Ambitious?

A tiny milestone tonight. It's the last class of my first Blue Belt chapter at Jiu-Jitsu. I have completed roughly one seventh of the material I need to work through before I move up to the next level.

It's a long road.

This chapter took all of September, October, and November. The next will occupy December, January and February. I'll be retired before I complete the third.

Next year at this time I'll be working on chapter six, with only number seven left to do.

Somewhere towards the end I want to spend a month training at the Gracie Academy in LA. If I haven't finished my level and earned the first stripe for my Blue Belt, I'll be training in LA on the same material I will have been working on for a year and a half. If I manage to get my stripe before we go, my California month will be spent working on my upcoming level.

I would much rather work ahead, rather than working back.

To do that, I will need to finish my stripe material and exam before Christmas of 2013. That will be hard. That's about exactly a year from, well, now.

If everything runs smoothly until then I will still have a chapter and a half to go. Can I complete a chapter and a half ahead of schedule? That is a pretty daunting task.

Can I teach myself one extra technique and all of its variations each month? Maybe. I could do a private lesson on the technique, and then drill it afterwards on my own.

I wonder if any of the other Blue Belts would like to join me on this quest. That could work really well.

This all assumes no interruption in training. Getting sick, or hurt, or any changes in the class schedule would certainly throw a monkey wrench into everything.

Once I retire, I can find extra training time, but I'm not there yet.

Maybe I should run this all by the Instructor. It can't be done without his help and support.

If I go for it, I'd like to do one a month until I retire and then two per month thereafter until it's done. This would get me done a little early. This would be good in case of unforeseens.

I must be nuts.