Thursday, September 18, 2008

Rolling Wednesday

I had a great roll with my friend Tom yesterday. I don't expect I'll get many more from him for a while, though, since he's going to the NAGA competition in Vegas October 4th, so he'll be busy dropping weight and training with people who actually challenge him. He's trying to go from 165 into the fly or feather weight division (139.9 or 149.9, respectively) and will also (crazy man) compete in the absolute division i.e. no weight classes. Yikes! I was very interested to check out the womens' divisions and who knows, maybe I'll try competing next year assuming pregnancy/childbirth doesn't interfere.

Anyway, the roll. I worked most of the time on passing his guard, still getting triangled, armbarred and guillotined on a regular basis. From my closed guard, I'm better at escaping his can-opener tendencies, though I needed some encouragement to go for the armbar, as I'm always afraid of clocking him in the head. In fact, I did once, because I use both hands to control his wrist(s) and don't reach up to push his head down.

I'm practicing for the belt test next Saturday. Kajukenbo belt tests have sparring-- stand up and on the ground-- and I'm scared. It will be interesting for sure. They bring in black belts from other academies and just charge into you for 5 min rounds.

Then at my grappling class (in the kajukenbo school) we worked on triangles and armbars from the guard. This weekend I'm practicing all my forms and techniques for the belt test, and Samir and I will spend an hour drilling back and forth. I'm sure that will help.

Hopefully I get to roll with Robert today before kaju class.

1 comment:

slideyfoot said...

Never been fond of weight cutting: the one time I tried it, fell ill, lost even more weight, and felt total crap for the comp and for about a month afterwards.

Of course, depends on how you cut weight, but since then I've decided that when (if?) I compete again, I'll just enter whatever weight I am on the day.