torn between jits and kaju, and the result has unfortunately been that I don't put my heart into either. With work ramping up, I can't afford to do 5 hours in a row of any martial art, so I needed to pick one.

I haven't officially joined the Gracie school yet and since I'm committed to kaju until the end of September, I feel weird about skipping class to do jiu jitsu, so for the next two weeks I'm still not getting formal jiu jitsu training. That doesn't stop me from dreaming about it though. Yes, I armbarred someone from guard in my sleep last night and it wasn't my husband. Is that cheating? ;)

On that subject-- Mitch deigned to allow me to show him some things yesterday... I explained position before submission to the best of my whitebelt ability, demonstrated an Americana and a Kimura, and allowed him to do them to me. He's still not interested in being my demo dummy really; when I gently did a guard pass he got irritable. But hopefully his interest will grow sufficiently that I can practice on him a little bit. In the meantime we have worked out a happy compromise that gets him rowing on the lake more often, so he'll miss me less when I'm rolling.

Lucky me, I still have Robert, and Tom, at my regular gym, so I can still roll around even when the kaju class isn't doing ground work. Yesterday would have been judo day in kajukenbo, but I stayed home sick (I have a cold) and still ended up working all day to get my brief finalized for my supervisor's review. I'm still working from home this morning, though I have to be in to the office this afternoon to make sure it gets fed-exed out to the Fifth Circuit all pretty.

I'll drag myself in to my noon class at the gym because I have put on some weight (doubtless from the wedding cake at Jeff & Lauri's wedding last Friday.. and the Belgian waffle with Mitch's brother and family on Saturday... and the cheese ravioli with pesto and shrimp on Sunday... and the *second* Belgian waffle of the week yesterday!) It's only 3lbs but that's a lot when you're short. Anyway, I have kaju today from 4-8, but there's also jits at the Gracie school from 5-8, which dovetails with their women's-only class from 7-9. And I'm picking up my long-time friend Ken at his hotel tonight at 8 to go out to dinner... he's in town for a conference and I haven't seen him in years. (He already knows I'll come with my hair all frowsy.)

The real bummer is, I have to do defensive driving and soon, so I had to decline Tom's rolling invitation at 9:30 this morning. Boo!

1 comment:

slideyfoot said...

Glad to hear Mitch is being flexible on the BJJ! :D

Also interesting that you've decided to focus on just the BJJ. It seems quite often when people come to BJJ from another style, they eventually give it up for BJJ: same thing happened to me, when I started cross-training BJJ with something called Zhuan Shu Kuan (basically kickboxing, which I'd been doing at uni since 1999). Six months later, I'd dropped ZSK to focus fully on the BJJ.

Then again, your situation is a bit different, as its a time thing.