Monday, April 02, 2012

Tiring training!

So, I finally (but inadvertently) did one of our "training" classes...

See, at the new academy, there's class, and then there's training, and then there's open mat. Class is pretty standard-- 1.5 hrs long, including a warmup, some drills, self defense and sport technique and lots of drilling, and maybe some positional sparring. Usually there's a separately-scheduled optional open mat after the 1.5 hrs.

But training, I'd been told, is more like 60-90 minutes of full-on non-stop sparring. No dillydallying between matches either. We're talking enough back-to-back 8 minute matches to make some of our ripped, shredded, healthy young men puke outside. ("As long as you don't get it on the mats" is the rule.) Our instructor picks your opponents for you, too, so don't think you can just pick on the 130-lb-soaking-wet-guy-with-one-arm for a whole hour. (And I'm only saying that for the image-- if you'd ever rolled with him, you'd realize he's FAR from a rest match.)

Of course, that description made me steer far, far clear of training sessions. I've been attending the 3 class-classes a week, and some open mat too. But then I showed up Sunday, which had until yesterday been a mellow, more open-mat-y kind of training.

Oh no, not this Sunday, not when we had visiting blackbelts from other schools... but I jumped in there with a good will, and did my best. I didn't puke, either! But mainly that's because after a certain amount of muscle fatigue, the limbs, well- they just don't want to move. So my muscle fibers ran out before my cardio did, right about at the one-hour mark. After class, one of my fave brown belts who I haven't gotten to roll with in forever asked me to roll. I wimped out for water and took a few minutes to ask him his advice on a certain thing... but then I gave it a shot. Pretty mortifying that within five minutes, I was statue-still underneath him and had to admit I was just too tired to roll.

It was a great feeling-- like being fully wrung out, like there weren't any spaces between any electrons or other atomic particles in my body-- like I was completely connected, tight and sleek. That might have been because I was so tired, there was no energy left for extraneous motion. I was capable of filling my water bottle.. mopping the mats.. storing the mats (we share space with another gym for now).. and even changing the radio station in the car. But that was it. I got home, showered, laundered the gi, and held the couch down for the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, until it was time to relocate and hold the bed down.

I didn't even have the energy to sign on to BudoVideos, which kind of sucked. Anyone have a report on what their "mat on demand" thing was like???

One more thing-- one of my favorite competitors, Hillary, at the 2010 Worlds (she won the middle weight brown/black division.)

3 comments:

Mike M. said...

The multi-mat technology was awesome! Out of fairness of bandwidth they were limiting their streams to the commentary window at 3000 kbps and the others at 1500 kbps. Caleb, Shawn, and BudoDave were good to tell us when they were going to switch to a different fight and what mat we needed to switch to on our other window if we wanted to keep watching. I hope they do the same for the Worlds. I, for one, will be ringside. ;)

Anonymous said...

I love training sessions like that, they are more powerful than ambien. I thought the live stream was great. We put it on the big flat screen at our school to watch our former instructor Lucas Lepri compete and another of our instructors coach him. It was great stuff and the quality of the images was outstanding.

Cyrus said...

I love training classes like that! We do that in competition class sometimes. Nothing like rolling until you are spent and have nothing at all left, then rolling for another half hour anyways!