Cloud Nine

Man, so much is going on in my little world right now I don't even know where to start. I guess, given that this is a BJJ blog, I'll contain my gleeful spoutings to only the things happening with my school and training.

Firstly, we had a belt graduation at Fabio's on Friday night and several people were promoted, including both of my Summerlin instructors, Ben and Mario. Ben got another stripe on his brown belt and Mario was promoted to Purple Belt. Go Mario!! Steph and I were humming the Super Mario theme song while he was getting his belt tied on. Then, after the end of class, we decided to congratulate him by doing a sneak attack and ambushing him at the same time. He ended up using Stephanie as a human shield against me and pinning us both to the wall. But I gave him a wet-willy in the process, so that has to count for something!! lol

Several others in the school got stripes or belts. Congrats to the Fabio Novaes BJJ team! Love you guys!!
















I have a video of the "ceremony" we do at Fabio's whenever a person is promoted to the next belt. All of the belts at their level or higher get to do three take downs of their choosing on the newly initiated. It was pretty awesome, though I will say I have no desire to become a blue belt any time soon after seeing the enormous line of excited blues, purples and browns waiting to toss the guys who got promoted! I'll put the video up soon.

Then, Saturday morning during class, I felt like the drills we did were almost tailor made for what I needed to learn. It was just one of those mornings where everything we learned instantly clicked. I think that's because we focused mainly on concepts, not on detailed, multi-step moves (though we did have a few of those). I am the type of person who learns the big picture, more than the small details. That's good in some cases. I can imitate positions and see variations during grapples when I learn something new. But it's bad because I usually forget some key detail that makes a position hard to keep or a submission difficult to finish. Oh well. Details will come with time, I hope.

I had a private lesson scheduled for after class, to work on some basic positions. I was noticing in my grappling that I could pass guard and get to side control, but I couldn't keep side control to save my life. Also, I was feeling like I needed to understand some of the basic concepts behind the North/South and Knee-on-Belly positions as well. I wrote everything down that I learned both in regular class and in the private, but I'm still absorbing it all. I'll do a post in the next few days about everything I learned. But, man! It was a great training session.

The icing on the cake was that I got a few stripes at Saturday morning's class. I was shocked. For the last month or so, I didn't feel like I was improving at all. It just goes to show how little I know about BJJ! And it inspires me to train even harder.