Engulfed in Flames

Mayday! Mayday! Parker's down! She's burning! Ooooh...yes, she's toast.
Taught hammerfist today in Relentless' level 1 class. Unsure of how to reconcile the 3 first time students need for greater instruction with the more advanced students need to get working, I decided the solution was to talk too long. And I did that very well. Talked less on side hammerfist, even less on knees. Hooray. Then I "taught" defense against choke from the side. My attacker, a large student, was shoving me sideways on the attack & instead of stopping & telling him to please not push, I defended anyway - failed to get the pluck! - and kept fighting him off. Badly. A match was struck & I started to smell gasoline. Then I gave a beautifully unclear explanation of the technique, moved them on to drywork, which kind of looked like a spastic dance-off. My clothes started smoking. I let them get to work and I don't know what the hell they were doing, and I definitely don't know what the hell I was doing, but I was clearly going down in flames. The funny thing is, a student came up behind me to ask me a question after class in the lobby & heard me telling Miss C what I'd just done & he said, "You know what, I'm a teacher & you need to understand that things look very different to your audience than they do from your perspective. We thought you were doing great." I am now engaged to be married to this man. HA, good thing my husband isn't reading this...

Anyway, that took a bit of the sting out of it, and I'll be working on that technique next week in teacher training. A lot.

2nd hour was The Gentleman's bag class. This class is awesome. Crossfit is really starting to pay off, I can feel myself getting stronger & having more endurance, and being more willing and able to push through exhaustion. I take back all the stuff I said about Crossfit, its making a huge difference for the better in my training.

3rd hour, MMA, worked with Strongirl again (yay!). We worked some of those weird, complicated BJJ moves from the guard where you're reversing people and yanking on them, and doing super secret sneaky moves. Stuff that looks really complicated, until you realize it makes perfect sense, but then you can't explain it at all, you can only do it. We did that stuff.

4th hour, just worked one-on-one with The Professor, working on patching up holes in my game, building aggression in my moves, working the focus mitts, sprawling against his takedowns, fighting off his clinches. That boy is strong. Then just a little more groundwork, learned how to give the world's coolest beatdown while I have someone trapped in my guard, then a most excellent armbar. Mostly it was just bang bang bang for an hour, the kind of workout I live for. I just get so happy and excited after training like that, I want to jump around like a puppy, by mostly I just have to lay on the ground, sweating and panting. Its so good good good!