Retreat

Except that instead of the subject being a German-Turkish crime lord, Verbal Kint is talking about my ability to get to (or write about) BJJ regularly. Lots has happened since April (!), mostly just typical stuff that comes with the territory for a middle-aged professional with two kids: work got busy, vacations came and went, U5 soccer started and other general life administration rolled on.

But, in that time there was some cool/fun stuff that happened:

• we attended our first grading (now sporting an intimidating one stripe!),
• grading weekend also included our first seminar experience with Master Sylvio Behring,
• during our vacation I attended a class at Maui Jiu-jitsu taught by Professor Luis Heredia,
• golf started, which I enjoy and think has some correlation to jiu-jitsu (seriously, I’ll explain it in its own post)

The biggest impediment to getting to BJJ over the course of May and June has been my boy’s soccer. Last year it was once, for 45 minutes, and on the weekend. This year its twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday… which typically were the days I was going to BJJ. So, with the women’s class only available on Wednesday and Friday, that’s a pretty large constraint on both of us attending BJJ with any regularity. We’re going to have to take a hard look at our scheduling going forward from here, because we were caught off guard by the hectic-ness of soccer season… and our youngest hasn’t even started anything yet. (*this paragraph is meant to be read whilst listening to sorrowful violin music to fully appreciate the gravity of my first world problems*)

So, I’m going to write some short-ish posts about the notes above, plus some thoughts about how my jiu-jitsu is going. Not because my worldwide audience of three (hi mom!) is demanding it, but writing about it is somewhat helpful in making sense of how things are going. A different perspective, y’know?

The Did-Wells and Next-Times of BJJ

Well, looks like I did get around to writing a “goals” post. It’s pretty self-explanatory but I wanted to take the time to reflect (man, that’s a lame turn of phrase) on how’s it’s gone so far and set a few goals for the next year. I tried to keep it reasonable (smart), and I’ll try to remember to look back at each milestone to see how/what I’ve done in comparison to the goals.

(Aside: the title comes from my time working at a bank, and their performance reviews had been morphed into the Orwellian newspeak where there was nothing negative, only did-wells and next-times.)

Recap of BJJ so far:

All in all, it’s been going great. Better than expected, actually. Try as you might, you always entering into new things with preconceived ideas, no matter how open-minded you try to be. Anyways, so thoughts about BJJ so far:

The Fog

I’m starting this as more of a journal than anything else. I have delusions of having this grow to be the “go-to blog about blahblahblah” that people of the internets rave about, but that’s likely to remain a delusion at best.