Semi-private

For Marc;

A wonderful part of the NVGJJ web lessons is how they generally follow the sequence and methods of the Gracie University material, but with a magnificent plus.

Let me give an example. The technique is called (BBS2-32) Butterfly Half Guard; Front Side Sweep. I first encountered this puppy several years ago, and trained it as throughly as any other technique. It worked like a charm during drill. However, whenever I attempted to pull it off during free-rolling my guard was always instantly passed.

I returned to the video lessons from Gracie University, and noted every detail. They talked a lot about the technique’s potential for failure and emphasized faster and higher leg extension to prevent these issues. I tried, and there was zero improvement.

When NVGJJ got to that lesson, I didn’t expect much. There were all the exact same steps, until one wasn’t the same. Just before all those explosive leg extensions that did me no good there is a movement that the young giants at Gracie University barely mentioned. They are shown grabbing their opponent’s support arm and pulling on it with their own arm. I had been doing it exactly the same way, but am neither young nor a giant. The NVGJJ video showed grabbing the arm, and then collapsing it completely using a total contraction of back muscles. I tried it that way, and almost didn’t have to extend my legs at all. The back crunch alone was almost enough to complete the entire technique. What the hell?

The difference was that the NVGJJ lesson was done by somebody who does not normally out-mass or out-muscle his opponents. 

In this particular case the new video took a technique which did absolutely nothing for me except get my guard passed, and made it into a viable, high-success, low-effort option for me.

Usually, the difference is not so dramatic, but still allows me to improve my effectiveness while lowering the energy costs for me. A little bit here, and a little bit there.

Sometimes being 6’13” tall like the Gracie University instructors means they miss certain efficiencies. I am a hundred years old and need every effort reduction that exists.

There is also a different pace to the NVGJJ online lessons. They are tight. Often, too much information can be just as bad as not enough. Let’s say I watch a NVGJJ lesson, and need more. I could ask a question, and sometimes do, but am just as likely to make a note to watch the corresponding Gracie University video, or at least the relevant part of one.

Every single one of the NVGJJ lessons has either given me something new, or fired me up to watch a GU video, or made me re-think some pertinent conundrum.

Nothing can replace hands-on work with a partner, but these are damn close.

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.

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.