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My Experience at the IBJJF Chicago Open

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I traveled to Chicago this weekend to visit friends and to compete in the Chicago Open. It’s put together twice a year by the IBJJF in Chicago. I don’t like to compete that far away from home, but I’m using the tournament as a way to ensure I see my friends at least twice a year. Speaking of whom, to the left is a picture of Matt, Allen, and me half way through the long day.

I was able to get silver in my weight and bronze in absolute (see results page). It’s not the result I came there for, but the experience was great. I got a lot of matches and learned a lot. That’s why this blog post will probably be way too long, and filled with random thoughts. I’ll try to write about the small and big lessons I learned, at least the ones that are easy to put into words.

The best part was being reminded how much I love the people in the  jiu jitsu community. The kind of folks that compete at these tournaments are a rare breed. They come from all sorts of different backgrounds, but all have grounded character, a weird sense of humor, and an exceptional drive to succeed in all aspects of life.

Overall, I enjoyed the matches I won (a bunch, all by submission), but my mind has been going over and over the two matches I lost. Both of them I lost 2-0. Both were against good aggressive guard pullers that play the de la riva, berimbolo, fifty fifty games.

So first, here is the video blog I put together about the experience, and after that, is a bunch of random lessons learned:

I apologize for the monotone and at time ridiculous commentary. I try to let the coffee do the talking but that usually only lasts about 20 seconds. Alright so here are some “lessons”…

Gi Size: Avoid Surprises

Against my better instincts, and general common sense, I competing in a new gi that I’ve only trained in a couple of times. It was a Gameness Air gi, which I bought because of how light it is (like 0.5 lbs makes a difference…). It’s a great gi, generally speaking, but in my experience, what makes a “great” gi is mostly how well it fits on my specific body. I have 5 Fuji A3 gi’s and all fit differently. Anyway this gi was too big on me, especially in terms of the length of the sleeves. I got swept in my first match with the sleeve pulled all the way over my hand which was a new and disorienting feeling. There are technical details here that I’ll have to work on that have to do with left-sided base and scrambling in an entangled gi, but the main lesson to keep in mind is: compete in a gi that has already seen many battles in training (and preferably competition).

Renting a Car is a Good Idea

I always try to minimize the amount of money I spend on a tournament. In the spirit of that, I do things like bring my own food, don’t stay overnight at a hotel, carpool as much as possible, and if needed take public transportation. I usually embrace the chaotic labyrinth of transfers that is the subway and bus systems of the world. But this somehow becomes exponentially more difficult in many cases when used to get to and from a tournament. There are already a million things on my mind the hours before a tournament. The need to keep track of bus numbers and train stops adds too much to think about. Maybe I’m just over-stressing it, and once I get more used to competing at certain venues, public transit will be okay, but at least this time, renting a car helped me out.

This is especially true given that my division was on at 9am, and so I had to leave Matt’s house at around 7:30am. If I was taking a train I would probably need to be standing at a bus stop somewhere at 7am on Saturday morning, wondering why the hell I do such crazy things.

Cutting Weight is a Great Warm Up

When I arrived at the venue (at 8am) and checked my weight, I was 2 lbs over. I was ready for this and partially was hoping I was a little over, because I was also 2 lbs over at Worlds, and the experience was positive then. This may seem ridiculous, but being over by 1 to 2 lbs forces me to have a hell of a good warm up, the result of which I drop the 2 lbs. I calmly changed and waiting until 8:30am. I jogged for 10 minutes and then did about 100 burpees. From experience, I knew that the sweat I built up was more than 2 lbs by a little. I also knew that the test scale was a little heavy. When they called my name 5 minutes later, I was warmed up, awake, alert, ready to go, and 3 lbs lighter than 30 minutes before.

The lesson here is not to come in overweight, but rather that a good hard warm up is important, and very often skipped in competition. People for some reason are worried about tiring themselves out. That’s just an excuse we feed ourselves, and I know I do this a lot. So my goal for the next tournament is come in under weight, but still to go through a good 2-3 lbs warm up.

To be continued…

I jotted down a few more “lessons” in a notebook. This post is already ridiculously long, so I’ll save it for another post.

Overall the experience was great. I saw a lot of of the same faces, old friends, new friends, random facebook friends, and shady hipsters at the many Starbucks I visited to get some programming done.

By the way, I’m trying to maintain a good diet to get rid of some of that summer fat. This was my breakfast the day after the tournament. Roast beef and carrots!

Lazy Judo

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I woke up bright and early at 10am today (Sunday). For some people that might not be so early, but for people like me with a productivity peak that hits around 3am and a life-threatening addiction to coffee, 10am is pretty damn early.

I finally got around to having my “birthday party” with my parents. A month late, but who’s counting. I got a new camera! Mostly for still shots, but I’ll be definitely using for HD video also together with my other one. Here’s the first video:

These are a couple of throws that ignore most of the basics: not bending knees, not turning enough, not pulling enough, etc. Hence the title of this post: “Lazy Judo”. I was being relaxed, overly relaxed.

That’s a perfect time to focus on technique. Instead I ended up lazily half-assing each throw. This is why I like video’ing practice, because my judo looks a lot worse on camera than I imagine in my head ;-)

Special thanks to Osagame Martial Arts for the great training and instruction as always.

In other news, congrats to Jared for winning his Long Island Pride superfight. A score of 3-0 is always music to my ears. That’s a score I would love to have for the rest of my BJJ career. To me it says: a long battle that ends in a guard being passed.

Chewing Gum

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I sometimes get heartburn when training. It’s unpleasant, distracting, and prevents me from really pushing myself. I would say the worst part of it is that it prevents me from enjoying a long training session, but not enough where I have to stop. So I just go on, annoyed.

I’ve heard a few other folks complain about heartburn on the mat, and their solution is not to eat for several hours before training. That’s just not an option for me. I eat small meals about every two hours and wouldn’t be able to last through a hard practice if I didn’t eat at least an hour before hand.

Anyway, for me, for some reason chewing gum helps with heartburn. I don’t know the physiology of this, nor do I care, it just works (for me). So, I’ve gotten into the habit of popping in a piece of gum before training. Plus, it helps make me smell a little less like a pot of coffee, since by the time I actually get to training, I’ve probably consumed 1-2 pots. Yes, I’m an addict. And yes, I know, coffee is terrible for heartburn.

That’s a lot of writing to get to the comment that I actually wanted to make, which is: I feel that chewing gum helps me in training by reminding me to relax and breath. For example, I was guillotined today in training for about 2 minutes with very little ability to breath, and as crazy as it sounds, chewing gum helped put my mind into that relaxed “I’m just chilling” state and I was able to ride it out. Later, a 250 lbs guy was on my back and had a body triangle on tight for 2-3 minutes while working a choke. I was able to relax through that also. It’s all psychological, but gum seems to be a useful catalyst, as absurd as that sounds.