This morning I went down to get my gi from the laundry rack. And I had a bit of a scare seeing my purple belt hanging up there. �Oh, no, I�ve gotta put that in my bag!� �. wait...
This morning I went down to get my gi from the laundry rack. And I had a bit of a scare seeing my purple belt hanging up there. �Oh, no, I�ve gotta put that in my bag!� �. wait a minute��
On the one hand, a very large weight has been lifted. I�m no longer wondering what else I have to do to be promoted. I�m no longer tracking if the instructor is watching everything I do. I�m no longer critiquing every little movement as to whether it�s �purple belt level� (let alone brown belt level, goodness) or not; everything feels like a nice brown haze, lol. Even when the biggun� white belt tossed me around last week and sat on me and I seriously considered tapping to pressure (because omg the pressure), still a brown haze.
I also feel more free to try stuff, and it feels like things are working better. I feel like I might be rolling better and more fluid even with the people who don�t roll that way back, probably mostly because I�m not putting so much pressure on myself.
On the other hand, if I think about it too much, I panic: they expect me to know jiu-jitsu now! And my brain blanks out and claims it doesn�t know any. I taught the Friday morning before I was promoted, and it was no big deal because I�ve been teaching morning classes now for months. Then Tim asked me to teach a morning last week after being promoted, and I panicked; when one of the black belts showed up that morning, I turned it over to him instead because I couldn�t think of anything to teach. (I did feel silly afterward, but at the time, just pure panic.)
I did stop training 2-a-days. I had already dropped Fridays because I was wiped out by the end of the week. Then at the beginning of this month, Tim suggested that I train a bit less because I seemed tired and burned out. So I started taking the evenings off, which also let me get back to doing things around my house (all my other evenings are taken up with other things). I did feel a lot better in the mornings, though I was missing some of the people from the evenings. I�d already decided to go to class that Wednesday evening that ended up being my promotion, so I did go then.
And zomg, only crazy people do 2-a-days! I even just played around with one of the other ladies for 2 rounds and then sat another. I was d.e.a.d. the next two days. I have no idea how I did 2-a-days for so many months.
So I�m still on mornings only. I intend to try to do 1 evening every few weeks and/or go to Saturday open mat sometimes so I can train with those folks, though knowing that I�ll likely be wrecked again after.
