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.