A Rare Day Off

Just updated my spreadsheet.

I went back to the day almost two weeks ago when I was told that my test was coming shortly before Christmas.

By the time I arrive at my Brown Belt exam about 7 weeks from today, I will have attended about 26 classes at my home-town school, and about 5 more in Vancouver.

In that same period, there will also have been 25 times on the mat doing test preparation.

That’s a lot of work towards getting myself ready, and that doesn’t even include the many hours spent watching the available instructional videos.

The funny thing is that even with all of that last minute training, placed on top of over 8 years of Jiu-Jitsu, I still feel rushed.

To be ready to handle whatever I might be asked to do, I have to get four levels of advanced self-defence material up to a level of acceptable fluency.

The first couple of levels are no big deal as I’ve been doing them for years. I drill those in a manner that gets them ready to demonstrate. I don’t think I’ll make any significant mistakes there.

Level one is the easiest, as I’ve been doing those techniques since 2012. Since then we’ve gone through the level one curriculum in class about 7 times, and I’ve already passed a humongous technical exam that included exactly that material, and acted as tutor and victim for a number of other students who’ve also done that test.

Level two is almost as familiar. Our class has cycled through that about 6 times over the years. I don’t know it as well, but there are no mysteries.

Level three is the highest material I’ve been doing test prep on so far. I think we’ve done that part of the curriculum only twice in class. I am far less proficient on this segment, but am working to make it as much my own as are the previous levels.

Level four may or may not be on the test, but I have to assume that it is. This will be hard. We’ve never done it in class, so I will have to learn these babies from scratch using the online instructional videos. They will take a disproportionate amount of work, and will still be the ones I will be least able to perform acceptably at test time.

All of this focus is having a down side. Free rolling is also a part of the exam, but I have cut down on this significantly. Neither minor nor major injures can be allowed to happen. Losing test preparation time is just not an option.

There are a few trusted partners that can help me with rolling here, and I’ve recruited four that I trust in Vancouver. If my trusted crew isn’t available, I won’t roll. Even with their help there will be some measure of ring rust, but hobbling onto the mat on test day with the help of crutches would be much, much worse.

One thing I’m very glad of is that most of the throwing that is actually included in the self-defence part of the curriculum is not part of my exam. I suck pretty bad at throwing in general, and my old body can only handle so much practice as either the throw-ER or the throw-EE.

Today, it was one of my rare days off. There are no classes that I can reach on a Tuesday, and there were no playdates with my test-prep helpers.

Tomorrow it’s back to work.