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.

Quarantine Time

There are huge events afoot in the world. The future with COVID-19 is very uncertain.

You’d think that there would be a lot to write about, but strangely there isn’t. This blog is for fairly petty things, and all the small stuff is gone.

Helen and I got home from our California trip a couple of weeks early and have been on a mandated two weeks of self-isolation.

A friend dropped off groceries early on, and we’ve been merrily eating them, and our pantry and freezer food, ever since.

I went for a couple of runs early on, before the rules changed and said we shouldn’t, and managed to blow out my injured knee. It would mean my being off of Jiu-Jitsu, but everybody is off of Jiu-Jitsu anyway.

Our days are spent sitting about, doing chores, surfing the web, watching TV, and me playing video games.

The Jiu-Jitsu instructor in Vancouver has been doing some lessons online, which have been fun to watch, as have the Gracies in Los Angeles. Not real training, of course, but something.

We have 6 days left to go in our quarantine. Almost nothing will change when we are “free” except we can go to the grocery store on our own. Our recycling is piling up, and a visit to the depot would actually be a nice outing.

Other than that kind of thing, we will continue to isolate.

On the bigger level, the numbers continue to rise. There are something like 700,000 cases confirmed worldwide, and been over 32,000 deaths.

President Trump sounds like he wants to end the American lockdown too early, even though the USA has 125,000 confirmed cases and over 2,000 deaths.

On a personal note, we’re in the age category where we’re at some serious risk if we get the virus. There’s a 20-28% chance we’ll end up in the hospital, and if we do there’s about a 1-in-3 chance we’ll be in intensive care. Our chance of dying is in the 1-to-2% range.

These figure are not pleasant, but a lot of folks face odds that are significantly worse.

The Run Home

So we decided to head home, and set out departure day for Friday. Our friends decided to cut and run on Wednesday, so we had a couple of days alone in our rented Desert Hot Springs mobile home.

We had all the leftovers from both kitchens so we pretty much went into full self-isolation for those two days.

The park was pretty much a ghost town. People were around, we just didn’t see them.

We used the hot-water swimming pool, Helen did her yoga every day, and I went for lonely desert runs.

Thursday we packed to get an early start in the wee small hours of Friday morning.

I went wild, and took the car out and gassed it up.

The original plan was to get going before dawn, and to reach our reserved hotel room in Yreka, California by around supper time. The expectation was that the drive would take us 11 or 12 hours, well beyond our usual absolute maximum of 8. We are old, after all.

The following day would see us bunking down in a hotel in Portland, just inside the northern edge of Oregon. Washington state is one of the Corona hotspots, so we planned on zipping through without stopping at all just be on the safe side.

That would mean that both days 2 and 3 would be about 6 hours of driving each. We had no idea what kind of crowds and procedures and delay there would be at the Canadian border.

Our first day’s route took us along the northernmost LA freeway to the west. We were underway at 5:48am. By the time we reached our closest point to LA itself, we were in the height of rush hour.

Except there was none at all. Traffic volume was what the freeways were originally designed for, and things never bogged down, or even slowed at all.

The only interesting characteristic was that everybody was going fast; much faster than normal, even for clear roads. It was as if everybody had decided to ignore the posted speeds, and to stick to the highest on any stretch (70 mph), and to go 10% faster than that.

This was how the conservative drivers were going it. Of course, there were a significant number of real speed demons. What was totally missing was anybody plodding long at the real speed limits, nobody at all.

At first, I thought this was just LA traffic scampering gleefully on their freakishly free roads, but it turned out to be that way for our entire trip, me included.

So we merged onto Interstate 5 and swung north, and kept cranking off the miles.

Our lovely car can go about 850 km between refuelings, so we knew we’d have to stop once on our first leg. We also took one rest stop break. To make this possible neither of us was drinking. Usually, sipping away on a Dr Pepper while driving is one of my simple pleasures. Not on this trip. There would be limited rest stops.

When we did stop, I would use a disinfecting cloth to clean my hands, and anything else that touched anything. We ate our own pre-packed food, picking up nothing along the way.

The scenery was grand, and with so little traffic, I could actually look once in a while. Don’t worry; the car has adaptive cruise control and lane alert features.

The first huge day of diving took us north of LA, through Stockton and Sacramento, and many smaller places.

Our first night’s hotel was a Super 8 in Yreka California. There were only about a half dozen cars staying there overnight.

They still provided a breakfast the next day, but all I had was coffee, and a bunch of sweet breakfast pastries that came pre-sealed from some factory.

