A Long Time

Covid hit my Jiu-Jitsu world in mid-March of 2020.

We were in California, and things got bad all over. Businesses of every type were shutting down. A lot of people were getting sick.

We headed north before the month was out. The freeways were strangely empty. Went through LA, San Francisco, and Seattle at what should have been rush hour, but wasn’t.

It was good to get home to Canada. Helen and I settled in for the long haul.

My Jiu-Jitsu shut down, along with pretty much everything else.

Gracie University is well known for the programs they put online, and they moved to take up the slack. They produced a few webinars, and were soon doing zoom lessons.

I loved the webinars, but their zooms didn’t click with me. A friend of mine in North Vancouver started doing zoom lessons of his own several times a week. These became my regular online program. Real, physical classes shut down everywhere.

We didn’t see any people in any way other than on screens, or masked and at a distance in a food store.

By July I found a partner for Jiu-Jitsu who is even more Covid careful than I am, and we worked for a few weeks until his situation changed and we had to end our meetings.

Helen found a few music groups that met masked, and only outdoors, and at several times the distance people were advised to maintain.

I had my zooms from North Vancouver, and nothing else Jiu-Jitsu related. They were great, and I was happy to get them, but something was lacking.

July became August, and then September. Nothing changed, but there was a shift by October.

A young gentleman and I started meeting to train. He was doing all of his high school classes at home, and was at least as deep into isolation as I am.

We trained three times a week. There were holes in this schedule on occasion. Although I am a retired man of leisure, my partner was still working his way through online high school, and also working online towards Royal Conservatory professional-level violin and viola exams.

On through Winter, and into Spring, and into the start of Summer. In April we received our first vaccination shots.

Then, on July 1st, our provincial government changed a lot of the official restrictions. Things started to open up, and Helen and I got our second Covid shots.

The local school won’t be in real operation for classes until September at the earliest, but small groups popped up.

I still work about 3 times a week with my musical friend. To this has been added twice a week with a small group of other folks, and an even smaller group of our most experienced people on Fridays. Soon I might even add a weekly trip to train with the fully open school in North Vancouver.

Suddenly, I’m training more than I would normally have done before Covid reared its ugly head.

Of course, this could all change in a flash if something goes sour; Covid variants spring to mind. However, I’m having a lot of fun.

My sister is coming for a visit soon, and we plan on going to see more family in Victoria in August.

Things are potentially more “normal” than they’ve been in a very long time.