My rolling today can be summed up thusly: I sucked ass. Here’s my self-critique:

Good

• Got a clean sit-up sweep. This is only the second time I’ve been able to do this sweep
• Got a clean mount-escape by shrimping and then hipping out when Pat transitioned to side-control
• Did a decent lumberjack-sweep and transition to mount

Bad

• Got into a fruitless hand-war with Suzuki while mounting him. I have a tendency to stick with my game-plan even if it’s not working, and I rarely transition to a different attack. This is partly because I’m trying to practice a specific technique and partly because I’m a dumb ass. In this case, I had decided that I was going to try for a mounted triangle and so I wasted a lot of time trying to isolate an arm and ignoring other opportunities.
• When mounted, I kept trying for a leg hook to half-guard and ignored an easier opportunity to transition to butterfly guard.
• Got stacked and passed three times because
  • I failed to control my opponent’s posture.
  • Let my legs get gathered up on his shoulders rather than weighing them heavy on his arms.
• Kept grabbing at my opponent’s collars even though it was a no-gi class
• While executing a guard pass on my knees I forgot to counter the far leg to avoid getting hooked up in half-guard. I did this like four times in a row and I was scratching my head wondering how I kept getting stuck in half-guard. As per usual, I remembered what I should have done while walking away from the building.

My wife Laura, a therapist and life coach, says that I get into “Negative Thought Spirals”. I this means I think about things in a negative way and fail to acknowledge the positive aspects of whatever it is I’m obsessing over until I fall into a deep and stagnant depression. I think I need to work on my mental game as much as my physical game because I make a lot of mental mistakes and that makes me more depressed than anything.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under no-gi, rolling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.