We got going about 7:30am, and again I was the driver. Usually we share, but not on this trip.

We headed north again, through mountains, and into Oregon. We weren’t rushing, as our planned stop was only in Portland, only about 6 hours away. There was no need to dawdle either, so I kept our speed parallel to the other drivers, who were all still driving fast.

After a couple of hours, our speed and lack of stops had our gps showing a crazy early arrival at our booked hotel. Helen looked up the Canadian border wait times, and they were only a few minutes at every crossing. She suggested that we just push on and run all the way home.

I agreed. It was too late to cancel the hotel booking, but we’d rather get home a day early.

Traffic remained sparse and fast. The usual two logjams are the freeway tangles around Portland and Seattle. We zipped right through as if we were the last people on earth.

We hit the border at 5pm. There was only one booth open out of a potential of 12. There was a single car ahead of us, and they pulled away as soon as we drove up. No wait at all.

The customs agent didn’t ask about what we’d bought, which is their usual concern. She just asked if either of us had been having any respiratory symptoms, gave us an information sheet, and welcomed us home.

Once across, I made myself adapt totally to Canadian speeds. The usual setting for our cruise control on this drive had been 119 kph, and now the freeway limit was 90. In places the limit was 80.

The roads were still pretty empty. We got the the ferry terminal at about 6:30pm, and our boat wasn’t until 7:50pm. We hung out in our car both in the parking lot, and while onboard.

Helen drove the last few miles from the ferry to our home, and into self-quarantine we went.

Virus Holiday

This started out as our very ordinary, but fun, kind of winter getaway.

We’ve done some variant of a basic theme since we retired back in 2013.

As I said, it started normally, but that didn’t hold up all that well.

It started with 4 days of car travel from our home north of Vancouver, down through Washington, Oregon, and into California. Like always, we moved in with a dear friend in Lomita, which is a part of Los Angeles.

We have a lot of fun there, and I go off almost every day to Jiu-Jitsu classes at Gracie University. Like I said, just like it always is.

After two weeks, we moved on to the next phase, which entails moving on to the Palm Springs area and a mobile home park in Desert Hot Springs. We meet up with a pair of other Canadians, and each couple rents a place for the month of March.

A typical day there consists of meeting up for early coffee, and lazing about. Then we do various morning activities; Yoga, pool exercise, pickle ball or desert running. We then pile into somebody’s car, and go poke around someplace and end up in a restaurant having a fabulous lunch.

By mid afternoon we are back in our units, perhaps for naps, and always to get ready for pool time around 3pm. The pool is massive, and fed from natural hot springs, and is warmer than anyplace I’ve ever swum before, ever. Dinner is home-made, and we watch a movie from the couch and comfy chairs, and magically bedtime arrives.

And then again the next day.

This year was exactly all of this exact stuff, with the only difference being that the news was all related to the upcoming US elections. One slowly-growing back story focused on the spread of the Corona virus.

There were cruise ship problems, trouble in China and Italy, and a few cases popping up around the world.

When we made the transition to the desert on March 1st everything here was absolutely normal.

Some time between then and now (March 18th) that has completely changed.

Hoarding started, mostly toilet paper. Soon, major events like the huge South-by-Southwest and Coachella concerts, and professional sporting events were being cancelled all over the place.

Then it was smaller events, and strings of government announcements both here and in Canada. People started flocking away from the mobile home part, heading home.

Our friends chose their departure date, as did we. They set today as their exit, so last night we went downtown for a final meal together. A few sad shops were still open, but most were not. The few still going had no patrons at all.

About half of the restaurants were bolted, and those remaining were doing take-out meals only, and not many of those.

We grabbed pizza to take back to our units.

This morning, our friends headed back to Canada, and we go on Friday.

It isn’t really virus fears that are driving us out, as we are probably safer in that respect being here rather than home, but there is really not much reason to stay for funwise.

Just about everything is shut down. Today I did a desert run, and Helen did Yoga in our place. We plan on going to see if a nearby nature park is open, but last time we checked it wasn’t.

The only attractions remaining are our pool (chlorinated), and the weather. Once we get home were are expected to self-quarantine for 14 days. That looms whatever our return date, so we might as well go, and get started on that. The internet and TV at home are much superior to what we’ve got here, and our own house is jammed with our stuff. Helen already has a bunch of sewing projects in mind for when we lock ourselves in at home.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m complaining about anything, because that’s not how I feel at all. We are not suffering in any way. It is still very pleasant here, and will be fine while on the road, and when we’re at home as well.

