2023 Class 3

The absence of my beard felt like a cool breeze on a summer day - an unexpected relief, making everything somewhat simpler. Warmups, you see, are a bit like a dance, except in this dance, I only knew two steps. I shuffled through them repeatedly, a perpetual loop of my limited repertoire. There's plenty of time allocated for warmups, which suggests there might be a few more steps to this dance that I'm yet to learn. As a result, I sometimes found myself standing around, a momentary statue amidst the whirlwind of activity. Still, every cloud, as they say - it did afford me the chance to snatch a few breaths and ponder the mysteries of the universe, like why I'd taken up a hobby that involved so much sweating.

We revisited our old friends, the chokes, from last class. Familiar faces in an otherwise foreign land. Each repetition was a little bit more refined, a touch more polished. Like sanding down a piece of driftwood, the edges were slowly being smoothed.

The finale involved three-minute stints in each position, aiming for the collar choke or the kimura, while our training partners did their best Houdini impressions, wriggling out of our underhooks. It was like trying to catch an eel with a pair of chopsticks. Neither of us managed to claim a victory, or a 'tap out' as they say in the trade.

But amongst the sweat and the struggle, I discovered something. The attack wasn't as scary as it seemed. Like a shadow in a dark room, it lost some of its menace once you'd stared at it long enough. I found I could conserve some energy, retreat from the all-out assault I'd previously favored. My current approach was roughly 90% brute force, 10% primal instinct, and an optimism of an over-ambitious lottery player. Still, I was eagerly awaiting the day when I could sprinkle in a dash of skill to the mix - just 10% to start, mind you. A little goes a long way, after all.

Keep your shell hard and your roll steady. Oss, turtles!