This year I spent slightly less time at the gym than in 2013. I still wound up with 294.5 hours at the gym between BJJ, conditioning and a handful of Judo classes. I also competed in a couple tournaments. I got 3rd in Circle of Iron and 3rd in no-gi at a tournament in Kansas City. Also, for the first time, I placed at our in-house tournament, getting 3rd there as well (seems to be a theme for the year.) I think my favorite tournament was our second in-house tournament. It was submission only, and it was scored a bit like the World Cup. A win was 3 points, a draw was 1 point and a loss was no points. I ended up winning one match and drawing my other 4.
In addition to competing in a tournament, I had the privilege of helping referee a tournament as well. That was fun, and surprisingly no parents yelled at me, and thankfully no kids got hurt.
The biggest accomplishment this year was getting my blue belt. I wrote a rather long post about that, so I won’t rehash it. I will say, however, that here almost 3 months later, seeing a blue belt in my gym bag still makes me proud and makes me smile from time to time.
For 2015, I’ve already signed up to compete at my first tournament as a blue belt. I’ll be at Circle of Iron in Omaha on February 1st. I’d like to do some more tournaments again this year, but we’ll see how my schedule works out.
Over all, here’s what my tracker said I did this year.
The bulk of my time was spent in gi technique (77.5 hours) just barely beating out gi sparring (76 hours.) Open mat came in 3rd and that’s a lot of sparring, probably 70% gi, 30% no-gi. Overall, gi & no-gi, it’s over 100 hours of technique and another 100+ hours of sparring. As you can see here, I really slacked off on my conditioning, averaging less than 1 day a week for the year.