Third time is a charm?
This weekend was my third tournament. Finally time for me to win a match right? I mean afterall, I’m now a two-stripe white belt! With more tournament experience than most of the other white belts at my gym. Well, it didn’t quite work out.
No Limits hosted a tournament and the turn out was pretty good. With most of my training focusing on the gi lately I opted to not compete in the no-gi division.
My first match was against a fellow white belt who pulled a great throw on me right off the bat. I hit my head on the way down and literally blacked out. The next thing I remembered was him with his knee on my belly scoring points then transitioning to mount and pulling out an armbar. I later found out from one of his training partners that he is a Judo brown belt. I don’t know if that’s considered sandbagging or not but he definitely had an advantage with the takedowns.
After that, I had to go up against one of my training partners. I pulled guard on him (my favorite. Ok, more like the only thing I am comfortable with. He managed to sweep me into full mount. I used my favorite sweep to end up in his guard, rather than full mount (I’ll post about that soon, it really works out well for me and I seem to be able to pull it off very easily against most people). During the sweep though, he managed to get ahold of a gi choke that I couldn’t get out of.
For the rest of the day I filmed some of my training partners in their match. Since we had our belt promotion the day before, many of our members were competing at a higher belt level for the first time. I think it showed as overall, the recently promoted guys didn’t do all that well. That’s ok though, everybody seemed to have fun and it was even the first tournament for quite a few of us.
The major downer for me was that I received a mild concussion from that throw. For the rest of the day my head was pounding and I was extremely dizzy. I got home around 7pm and passed out for over 12 hours. Not a good idea!
So needless to say, I’m going to be focusing on keeping that chin tucked when going down to the ground! I’m usually good at it when pulling guard or with any of my takedowns, but getting thrown like that totally caught me off guard.
After three tournaments, my record is a lopsided 0-7. If you’ve been reading this blog though, you know I don’t take it too seriously. I love training, but I never expected to be competing like this when I started out so it’s really just for fun. Win or lose, have fun. Right?
