Great vacation to start a big year!

So, I've just come back from a good vacation for BJJ. I was able to visit Charles Dos Anjos in Sarasota and Kristopher Williams in Orange Park, Florida.

With Charles, we simply rolled for most of the time, allowing him to identify my most common mistakes and correct them. It was an extremely valuable experience, as well as, a very good time. Charles lets you work and try different things. Though he easily could have finished me at any time, he allowed our rolls to go around 5 to 8 minutes each, giving me numerous opportunities to get into various position, both dominant and inferior. I learned about positioning in side control, how to get the mount without immediately losing it and some better ways to work out of side control.

With Kris, I was able to work on some specific things that I have been having trouble with, namely maintaining a pass to side control and maintaining mount. I realized that instead of looking forward to actually maintaining mount, I had been simply working just to get it. I need to be looking further ahead and controlling smart players (find that under hook). We also worked some very useful half guard attacks, which I'm already incorporating into my rolling.

We finally opened the new Lincoln Mid-American Martial Arts gym and it's very exciting. We are having a seminar in January with 5 visiting black belts in either BJJ or Judo, for free. We're really pushing to get big numbers here for that event. I'll be teaching at least once a week in the new school, which I expect to help with my own technique as I sharpen the the things that I know and learn more details. I also expect to be able to increase the number of times I train each week, which can't help but improve my game. Ed and Aaron are keeping a close watch on what we teach, making sure that we are getting plenty of technique from them.

Finally, I will be attending officer candidacy school this year for the Air Force. That is a very unexpected, but great, opportunity that I'm facing. It will certainly cut into my training time (5 weeks), but should increase my level of fitness even more, so it won't be a total loss. Given the spread of BJJ over the years, I may very well find that some of my fellow officer's candidates are interested in rolling during our free time (I'd even teach a beginner's class, just to get some mat time).