We haven’t had jobs impacted, nor faced any health issues, nor been unduly hampered by restrictions. We are just here, surrounded by events, and going with the flow.

Unexpected

I’ve been coming to train at Gracie University every year since I retired.

That first year the visit was 8 weeks long, and the following five visits were all 2 weeks long. This week it’s visit number seven, and I’m halfway through two weeks of training.

There have been milestones along the way; one year I did a few private lessons with Jordan Collins; in 2016 I was evaluated for and received a Purple Belt promotion.

In general, it has all been good, rock-solid training.

This year is just a little different. A lot of the lessons have involved defence, where suddenly the defender abandons everything that they’ve spent years learning, and does what seems suicidal, and suddenly is out of danger.

This is very good for me, and is making me think differently about rolling.

Compared to just about everybody I train with, I am a dinosaur. Certainly not one of those sprightly velociraptors or t-rexs, something significantly more lumbering.

My basic assumption, almost always proven totally correct, is that my partner is faster than me, and stronger than me.

I can only manage to survive with technique.

With significantly less experienced partners, this is just fine, as almost anything I do will be a surprise. With those around my level of skill, all I can usually do is defend and try and survive.

Those guys know everything that I do, and are still faster and stronger. It hardly seems fair.

Therefore, it is really nice to be learning some techniques that turn all of an opponent’s expectations upside down. With these kind of moves being exactly the opposite of what is expected, I will seem crazy fast, even if it’s only an illusion. These also go exactly where the attacker they want things to go, therefore making a strength advantage into a handicap.

And there is something even better than the techniques; this is the mindset of looking for them.

If it were just the moves I’m being taught, then I’d head home after two weeks with maybe 4 very specific tricks to use when caught in very specific situations. Focusing on the mind set means that, while I’ll still have the specific tricks, I’ll be looking to create others of my own.

Let’s say I figure out a couple more, and am back home pulling this kind of stuff on my rolling partners. This will annoy the hell out of them, and they will likely get much more careful about everything they try to pull off. Does that seem like they’ll be slowing down to protect themselves from the tricky old guy? It does to me.

That in itself is a great form of defence.

Tired Knee no Problem

My knee is acting up, so this evening I am only watching the classes. It’s nothing serious, but better to baby any injury.

Currently, the group lined up in class has about 40 members, at least half of whom are coloured belts. This is very strange, as it is primarily a White Belt session.

All the other White Belt classes are just about as large, but with only a handful of coloured belts around. Those that attend are there to help.

Not tonight. This is the ever-so-slightly-higher-level session for beginners who are at least half way through their program.

The fancy name for this class is “Reflex Development.” It is still aimed at self-defence, and focused on simple technique. But why so many coloured belts?

The answer is simple. Rank advancement has many mandatory minimum requirements. Coloured belts have to attend at least ten  Reflex Development classes in every 8 month period if they want to move up in rank. There is no such demand that they attend ordinary White Belt classes.

What this means in practice is that a lot of people with Blue, Purple of Brown Belts show up for exactly ten Reflex classes, but never, ever attend any other White Belt sessions. The only advanced people that do so are there to help. I applaud them.

Anyhow, it’s a room full of every rank right now.

Ryron Gracie is teaching, and having them do some cool control drills. The moves all feature what the White Belts are already familiar with, but in a very different context. It is also stuff that the higher folk don’t regularly deal with either.

After an hour, the group is dismissed, and the Friday advanced class happens. Likely, all of the coloured belts from the Reflex class will stay, and be joined by a million others.

For my entire time here, the advanced classes have all addressed counters to Back Mount submission attacks. Well, almost all. The 7am classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays are a little less controlled. In those we’ve been doing mostly Back, but with a little arm bar work thrown in.

Usually we jump right into the lesson, but at the noon class earlier today we were all directed to do a simple throw that I wasn’t going to risk my knee for. When everybody grabbed partners, I just moved to the side.

After a couple of minutes of everybody working, and me sitting who do you think walked in?

It was my Black Belt friend Marc from Vancouver. He’s down to help with the police training course. He saw me at the side and asked if I wanted to do the throw on him.

Both taking and receiving the throw are not knee friendly events, but with a perfect partner like Marc, my executing the throw carries zero risk.

He stayed with me for the whole class.

The main lesson covered escapes from side and turtle position that I’ve done before, but not in a very long time. The instructor, Alex Stewart, is detail-oriented teacher.

