8 or 13 months?

I've been laboring under a false assumption. I had thought that it was possible to gain rank in Gracie Jiu-Jitsu through two methods. This is not correct.

For a student at an outlying Certified Training Center, it is necessary to train for a minimum of 8 months and to have attended a minimum of 100 classes to qualify for promotion. As soon as this all became clear, I did my usual spreadsheet prediction of what this means for my next few levels.

I punched in my current rank, and when I received it, and added on 8 months for each of the ranks of third stripe Blue Belt, forth stripe, and for Purple Belt.

I then noticed that I cannot receive a third stripe on the date predicted, as I'll be out of town for around a month. It was necessary to move that promotion a little down the road. Strangely, the cause of my delay in promotion will be that I'll be down at the Gracie Academy training 13 times a week with the Gracies. Life is like that sometimes.

As I'm planning to make my pilgrimage to the Gracie Academy an annual winter event, I punched in both the months of November and March as defining the upper and lower range of time for me to receive a Purple Belt. Those promotions have to be evaluated by the Gracies.

Compare all this with the theoretical fastest a person can go through all the Blue Belt stripes and earn a Purple Belt. That length of time is 40 months, or 3.3 years. My total time would be 3.4 to 3.8 years. Instead of 8 months per level, my average would be between 8.2 and 9 months per level. I thought this was a good goal to shoot for.

Sadly, there just might be a monkey wrench in the gears. It turns out that my last increase in rank, which I received early in March, could not be registered until just this week. The online system prevents my instructor from issuing another promotion until 8 months after the registered date. He has tried to assure me that this will not be a problem, but I'm a nervous Nelly abut this kind of thing.

I promptly re-punched the numbers. My new, possible, promotion date for 3^rd stripe might not be late in 2014 as hoped, but rather in February of the following year. That's 12 months.

The good news is that my trip to train with the Gracies in the fall won't add on another month.

The freakish news is that something might just gum up the works a bit more that is actually very similar. Helen and I are going to be in Arizona in March. On the way down, I want to spend another week with the Gracies. That's right, I might mess up another promotion by doing extra training. That means that the level I'd been hoping to reach before Christmas won't arrive until sometime in April. That's a chubby 13 months wearing my current rank.

Add on another minimum 8 months for my forth stripe, and we're into winter again.

I'm therefore looking at the following winter to grade for Purple Belt.

So a possible Purple sometime between November 2016, and March of 2017, or 4.5 to 4.8 years as a Blue Belt. My average time per level under this prediction is between 10.8 to 11.4 months.

I could be looking at an entire extra year due to the different registration of my rank.

Likely not an issue, but I won't know until the end of this year when my real 8 month time is up.

Will I have a new stripe by Christmas, and be on track for winter of 2015-2016, or be delayed until 2016-2017?

Waiting to see. I don't wait well.