Discovery

I am off Jiu-Jitsu for a week, but the period following that will be especially rich in training.

It starts on Saturday, with a seminar in North Vancouver by Ryron Gracie. That's four hours with a genuine Jiu-Jitsu genius.

Then it's back home, and facing a week of closure at our local academy. The good part is that a friend Koko will be home from university for a week. She's as much of a mat rat as I am, so there is a strong probability that we'll train daily for a couple of hours. It's really her call, as I'm always thrilled to get any partner time at all.

On top of that, Tawha is working on a technical exam, and won't be wanting a full week off. I bet she'll want to do a few morning drill sessions.

So, the week of school closure will have up to 25 to 30 hours of training. That's considerably more than double what is available when things are running normally.

It is also actually better training, hour-for-hour.

Don't get me wrong, our training is fine, it's just that this will all be better.

Let's look at a normal week of classtime. There are 3 hours of beginner classes. Nothing in this training spurt will be beginner stuff. There are also 2.5 hours of open mat, which is sometimes good, and sometimes sees me alone on the mat, working solo.

Of our normal 3 advanced classes, there are 3 hours of training, and 1.5 hours of free-rolling. The free-rolling is super. Of the training time, about two thirds is dedicated to review, which is fine, but it's review. Of the remaining hour dedicated to new material, at least half gets used up by demos. That leaves us only 30 minutes a week actually doing challenging training.

This coming week will be very different.

The first part will be four hours of intensive seminar training lead by Ryron Gracie. There will not be any review, or beginner stuff; all will be challenging and intense.

Then there will be the times that Tawha wants to get together in the morning to work on her test. For me, it is review, but I am also the tutor, and am depended on to find and correct any errors in either of us. For me, it is the most valuable review there could possibly be. By the end of each session, we will have completed hundreds of repetitions, and will be bathed in sweat.

Even better will be the sessions with Koko. We work together on the most advanced stuff we have, and add in more from videos, and from my Los Angeles notepad. We examine it, drill it a bit, and then try and make it both work and fail at the same time. The Gracies say that you can only be taught half of Jiu-Jitsu, and that you have to discover the rest on your own. We will be doing precisely that.

I hope I've made it clear that I'm looking forward very much to this weird week on the mat.

When it has passed, training will return to normal. No seminars anywhere on the horizon, and Koko back in the city. Tawha will still be here, but her test will soon be ending.

The residue will be improvement in those of us who had been involved.