Shawn-less-ness

I hate it when Shawn our instructor is away. He likes vacations, which I certainly understand, and sometimes he has to go down to LA for instructor stuff which I also get, but I still hate it.

When he's gone, Scott steps up and does a good job keeping things rolling, but it isn't the same.

Silly of me, really, as I lose much more training time each year due to my own travels.

So far this year, I've spend several days driving down the American Pacific coast, about two weeks in LA (training with the Gracies, so I don't count this as downtime), a month in Arizona, about a week in Vegas and driving north from there, a week in Victoria, two more weeks in Victoria. That adds up to being gone about 20% of the time. This is actually down quite a bit from the year before, when it was over 30%.

Sometimes the breaks Shawn and I take overlap. When those happen I somehow feel like they cancel each other out, which is stupid. It still is time off the mat, but my brain does stuff like that sometimes.

But getting back on topic.

Shawn is away. That doesn't mean that lots of interesting stuff doesn't still happen.

Tuesday, at Combatives it seemed that Cosme was going to teach. Cool. He started the class off, directing the students to begin their review period. Everybody started rolling around. Then it turned out that Cosme was leaving, and Scott was going to teach. Cool. He came up, lined everybody up, and directed the students to begin their review period, which they did. The class had two complete start-ups. Nobody minded, but we all smiled.

So far there have been four Shawn-less adult classes, and all were well lead.

In the White Belt classes it was really interesting to see that Nathan has been assigned Tobias as his tutor. Tobias is working towards instructor certification, so it is a mutually beneficial relationship. He has exceptional potential as an instructor. I predict that Nathan will have his Blue Belt in record time.

In the advanced classes, I got to work with a lot of different people. I don't usually pick my partners, but work with whoever points at me. We switched up many times. I was with several people for single moves, and multiple pairings with Rob, Wan and Koko on Tuesday. Wednesday, more single-move partners, and repeatedly with Rob, Tobias, and Koko.

In many ways this is perfectly normal, but also not so much. Rob, Tobias and Wan are all amongst my most usual partners, so that much was ordinary. Koko never avoids me, but as I am helping her with her BBS1 training she wanted to work with me as much as possible, which makes sense.

What was weird was who didn't partner with me. There are three people who seem to like picking me as a partner more than anybody else does. Two of them are away right now, and I must have done something to alienate the third. I only ended up with that one once when there was nobody left for them to pick.

There has been less free-sparring than usual; none at all during class time. My only roll was with Than after class yesterday.

He is our strongest and heaviest guy. Can't hold that against him, but he always rolls as if he were the strongest and heaviest guy. He shouldn't, even if he is.

He also really, really likes to “defeat” his partners. I would love to see him rolling with the real giants down in LA. Anyhow, his movement has greatly improved since the last time we rolled. His attendance is kinda spotty, so that was quite a while ago. He also tries to pick up weird stuff from non-Gracie sources. This can be either good or bad. None of the weird stuff he tried last night caused me any problems at all, so I'd say in his case it's bad.

What was good was less reckless movement. If we were clamped in a neutral position, he used to do anything possible to advance, which usually involved massive expenditure of energy to no purpose. This time he was content enough to hold a neutral spot, sometimes causing me to try and get out and wasting energy. He used to be so wild that there was no reason for me to ever be the “burner”.

He caught me two or three times in our roll. They were all still strength submissions, but maybe that will mature, too.

It would be really cool to see him do a roll with a “referee”, whose job would be to point out whenever he is using raw strength. I'm sure he doesn't know he's relying so heavily on strength. As soon as he starts letting that go, his technique will become even better.

I wonder what interesting thing will happen tonight?