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It’s about one week from the U.S. Open and i’m really beaten up. In the past few weeks, i’ve been choked out by Juan, strangled by Hesam, and got literally thrown onto my face by Mike. It’s been fun and also a great learning experience to train with these guys as we all prepare to compete.

I’ve been going nearly every day since my hand recovered which has left me pretty injured. One thing that I forgot was that unlike most striking gyms where you’d spar at around 50-60%, it’s easy to go nearly 100% in grappling and do it in a safe and repeatable manner. This meant that it was easy for us to fall into that mentality and constantly push hard at each other during training. It allows us to learn a lot faster in a shorter period of time, but fuck if it didn’t hurt like a bitch. I’m pretty much injured everywhere in some way and i’ve definitely started performing worse due to just general exhaustion.

It all ends next week though. Wednesday, the 21st will be my last day in the gym before the Open. Tom and I agreed that we’re going to need some time to heal up or else we’re not even going to make it to the tournament. It’s been an awesome ride and i’m looking forward to seeing if I can perform well with everything i’ve learned.

September 20-26th, 2015

Things got off to an inauspicious start. I’ve injured both legs in two separate incidents earlier in the previous week and I started feeling like i’m recovering. Then, on the evening of the 19th, a freak accident while doing some housework ended up with 1.5 inches of my utility knife puncturing my left hand. A quick trip to the ER later, i’m left with a hand that I can’t really use for a week. It wasn’t the best experience and I wouldn’t recommend it.

This made any sort of grappling training impossible. I went to the gym to try and do some weight training but all I could really do was some half-assed squats. Turns out, it’s hard to pick up and lift stuff when you’re missing a hand to do so.

With nothing else that I could do, I decided to go back to the basics and work on my cardio. I’ve just recently gotten back from Burning Man and while I was there, I wasn’t able to run much. The altitude made it difficult to do so and all the alcohol gifts didn’t help either. It was late in the burn before I started feeling comfortable running in Black Rock Desert and when I got back, I felt like I was out of shape.

One thing I like to do two or three times a year is to go on a free run where I pack some water and some cliff bars, put some good tunes on, and run until I can’t anymore. Since I didn’t have anything else that was going to tire me out all week, it felt like the right time to do one of them now. I knew that I wasn’t in any shape to do so, and my legs were still not feeling up to it, so I had to prepare for it with some smaller runs. In Tuesday evening, I went on a small 3 mile run in my Vibram fivefingers and man did that hurt; it’s been so long since i’ve ran in them that i’ve forgotten the proper way to do so. On Thursday morning, I ran from my gym to my old workplace over at Seaport and back and that totaled 7.5 miles. I felt surprisingly good considering how shitty Tuesday felt and that gave me the needed confidence boost to proceed. Finally, on Saturday afternoon, I packed up my gear and headed out the door for my free run. It wasn’t the best run i’ve ever had, but I was pretty happy with it all things considered.

For those who don’t know, i’m going to be competing in the BJJ US Open. I have a bounty that you can find here that’ll give money to charity if I can submit someone in it. Go check it out!