"I Know I'm Not the Best"

Our team took the team trophy at the Long Island Pride tournament in NYC this weekend, so many of the students were discussing the tournament. From what I can gather, tournaments in NYC have competitors that come from not only the city, but also NJ and some other surrounding states. This means there is often a pretty good/deep pool of talent at these tournaments and you're not going against the same people all the time. One girl gave a brief speech about how great of a teacher Shaolin is and everyone applauded loudly after. Shaolin then followed up with something I found really humbling. He told us he knew he was "not the best" at jiu jitsu (uhh, you won worlds THREE TIMES at black belt in the lightweight division which is arguably one of the more stacked ones plus you had a pretty awesome run as a lightweight MMA fighter back in the day...) but that he believes in all of his students. He doesn't want anyone to sit on the sidelines at a tournament because they're afraid to compete. He invests his time equally in everyone, not just those who choose to compete and medal at big tournaments. I liked that he said that, because given his accomplishments he could easily focus his energy on the people who compete at big IBJJF tournaments and pay less attention to people who attend for more recreational purposes. Fortunately for me, I've never trained under an instructor who favored students who compete more.

On a more humorous note, my gi pants ripped down the center of my butt tonight. You may recall that about a month or so ago when my nogi spandex ripped during class. Well, I guess this my christening of sorts at Shaolin's but in the beginning of class as we were drilling half guard sweeps, someone pointed out that my pants were ripping. I knew they had been fraying, but when I inspected the damage after class it was definitely worse than it had been the last time! I hadn't worn this gi in a while because it's not my favorite gi. But ironically enough, those freaking Atama Ripstop pants are the only gi pants to rip on me!

Apart from that, training was excellent today. I got around 2.25 hours of training in- 2 hours of advanced BJJ and about 15-20 minutes of rolling in the beginner's class. There was a ton of purple belts tonight so I had the chance to see many of my weaknesses. I notice I was getting swept a lot when someone had me in butterfly guard, and Shaolin pointed out that I need to post my leg out but not too close so they can grab it. I'm not too familiar with butterfly guard, so I'm glad Shaolin pointed this out to me.