As too often happens when I come home from a poker trip all excited to get in a training routine, I've gotten injured again. I was doing jiujitsu and on top in a nice, high mounted position when the big 210 lb guy I was rolling with bridged and came awkwardly on top of me. Unlike when I hurt my elbow, this was not an instance of a big guy being ( Read more... )

I'm normally a positive and happy person and I rarely wish malice to anyone, but tonight that positivity is replaced by anger. Some huge guy at the gym today decided to assert his superiority by fucking up my already injured arm. Had he exerted so much force on my good arm it probably still would have caused damage, but on my bad arm, it probably ( Read more... )

It's been raining non-stop since my arrival in Curitiba. And I am being literal here; I have yet to leave the house and have it not be raining. So even if I had the energy to go around town (which I can't say I do), it wouldn't be very enjoyable. Anyway, my roommate, Joe, says there's pretty much nothing to do in Curitiba: "we go to the ( Read more... )

I arrived late at night; luckily the cab driver knew exactly where he was going, and the big well-lit "CM System" sign indicated we'd arrived at the correct destination. I buzzed the door a couple times, and a tough-looking dude with a shaved head and a nasty black eye walks up. He is a stone dead ringer for Royce Gracie, and he waits for me to ( Read more... )

Along with this new corner I've turned (which can be pretty much just be summarized by "stop being a fucking sissy and get in the gym), I've started a training diary. I can't really imagine anyone but serious hardcore jiujitsu/MMA people would be interested, but I guess that's also what I thought about the poker blog when I started it six years ( Read more... )

I was looking for more stuff to read on the Kindle when I noticed that on my Wish List appeared a book I'd never heard of before: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
( Read more... )

Many moons ago, chrisdanek and I had a discussion over whether I could submit him in a grappling match faster than he could solve a Rubik's Cube. At the time these were our respective hobbies and he was starting to get pretty good at the cube-solving. On his actual timed solve, he underperformed and only managed a 73-second solve. For some reason we were ( Read more... )

I went to jiujitsu today and got armbarred by a white belt ( Read more... )

I consider my day at GQ a partial success. Ironically, after all that weight cutting, no one else was registered in my division. So I "won" a gold medal by default, and to compete I would be moved up to the blue belt 130-139.9 lb class. This was surprising because last year in this same tournament there were 9-10 people in the 129.9 and below ( Read more... )

It's 8:30am, and I just got back from breakfast after making weight for the Grapplers Quest tournament tomorrow morning. I made 130.5 lbs to qualify for the bantamweight division, but not without significant difficulty, due to the fact that I basically had to cut weight twice in 12 hours ( Read more... )