Ooops & Saturday Open Mat

I was 95% of the way through the “Badger” workout on Tuesday:

3 rounds:

30 squat cleans
30 pullups
800m run

I was excited about this workout. The first with pullups since my “no more band” pledge. I had 20 pullups to go in the last round. Tired, but I was doing them in sets of 5. And then I tore some skin on my left palm. I stopped, taped both hands, re-chalked, and started up. Did 5 more and then had a pretty big callus tear on my right hand.

Uh, yeah. I guess I’ll go run now and “owe” the last 15 pullups another day. It’s healing, but it’ll be a bit before I can do pullups again. I continued Crossfit this week, taping it as necessary. On the plus side, my ribs are back to normal.

I skipped jiu jitsu on Wednesday, as I didn’t think that gripping a gi with a mostly-open wound would do my partners (or my hands) any favors.

However, by Saturday, I thought that it would be okay. I started off by doubling up on my 531 lifting, doing both presses and deadlifts. By the time open mat started, I was plenty warmed up.

I stretched a little bit, and Iron Mike walks in, eyeballs me, and starts walking over. Ugh. It’s purely a mental thing. He’s good. Both on a skill scale (4 stripes on his purple, so nearly a brown belt), and on a helpfulness scale.

We rolled for about 45 minutes. Some fast, mostly slow. His advice this morning was to relax even more. Apparently I’m too tense, so we slowed everything down. In our last roll I started to armlock from guard, he pulled his arm out, and I transitioned to an triangle choke. In my (mistaken) haste, I didn’t get the right angle on it, so I had to release and adjust…and while doing so, he escaped. I slowed down, and circled around to take his back.

So I’ve got one hook it, and he’s turtled up, and I’m attempting to get an arm around his neck…and he armlocks me. Never seen that done from that position. As is his custom, as soon as it’s apparent that he’s got it, he releases it and we continue. I give up on the choke, and switch to the power half, and get him rolled over and my other hook in. I wasn’t really able to do anything, his defense is extremely good. He wasn’t trying to escape, just prevent me from submitting him. I attempted the Rousimar armlock, but I neglected to secure his shoulder, so he turned into me and back to guard.