My favourite part of this was the final movement of the sequence. The instructor the previous night also included that movement in what we had done. It was fun noting the differences between their two, very dissimilar methods for the move.

Then, when drilling, my partner Marc didn’t do it the exact same way as either of the instructors.

Sam, from the night before, would insist we duck our shoulder underneath, plant it on the mat as far out as possible, and pivot. Alex, from today, had us duck our shoulder underneath, but very close in, and pivot. My partner Marc, didn’t really duck his shoulder under at all, and would pivot. I liked seeing what the range of possibilities really are.

The problem was that I was having way too much fun, and not holding back at all. By the end of the class, my knee was really done, but it was worth it.

Nothing desperate about my cranky knee, so I went for a yummy lunch, and walked about in a cool market area. When I got back to Denise’s place, I iced my knee and took things easy.

Now I’m on my viewing bench for the evening classes.

The Reflex class ended, and the advanced crowd moved in.

Ryron was teaching, and I think the stuff they were doing was something that I first encountered during last year’s visit, but perhaps it was at a seminar sometime.

It involves at totally non-intuitive method of defending from a nasty rear choke.

Watching from my bench, I decided that the best way to teach this would be from the back to the front.

In the normal order the attacker manages to get a one arm choke started, and wants to bring in the second arm. Conventional wisdom is that the defender tries to stop this progress, and tries to pull his chin down, and to tense all of the neck muscles.

This evening’s wild defence insists that as soon as that first attacking arm gets locked in, the defender should pull is own head back, totally exposing their throat, but making the insertion of the attacker’s second arm into position much more difficult.

The defender concentrates on a couple of moves that capture the slowed second attacking arm, and then defeats unsupported single choking arm.

I learned a great deal from my off-mat perch. The biggest revelation was how difficult it was for most of the students to overcome their instincts and to really commit to fully exposing their naked throats to being attacked.

By not doing so, they totally failed to slow the other attacking arm. By not risking the neck, their partners were able to easily lock in both arms and finish the choke. To prevent the choke, they had to expose themselves to being choked. To hesitate at all got them choked; totally counter-intuitive.

That’s why I think that the finish should be taught first. Students would learn all the easy-to-trust stuff that finishes the move. The hard part would be left for last.  It could be emphasized that none of the evening’s lesson would be any use at all without total  commitment to the key element.

Things are rarely taught that way in Jiu-Jitsu. Sometimes, mixing up teaching style can be shockingly effective, specially with unusual material like tonight’s lesson.

It was a really great day for me here at Gracie University.

Happy

This visit has been freaky.

Keep in mind that I am nothing special at all. We have come to LA for a couple of weeks at about this time of year since 2014. We do fun tourist stuff, but we come primarily so that I can train in Jiu-Jitsu at Gracie University.

For this visit, my goal is to attend 20 classes, and so far am only 5 classes toward that total.

Gracie University has thousands of students of its own, and tons of visitors always coming and going.

I have been noticed and acknowledged by instructors Ryron Gracie twice, Alex Stewart twice, and by Sam Fernandez, and Rener Gracie.

Several students have remembered me from before, and made a point of greeting me.

I have also been approached in the change room by a student who says I am exactly what he is aspiring to be. You see, I am 63 years old, which counts as crazy old for an activity like this. He was stunned to run across somebody my age wearing a Brown Belt.

Another student came up after a class to greet me. He used to be a member at an affiliate school in Palm Desert, which has folded. I visited there a few times in 2018 and 2019 and showed them a few simple things.

Their survivors have opened a new school in Indio, and he enthusiastically invited me to visit them there. As we will be in that general area soon, I happily agreed.

Keep in mind that I’ve only been to 5 classes.

Nothing even close to this happened during any of my other 6 visits here to train.

It must be because of the high regard that people have for Brown Belts.

I must say that I don’t act like the other Brown Belts. Most don’t behave like they do at earlier levels.

There seems to be two trends. The first group seems serious all the time, and somewhat reserved; dare I say, “mysterious?” The other bunch is more annoying, and insist on telling other folk how to do every little thing as if they are some kind of experts. If you listen in, you’ll hear all sorts of downright nonsense. Luckily this is by far the smaller of the two groups.

I don’t know why either group behaves as it does, but it’s really pretty obvious if you play spy for a while.

Me? I’m usually smiling, and acting as if I’m just happy to be there, because I am. Not mysterious, and not trying to pass my self off as knowing more than I do.