Stinky Rolling

The beautiful blue sky has given way to grey, moody clouds that appear to be perpetually threatening rain, but never produce.  Unfortunately that creates an higher than average humidity and that means exertion, not matter how little, will be rewarded with a greasy, clinging sweat.  

This also means that I need to special care when cleaning my gis.  If I leave the Gi in the washing machine too long the materials get a bitter, acrid odor that the dryer seems to bake in.  In yesterday's case I didn't notice this until I was being choked out with an ankle and realized the bad smell was coming from me.  That was in the first 15 minutes and I had two more hours to go.  Yuck.  I also felt for everyone that had to hug me for the bulk of that time.

In BB class we decided to do ground work for that hour and do test prep for the regular adult class.  The big local celebration is on the 30th and Reed wants us all to know what the kids are expected to do so we can judge in stations.  

In the BB class we started with the full mount, doing an armbar and then swinging one leg around and tucking the foot under the chin for an additional choke.  This hints at having some strength and flexibility with one leg I didn't seem to have, but at least I could get there.  The next move was to fall to the side while maintaining the armbar which is a fairly common move.  But what if the guy on the ground knows to grab his own arm to stop the bar?  We then drive one of our feet into the elbow of the farthest arm while slamming their head with one of our legs. 

We continued with escapes and extremely complicated figure-four armbars which were all quite fun and painful.  At one point I realized we appeared to be in a laboratory.  Reviewing why something worked and why something didn't.  This is a divergence from our normal work, but because the discussion always goes to "most fights go to the floor".  

The practically of Sensei Reed never ceases to amaze me.  As always, hyper traditional Karate (or at least in my experience) doesn't really cover anything about going to the ground other than putting people there.  So when he has time he learns as much as he can and introduces it to the blackbelts.  Simple escapes and how to deal with basic MMA type shenanigans.  We wouldn't be able to deal with an experienced person, but might be able to escape someone if the opportunity came up.

In the Regular class we went through each self-defense move that the each belt level was going to be expected to know during the test.  So from white belt all the way to orange the moves get progressively more complex and violent.  The final one does a pull of the leg and ends up breaking multiple pieces and parts.  Damn!