Countdown

Counting things makes me feel better, so I’ve done that for my upcoming Brown Belt exam.

From what my instructor has said, the test will likely be on December 14 or 15, unless he agrees to a date a month later.

That means there are at least 53 days left.

In that many calendar days, I’ll have attended a couple of dozen White Belt classes, and an equal number of advanced ones. None of those will have any direct impact on improving my test performance. There is always a very small chance of injury when training, and a not insignificant change of damage during free-rolling.

To be fit on test day, I will be curtailing my free-rolling. All I’d need now would be a busted ankle or blown knee. I will still partake of the activity, but only with the very best of my free-rolling friends. I like wrestling around, but caution is wise in this situation.

In those same 53 days it looks like I’ll have three dozen sessions working on the Brown Belt test material. These will include general self-defence practise with the Sunday group, work with Rob on the more advanced material, sessions in Vancouver focused on precisely what the examiner wants, and times with my instructor where a small group works on Brown and Black Belt exam material.

That feels like it will be enough. Seeing the actual numbers helps me understand this.

So far, the Gracies have released curriculum that contains 276 techniques and all of their variants. We are allowed to know that only the self-defence material will be covered. That brings the tally down to 87 techniques.

If it were to be a test on all 87, the test would be crazy long and exhausting. Some of us do huge technical exams, where sets of about 20 techniques are recorded. These take between 12 and 25 minutes to perform, and are absolutely exhausting. I can’t even imagine what a test of 87 would look like. Might it be and hour-and-a-half of non-stop motion? If it is they better have oxygen and stretchers available.

Don’t get me wrong; I like them all the techniques and enjoy working on them. The point is that with 53 days left, this isn’t really the time to be doing general training.

My instructor and I were working on the list of material for his upcoming Black Belt exam, and he let me have a real look at it.

I totally ignored the first 36 items (the easy ones) that might be on the test, other than to notice that there won’t be much from that at all. It was the other 51 (the hard ones) that might be included that I wanted to know about.

Of those 51, there were only 36 included. That is already making a huge difference. By knowing that the list is 15 techniques shorter, it’s as if I’ve managed to find 30% more training time.

The other issue is that of the remaining (hard) techniques, there are 9 that I have never experienced in class. A bit of a bummer being examined on stuff that I’ve never learned. A friend of mine who is also being graded for a Brown Belt hasn’t even seen them.

These are all of the highest, hardest, and most recently released layer of curriculum, called BBS4. This is where the majority of all my training time will have to be invested.

The online instructional videos for this stuff adds up to a hair under 6 hours long, and that’s without all the stopping and rewinding that actually has to be done to gain understanding. Of course, that doesn’t include any of the drill that is necessary to actually gain any sort of competence.

So I have 53 days to get ready. The goal is to be able to fluently demonstrate an insignificant number of easy items, along with 27 hard ones that I already have some competence at, and 9 more hard ones that I need to learn up from scratch.

I won’t work the easy ones at all, as I already do them on a very regular basis. They are covered in our beginner classes, which I always attend, and sometimes teach.

The 9 hard ones from BBS4 will demand far too much of my time and effort, but they are on the list. I will need to spend many hours studying the related videos, and teaching them to myself. I’m sure that my instructor will help when he can. It is this section that is of the greatest concern.

The 27 remaining techniques will have to be polished up with less training time than would be ideal.

Overall, the amount of time that I have available should get me to a level that will likely be enough for the examiner. Conversely, due to the necessity of learning material that I’ve never been taught, I won’t be able to perform at anything like the level I would prefer.

I would like to be really fluent in what I am asked to perform, not merely barely competent. That, however, is not up to me.

I better not get the flu.