Thursday 3/25/2010 - How I've become a Phil Neikro

I never really make titles for my entries as I don't want to invest the time to make each of them clever, and if they aren't clever, it's a waste of time, but I had a terrible revelation as I was writing this that i wanted to recall. The relevant passage is in bold so i can find it easily if I look for it.

Day class at the Westin. No Chris today and was a small group (me, 2 johns and Craig) John did the closed guard, flip to turtle sweep and an Oma Plata attack from the same position. He also covered an interesting position he uses that I hadn't seen in awhile. Uke stands, tori underhooks behind the ankle of the uke and comes off of the closed guard but keeps his hips up. Pull the sleeve of uke up a bit to make space and put the right foot in the left armpit of the uke. keep the foot in the armpit. Drop the other foot down to the other foot of the uke. there is a nice knee lock entry here, or push the far foot of the uke with tori's left foot while pushing him back with your foot in his armpit. He goes over surprisingly easily. I rolled two short sets with Craig and blue John, just enough to break a sweat. Decent class.

BJJ Open mat
Just Judo folks here. We covered a few questions then trained. Katie was getting a bit frustrated trying to get a split to work her pass. I showed her how I do it and she seemed to fell better about it. I rolled once with Craig. He is a really big strong son of a gun. He is smart also. He has made a good technical decision to work on his half guard. It's a good technique selection for him and he is improving there.

Judo. 13 people I have been getting a little spoiled with the huge classes but this is actually an easier class to teach.  We did Drop Seoi Nage for 10-15 minutes then another 15-20 minutes of tokui waza. Then randori.

I jumped in and did some of the randori. I did a 5 min set with Eric. He is a good training partner. I hit a Sasai and a few knock down techs, but nothing big. He came close but didn't get me over a few times.
I had a 5 min with James. It's a reminder of how far my technique has fallen. I can''t get in on him with my harai and its maddening. I can feel the time for it, but can't trigger the attack. i can knock him down with stuff if I want to but I have always been a big technique player now I throw junk, it works I guess but its not what i want. I just saw an analogy to a baseball pitcher who blows out his shoulder or even just gets old. He had a big fastball and it was fun to throw it hard down the middle and overpower people and strike them out. then he blew out his shoulder and got old and lost the fastball, so he retires or he learns to be a junkballer.   He learns to throw slow curves, changeups, knuckleballs  and whatever offspeed crap he can find to get someone out. I am sort of saying this to be funny but I am also horrified by this. I genuinely don't know if I can accept this. I was never Dwight Gooden but my fastball had to be respected even by good players. Now it's gone. Perhaps never to return. My only consolation is at this point 95% of judoka retire... at least I haven't quit.

I did a set with Greg on his feet. He really is a beast, feeling very strong. I almost hit an Osoto Gari, then he switched to left and really screwed me up. I managed to stay near the wall so there was interference when he woud have thrown me, but it was definitely intimidating when he came in strong on the left side. I hit a Sumi Gaeshi as time expired but that was it.

We did turtle turning tokui waza 10 up turtle turns and 10 flat turtle turns.
We did ne waza to resolution 3 groups of 4 Christine won her group, Allesandro won his group of middle weights and Eric won the heavyweight group.