Progression. ** Spoiler at the end **

Roy Harris' brilliant exposition on 'Progression in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu' is found here. Great refresher and highlight of things to come for me, and a reassuring read when I start feeling like I'm flailing or floundering.

I am, slow inch by slow inch, starting to feel like I have stuck my finger in a hole in the dike. (Granted, there's so many other holes in my technique, it doesn't really matter, except that I feel like ONE durn hole is at least slowed to a trickle instead of a gush.) It comes back to Scott, and Josh, and the halfguard sweep I'd seen from Scott but wasn't ready to learn until Josh showed me when I visited his academy a little while back. I have probably pulled it off at least 10 times in live sparring against fully resisting male opponents, making it the ONLY sweep I can land against said beasts. Now, it's ugly, it's slow, and it needs lots of work, but I think it fits with what I admire... that jits which you can see or feel coming a mile away, but you can't do anything to stop it. Unfortunately most of the time, I nail the beginning part of the description and fall short on the second part. This sweep is nothing special or fancy so don't bother asking me for the how-to; it's just one puzzle piece that happened to click with my neurons better than some other piece did.

Harris' article makes it a little clearer to me that I *am* a blue belt and I am on the right path. I am working on escapes, working on maintaining dominant position, and identifying attacks to chain together. Now I know you'll laugh, because what I'm about to describe will be the simplest most obvious "duh!!" But it was a BIG deal for me today. You know that, like most girls, I usually roll mostly with guys. Most of them do their best to ratchet their use of muscle down a bit to give me a chance, but mostly it still ends up being a very different kind of game than rolling with a girl. Okay. And you know I really don't care for playing guard-- right? we've all heard enough of my complaints about wanting to get off my back and be on top, right? and my bold plan to play and work on only guard for the next year? So imagine my surprise, and then pleasure, when rolling with a fairly new whitebelt guy today... I not only played closed guard (i.e. didn't get passed like buttah) for an extended time, I also flowed through the whitebelt killer-kimura-guillotine chain several times, and though he was successful in muscling out of everything I threw at him, I could tell that was what he did. So it was really delightful. I normally don't even bother playing that game because I talk myself out of it ahead of time, but I thought eh, he's a newb, I have nothing to lose. (Well, nothing except spraining my shoulder, because I still had a wrist grip for the kimura, but went up and almost over for the hip bump sweep, and then he just barreled forward, knocking me down quite hard on shoulder with my arm behind me and him on top of it all. But no loss, and he was terribly nice and apologetic about it after.) So I can't pat myself on the back right now, but I am imagining it :)

Couple heads-up on what I have planned for you in the next couple days:

** an interview with a blue belt who got to train at the seminar Rickson Gracie taught in Houston this weekend...
** a review of the new Ouano lightweight competition gi...
** IF I'm lucky, I'll finish the review of Lloyd Irvin's newest nogi instructional series...
** an interview with Jaxon Smith, the Machado blue belt who won the BIGGEST division at the 2010 Pan (men's lightweight blue belt) which had 100+ competitors, and had to fight 8 matches to get his gold...


Then, of course-- MUNDIALS! We leave on Wednesday June 2nd.. will be working from the 3rd-6th.. and then I train at New Breed with Val Worthington and Johnny Ramirez for two days before coming home again :) So I'll be bringing home as much footage as I can wrangle of matches at the Pyramid. If there's particular belt levels, matches, weight classes, whatever you want to see, let me know in the comments section! (I know you want blackbelt matches and I will try to get as many womens' as I can.) THANKS again to Budovideos, which allegedly will be covering all the womens matches this time for the live stream on the internet!

p.s. Very sad Sakuraba lost even though I train in a Gracie school. And not at all thrilled with the decision against Hathaway. And I thought Muffintop made Duffee look quite Buffy.. till the end, when he was Sleepy.