Measure

A friend of mine will be leaving town soon. He's a great guy, and I'll generally miss him, but I'm also loosing a valuable yardstick.

After I got my Blue Belt back in mid 2012, there was a long gap during which nobody else made that jump. The first that did was my friend, Ryan. This gave me 11 months of training in the advanced class before he joined us there.

He's about 50 pounds bigger than me, and it isn't fat. He's a very strong chap.

At first, of course, I could easily dominate him in free sparring if I chose to. It is in the nature of martial arts training that juniors catch up to their seniors.

For example, on Ryan's first day of rolling, I had been doing so for about 125 or 150 classes already. I had about 12,500% as much experience as he did.

The a week my advantage would have dropped to about 4,500%, and in a month to 1,200%.

After 11 months, it I only had double his experience, and has been dropping steadily ever since. I now have only 37% more rolling experience than he has.

It sounds as if I should still be able to control him, but that has stopped being the case on several different occasions.

The Gracies say that if somebody is bigger than you it's as if they are one belt higher for every 20 pounds. That would make Ryan be the same as a Brown Belt my size. They also say every 10 years is worth a belt. That would easily bump him up to some kind of Black Belt. Maybe they don't add together, so he's merely a Brown Belt two different ways.

Ryan started regularly kicking my butt in the fall of 2013.

Early in 2014 I trained hard with the Gracies in Los Angeles for two months. In those two months I did 8 months worth of training. When I got home, I was again able to beat Ryan.

This lasted a few months, and he again pulled ahead. I still get him sometimes, but am almost always on the defensive.

I measure myself against him. He is skilled, and one of our faster learners, is big, and strong, and fast, and twenty years younger than me. I am proud that I can roll with him competitively at all.

So my measure is going away.

He will be moving over to Vancouver Island to the small community called Sooke. He intends to keep training there; maybe starting a new group.

This is great news for me, just as his leaving here is not.

I often travel to Vancouver Island to visit family. They all live in Victoria, which is about a 45 minute drive from Sooke. That will give me someplace to go and train while I'm there.