Hard Fighting Day


Yesterday (Monday) was a hard physical, fighting day for me. I wonder if I decided that it would be, or if it just happened to turn out that way. I am thinking the latter.

I got up in the morning here in my new bedroom. This new room here has a lot of windows, and one of them faces east. It gets great morning sunlight. The weather here in NYC was extremely nice and summer like yesterday, so, as you could imagine, the morning was beautiful.

I took the 4th pill of my 5-pill sinus infection medicine and grabbed my bike for its third time out this year. I was going to take it over the bridge and into Manhattan. So, I threw my gi belt and gi pants into my bag, having no real sense of time, and I hit the road, heading toward the Williamsburg bridge.

I am planning to heal my knee injury with the power of bike riding. I am discovering that cycling is proving helpful to strengthen and actively stretch the joint in a fairly safe and controlled manner.

I crosseed the bridge for the first time since last summer. It wasn't too hard, and I didn't get too much fatigue, but it had been a while and I wasn't super speedy.

Cut to the chase, yes. I made it into Manhattan and ended up riding to the gym to do a lift. I lifted for back & shoulders, but I wasn't feeling the love for being indoors. I pushed it on the lift as best as I could. I hadn't lifted in a week since that sinus trouble hit. My strength felt down, but it was good to work.

After lift I road around to do a few errands, and then I road over for the morning grappling class at Renzo's Academy. It was a big class and we shifted partners frequently, so we all got a lot of hard work in. At the class, after as certain drill, the teacher announced "congratulations guys, you just rolled for 20 minutes continuous."

I jumped back on the bike, now all sweaty, and headed back to Brooklyn. This time I took the train. I parked the bike at home and went to the thrift shop to purchase a desk for this new room. Zorikh and I carried it home on the train and all and up & down stairs. So there was some more lifting that I missed at the gym, I suppose.

By this point in the afternoon, I was getting a little nap-needing. But I instead decided to clean the room a bit and do work. Then finally it came time to go to Doom Maidens grappling training at Fight House.

Zorikh and I had a bit of unfinished grappling business when we arrived, so we both hit the mat immediately to settle. We started off fairly slowly, but then we flew into full throttle against each other (by "started off," I mean something like a 2-second time span). He was working really hard, and he played well, but I think he was expending a little too much energy. I was actually able to hold him in the mount at one point, look up at everyone else, and shake my head to comment on how much uneeded energy he was throwing around. I must say that he fought pretty well, but he was making himself rather tired.

We came to a point where I was holding him in my guard for about the fifth time, so I decided to try something different: I opened the guard and decided to try working from open-guard. But as soon as I opened, Zorikh sprang directly backwards and away. He got up and went to get water. "Let's call it a draw," he said. "What?!" I said, "We are just getting started, I had just gone to open guard." He replied "No, I got away." Got away? What?

Was that submission grappling or get-away grappling? But it's cool.

We practiced for our hour & a half. We worked take downs, and I wanted to help Vetiver feel good about certain leg take-downs. So, after she practiced the knee-on-chest position for a while, she worked on taking me down all over the place.

And *then* after all of that, I went in for the hardest fight of the night. I had a nice, rough-housing 1 hour competitive session with my client starting at 8:15 pm. He was a solid guy, though of my height. He had a weight advantage but no formal training (but he had great freestyle wrestling instinct!). We proceeded to thrash each other for an hour, rolling from wall to wall and getting sweat all over the place. At one point we got so close to the wall, that I climbed my feet up it and used that to "jump" (while in a headlock) and better my position.

He had some strong, smart headlocking ability, I must say. Luckily I have a strong neck. One can only hold a head lock for so long before one gets tired of holding it. And you can't really get a submission that way. So I'd save my power, and as soon as I felt a waver in his grip, I'd power out and overtake him.

Though I won every fall (about 5-6 to fill the hour), he did give me a hard, old-school, school-yard / backyard rough-housing time.

And crap, man, I was wondering why I was feeling like I couldn't tap my full energy while grappling him. Duh, I said to myself in the middle of trying to squeeze out of his grip, it's not like I was resting all day.

Anyway, it was good. It was a hard-ass day. It's now the next morning, and I feel fine. Neck soreness is extremely minimal. Knee is fairly good, may even be better. Now I go do laundry. Tuesday, 4/24, 7:08 am.

Cheers!
- JV