Caffeine Induced Airport/Travel Rant

I apologize for having not updated my blog in such a long time.  The heading of this blog post is exactly what this is.  As an update for my participation in the IBJJF Worlds, I figure I’d throw out how my trip has gone thus far.  I have been in Los Angeles for a full 7.5 hours at the current time of typing this post, have gotten perhaps a collective three hours of sleep and was forced to eat McDonald’s or (seemingly) die of starvation.  I had always wondered and fantasized about how easy it would be to live in southern California so that I could train at some of the best schools in the world and then travel to the top tournaments in the world quite easily, but if I were to only do two, three or perhaps four tournaments in California per year, wouldn’t it be just as easy to live somewhere on the east coast and then fly out to California when necessary?  There are, after all, great schools in the eastern states.  Let me put into perspective my personal traveling experience, comparing what it’s like to drive to New York City for a tournament and what it’s like to fly out to California:

Weeks in advance, I purchase my ticket to California and begin planning what days I need to leave Pennsylvania and, of course, return back home.  I may not be able to find a direct flight from Pittsburgh, and in this case, I needed to connect in JFK or else pay an astronomical price just to connect in a more ‘logical” area (somewhere between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles).  I chose the cheaper flight, which happened to be a steal, sacrificing what convenience I’d otherwise have.  I get ready to board my plane and fall victim to a somewhat common woe that passengers sometimes face – a delayed flight.  My plane from Pittsburgh to New York is delayed 45 minutes, and then again another 45 minutes when we are sitting on the tarmac.  Luckily my connection in New York was very long and I was able to make my next flight with plenty of time to spare, though I didn’t expect what was going to happen next.

I arrive in Los Angeles, happy (though sleep deprived as I can never fall asleep on planes) to be in my final destination and ready to get to my teammate’s apartment to rest up for a day of training, until my worst fears come true at baggage claim.  My baggage is nowhere to be found.  They tell me that it, for whatever reason, was set on another plane and that I’d have to pick it up at 10:00AM the next day (a time that I am, at the time of writing these words, awaiting eagerly).  They told me this at 12:45AM.  I had to choose between taking the time and money to go from LAX to Pasadena, then waking up early and taking the trip from Pasadena to LAX to retrieve my luggage and then from LAX back to Pasadena one more time, all the while disrupting my friend’s sleep schedule, or I could simply stay in the airport until I retrieve my luggage and then leave at a more ‘appropriate’ time of the day.  I chose the latter and rather grumpily frumped around for hours, hungry and cold, inappropriately dressed for airport air-conditioning, unable to find even a Denny’s that was open.  The only 24 hour restaurant in the area was closed for renovating this particular day.  Perhaps if I were not so cheap, none of this would have happened and I could have just taken a direct flight that would have transferred my luggage like what was originally supposed to happen, but I want to save what money I have as a broke blue belt to make it to the other big tournaments later in the year. 

            In my grumpy tantrum I was yelled at by a foreign woman for unplugging her unattended-to phone from the only outlet I could find so that I could charge my own laptop and phone, which were on their way to electronic-suicide, and was given a sweatshirt to wear by a woman who was waiting with me in the terminal before the workers could start their shifts.  After being handed the sweatshirt, she proceeded to tell me she’s been “feeling sick”.  I asked if I should be wearing the sweatshirt and she assured me that she only feels sick because she ate some really bad Mexican food the other day and she thinks she’s probably pregnant, or something.  Thankfully I had nothing to worry about.  I decided to take the sweatshirt off and walk around the airport a bit more to find the closest restaurant that would be open the soonest.  It was McDonalds, and I ate my egg white McMuffin and hashbrown like a champion should as soon as it opened for business.  While I’m quite ashamed at what I needed to eat and I was upset at what I had to go through, it is perhaps a consequence of my previous choices and a lot of bad luck.  Either way, it is a rough way to start a week of training at a new gym before the biggest tournament in the world.  Comparatively, my trips to New York City for No-Gi Pan Ams and the New York Open consist of figuring out what time I will leave before the weekend of the tournament to get to my parents’ house in Philly and then figuring out when to leave the morning of the tournament so that I get there in time for my division to start.  Generally there is no trouble other than waking up very early in the morning to compete in the very first division of the day (which is usually blue belt adult rooster weight). 

Living in California certainly seems great to me, though I suspect the travel is equally as difficult for the competitors living on the west coast that want to compete on the east coast – luckily for them, most of the major tournaments such as the IBJJF Worlds, Nationals, Pan Ams, No-Gi Worlds, and a few big “International Open” events are all hosted in the southern California region or within reasonable driving distance of it.  The only major tournaments on the east coast are No-Gi Pan Ams…and perhaps the New York Open, which happens to draw a lot of competitors due to its importance as being one of the only major gi tournaments in the northeast that is easily accessible by people in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Boston alike.  Is this unfair to east coast competitors that we must deal with the travel expenses and difficulties more so than west coast competitors at the highest level of competition?  It’s worth a thought.  Perhaps the IBJJF could consider moving worlds or Pan Ams around between New York City and Los Angeles each year…there may be a lot of schools in Southern California, but there certainly aren’t a lack of schools in the Mid-Atlantic, and there are a whole lot of good wrestlers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Am I the only one that thinks this way?  Perhaps I’ll think differently after a good night’s sleep and a good day of training.

