Sorry for taking so long to get this posted… this last week has just been hell.

I have thought an awful lot about how to do a review o the Tourney, and have decided to really do it in three parts… The first is a review of a what a Tournament really is, from the perspective fo a first timer…  Then I’ll post a bit about the matches, and finally, a bit on a specific move: The Makikomi.

On to an overview of tournaments then

1: Standing over ground-fighting

The first thing that was really surprising about a tournament was how quick they are o stand people up.  there was really very little ground fighting.  If you look back over my historical blog posts you’ll see that I talk a fair amount about the level of my cardio.  Watching the action at the tournament it seemed that cardio was almost always of very little issue.  Very, very few of the matches went the full 3 or 5 minutes (depending on age group.)

Most matches seemed to take far less than a minute.  The was a bit of struggling, someone got thrown, and it was over.  If the throw was not clean enough, there was a little scramble on the ground, they stood up, and they tried again.

Although some of the matches did go the limit, and some ended in a pin, it was definitely the exception, not the rule.

2-Don’t psych yourself out

There are two people that I was afraid I might face at the tournament: Randy (a Jujitsu guy), and Jeff (another Jujitsu guy.)  I have sparred a bit with both of them, and was pretty worried about it going into the competition.

My first match was against a person that I didn’t even know.  I had no fears and no assumptions going into the fight.  He was really pretty darned good (you’ll see more about that in my post after this one, about our specific matches.)  I won that match.

My second match was against Randy.  Don’t get me wrong, Randy is hella-good, and may well have beat me anyway, but I really feel like I psyched myself out.  There were several things in the patch that I know for sure that I would have done differently against anyone else, but I did what I did because I wanted to be so careful against a Jujitsu guy like Randy.

I may well have lost to Randy anyway, but next time I have decided that I would rather lose soundly, and know that I did than lose and wonder if it was due to me or due to him.  That’s worse than getting beat.

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