I'm Mr. Blue!

Got my blue belt after Wednesday's randori.

Awesome! :)

Amal asked me to roll for a few during the Wednesday randori (just to test me out a little bit I suppose), then at the end of class, he called Ross (a yellow belt) up. Ross got his orange belt and I got my blue. Not that getting a colored belt is why I'm training, but it -is- nice to feel like others feel like your knowledge and skill are progressing according to plan. It certainly made me reflect on how much training I've done and how far I've come.

It's been a long road so far and a lot of work. I started all this on April 19, 2006 (when I started I could barely do the warm-up); I guess it's been just under 1 year of spending about 5 hours a week (on average) training. Many times it was 6 hours a week, some weeks I've done 7, and I think one week when I had a lot of spare time and was between jobs where I went 9 hours. For the first 4 months, I probably only went about 2 hours a week. I started running almost every day and lost about 40 lbs., mainly motivated by a desire to really be in shape for BJJ and not be a tub when it came time to roll. After I got my 2nd stripe or so, it sort of started getting more and more addictive. When I got my third stripe, it stepped up again. I felt like I should go to at least to one blue belt class to continue to work on fundamentals (but often I went to both the A and B blue belt classes), both purple belt classes, and both weekly randoris. I bet I've spent over 200 hours of training in the last 11 months and could probably count on one hand the total number of weeks I've gone without training -at all- (most of those were weeks I was traveling outside of Colorado).

Anyway. What a great way to end a Wednesday!