Tunnel Vision

I think everyone that practices Jiu-Jitsu, especially those that have been in the sport for more than a year or so, experiences some form of tunnel vision.  You practice a move and become obsessed with it – constantly refining a move until you know it inside and out, operating within a position that you know so well and continuing to develop it.  What happens when two people meet that have both practiced a position so much?  More often than not, there is some sort of stalemate.  Nothing can be done by one person that will trick the other person into giving up a submission or giving up control.  One person will not gain the advantage for more than a split second.  Of course this is the archetypal representation of such a situation – usually there is a slight difference in technical ability or a slight difference in who is fighting “better” on that particular day that the two hypothetical practitioners meet, and one ends up as the victor.  Has tunnel vision helped or hurt these practitioners?

Much of this above scenario was meant to highlight the concern that many people have over what many dub “footsies”, the somewhat common berimbolo/leg-lock game that people are practicing in tournaments today.  Some people are against it, some people are for it and of course some people remain indifferent.  I had a tough time deciding my position on it, and my conclusion is that I have no immediate conclusion on this game.  As someone who likes to think of himself as a well-rounded Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, I’d like to explain a bit of my development in the sport to help support my theory on why people choose to play this game.

I started off small – well, I stayed that way – in the art of Jiu-Jitsu.  As a small, weak player, I found it very difficult to keep my balance fighting not only my opponent, but also gravity.  My passing game was not horrible, but it wasn’t excellent.  My guard, however, is what developed first and continued to develop in a relatively streamlined way to help me fight against the biggest guys in the gym.  I had not wrestled previously and had a very under-developed takedown game, and in the few tournament matches I had done, I would typically pull guard unless the other guy pulled it first.

As of now, I’d say my passing game has improved quite dramatically and I am much more “even” than I used to be, but I imagine that in some alternate universe there is a Dean that never focused on his passing and continued to be a guard player – his guard is probably very developed compared to myself in reality and he must feel very confident there.  Knowing that there are indeed people out there that have spent the majority of their time improving their guards, having faced the same situation as I have when starting in Jiu Jitsu, it is a bit more understandable that two players may meet up that want to pull guard immediately.  They are most confident in their guards and prefer to play that game rather than take their chances playing their weaker game against someone that wants to be in their guard.  When the tournament is over and the person perhaps lost by an advantage (almost having their back taken in a berimbolo war), would this person choose to develop his ways of passing his opponents guard so that he can get to side control – one of his other undeveloped positions – or would he instead focus on filling the holes he has in his nearly perfect guard game?  When the opposition is so adept at one position and can shut down guard players and passers alike, it may be better to continue working on his weaknesses in his guard rather than letting his guard lag behind to develop his passing – which, at the end of the day, could be insufficient to beating this opponent the next time the two meet.  Being able to win sometimes means prioritizing one’s training time and becoming advanced enough at one thing to implement a winning strategy in a competition, and becoming the coveted master of all trades is often unrealistic – one instead often becomes the jack of all trades and master of none. 

This is how tunnel vision can often shape one’s Jiu-Jitsu career, and it may start before people even choose to become major competitors – it starts with what is being practiced early on in one’s career, what is being drilled and what the focus of training is on.  Practicing only one’s strengths in the gym may be satisfying, and it may feel good to know that one is the master of a certain position (for the sake of argument, we’ll stick with the berimbolo, but this applies to many other positions and moves), but if one never practices how to pass and is shut down in a double guard pull scenario where both players are fighting to take the back, it won’t even seem like an option to “work on passing” because “that’s not really my gameplan”.  It isn’t one’s gameplan because it was never practiced and never stressed early on in one’s development.  This is the same with takedowns – being able to take any person down works until this strategy is shut down by somebody stronger, or by someone that, in some way, is better at takedowns.  What happens when one is taken down by someone even better and is placed on his back where he is out of his element?  The person may try to get better at takedowns so that he is not taken down ever again, and it may work.  It also may not work, and he may end up having the second best takedown game in the world.  Having practiced to have a better guard may have been a better investment of focus and time in the past rather than practicing takedowns to an obsessive degree, which eventually created diminishing returns in the grand scheme of one’s whole Jiu-Jitsu game.

Simply regretting one’s gameplan isn’t the answer – training to overcome the deficiencies in one’s game, even if it means bruising the ego that you thought you didn’t have, might be the best decision to make in the long run.  In conclusion, it always depends on the situation and the fighter at hand, though I generally think that people should practice a well-rounded game from the start in order to avoid situations such as these where they believe they “cannot” or “should not” try to get better at some other aspect of Jiu-Jitsu because it doesn’t fit with their style.  That is not to knock the technicality of these practitioners, whatever the focus of their game may be, but more to play devil’s advocate and challenge their preconceived notions.