Risky

Am I looking forward to all the virus restrictions being lifted? Not at all.

Covid-19 will still be out there, and if a lot of people go back to how they used to behave, it will spread like crazy.

Why do I care?

My age happens to be 64, and the most recently published death rate for my cohort happens to be almost exactly 2.6%. Is that a small number?

Not if you happen to be male, which I am. The death rate for males in every age group is about 50% higher than it is for females. The 2.6% figure is for both genders together.

Doing the math for that turns the 64-year-old-male death rate into something like 3.12%. Isn’t that cheery?

Would you be willing to roll two dice if getting a pair of ones meant you would die? I wouldn’t, and that would be a significantly safer wager (a much happier 2.777% risk).

Let’s say the illness behaved like jolly, old smallpox. If you got that sickness back in the pre-vaccine days, and survived, you were immune forever. Covid-19 doesn’t appear to be that way at all.

There are a significant number of people who seem to have caught Covid-19 twice already, and it’s only been in existence for a few months. Experts are starting to say that immunity may only last for a few months, or a very short number of years at best.

How jolly does rolling the dice sound now?

“Step right up, roll the dice, and maybe your life will end. The prize if you win is immunity from future gambling for a while, but you will certainly have to roll a few more times at some point in the future. Step right up.”

No thank you.

My personal, cunning plan is to not get infected with Covid-19 anytime soon, and catch it as few times as possible.

That means for me, I will be a practitioner of social-distancing for a long time. I want effective vaccines and treatments before my force fields are significantly lowered.

Do I want to rush right out to a bar? How about going to a movie? Street fairs?

My only issue is with my primary hobby. Jiu-Jitsu requires crazy close contact with other human beings. Will it be off the table for a very long time? I hope not. 

What is clear is that for me training in a traditional class structure will be a no-no until Covid-19 is licked

Alternative training might just return sooner. That would look like training with a very restricted number of contacts perhaps as few as one.

Let’s say things lighten up a bit generally, but I can find a partner who is likewise unwilling to risk infection about the same as I am. Such a pair could train together while still keeping society in general at arms length.

All they would need would be a mat (I’ve got that), and a library of instructional video material (I’ve got access to tons).

Let’s say that Covid-19 gets controlled with vaccines and treatments in a year, or maybe two. Could I train with one person for that long? My answer would be yes.

The big trick is finding a willing partner who would not introduce significant risk. Such might prove impossible. It couldn’t be somebody willing to train with me, who also starts going to group classes. In that case I might as well join the group sessions myself.

Anyhow, for now I remain in my cocoon.

Count On

If feels silly to think about little things like Jiu-Jitsu promotions, but everybody needs diversion. This kind of thing is mine.

The theoretical earliest date will roll around on August 21st. I don’t even know if our school will do promotions while it’s closed, but I’m going to assume that they will.

That means I want to get the required number of classes done by that date.

If things were normal in every way, it would be easy as pie.

But even before COVID-19 hit, things weren’t going in a normal fashion.

On the plus side, our school had started running 4 classes per week instead of 3. Adding in my usual extra weekly class in the city, and everything looked very rosy for me.

Of course, there would be a bunch of holiday time in there, but even that wouldn’t make much of a dent.

Then I screwed up my knee. This cost me a bunch of mat time, but even that didn’t really matter much.

Then COVID-19 happened, shutting all the schools down 5 months before my potential August promotion date. It’s pretty hard to attend classes, when they don’t exist.

So let’s look at the math. For me there are three periods involved. The earliest is from my promotion just before Christmas up until the middle of February. By that time, I had 16 appropriate classes (out of a required 90 classes). That was pretty low for me, and I blame my knee, but still it was enough for an on-time promotion in August.

Then Helen and I headed off for a seven week bout of snowbirding down in California. While there, I trained at Gracie University, and at a small school in Indio. This totalled 25 sessions (putting me at 41 out of 90).

Schools closed while we were there, as did pretty much everything else. We ended up coming home a couple of weeks early.

That put us comfortably at home and physically isolated from the world. My knee had a nasty relapse, but eventually I got back to Jiu-Jitsu training.

Webinar sessions are being provided by Gracie University, and the Vancouver school, and there are tons of other online resources.

I am strict about my training tally. A focused hour counts as one class. Doing more on any given day does not increase that day’s count beyond one. I run a stopwatch on my phone, and if my attention wanders a bit I keep going, but I stop the timer until I am fully concentrated again.

There are a number of different focus areas, and it’s going very well. My tally has gone up another 10 hours this way (a total of 51 out of 90).

My goal during this period is to crank out 5 class hours per week, and so far have actually been able to achieve that goal. If the pace can be maintained, my promotion goals will be managed before my birthday in June. By promotion day in August the tally might be sitting as high as 50% over the required goal.

Of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that a promotion will actually happen. The ball would be in my instructor’s court. If he thinks it appropriate, he could do the online paperwork. If not, he won’t. 

Either way, my part will have been done, and I’ll be good with that.

And I’ll keep going.

Training Without Classes

COVID-19 is a nightmare for so many, and for society in general.

In my own little world it isn’t really very bad at all. It has caused an early end to our Snowbird season, and being in self-quarantine for a couple of weeks. Neither of those is any kind of hardship.

There has also been an impact on my Jiu-Jitsu world. Classes everywhere are on hold, and likely will be for a considerable amount of time.

It is, after all, about the closest kind of contact, and is shared with a significant body of participants.

Anyhow, in Jiu-Jitsu terms, things are nowhere near as wonderful as they were just a few short weeks ago.

An ideal situation would be if you were locked away in your home, with an expert to train with. A person could get private instruction every single day of their isolation. When the schools eventually open, you could step out onto the mat a heck of a lot more awesome than you were before COVID-19 reared its ugly head.

Almost as good would be if in your household there happened to be more than a single Jiu-Jitsu student. You could share what you already know, and study the video lessons together. If you worked every day your progress would easily surpass what you were achieving by attending group lessons.

Unfortunately, like most Jiu-Jitsu people, my situation is nothing like the two scenarios I’ve already described. I am the only Jiu-Jitsu person in my little pod of self-quarantine.

There is good news in that the last day of my mandated 2-week period of lockdown (because of re-entering Canada from a vacation) is today. I’m “free” tomorrow.

However, the Jiu-Jitsu schools are still boarded up, and will be for a good long while.

I could invite fellow students over to train in my private gym, but that won’t happen. The problem is that the need to avoid contact is still present. Every person has their own circle of contacts, each of whom brings in a circle of their own, and so on.

Let’s say I invite Rob over to get back to work on our technical exams. He’s a careful guy about spreading infection, and scrupulously clean. He lives with his wife, and I am confident that they don’t expose themselves willy-nilly to danger. So what’s the big deal?

Well, you see, Rob is a nurse and works every day at the hospital. I am confident that he follows all the pertinent protocols, but even so he works at the epicentre of our community’s danger zone.

How about my other most-frequent training partners? All have families, and a lot are still working. Each of us carries risk to anybody we should choose to train with. I would endanger them, just as they would endanger me.

Am I that scared? Not for myself, but should I get infected from a partner that means that anybody in my circle of contacts is also unacceptably put in danger. There is no way I am going to risk that.

That all means that I’ve regressed to how I did much of my training back in 2013 when I was a new Blue Belt. At that time the only way students at a Certified Training Centre could progress in rank was by passing comprehensive technical exams.

I wanted to do that as quickly as possible. In addition to my schools excellent group classes, I did a few private lessons, and also put in many, many hours on my own trying to teach myself parts of the curriculum, and in drilling everything I was learning.

Now, there are no classes, private or group. All that’s left is teaching myself and drilling. Using excellent online resources, that’s exactly what I’m doing.