Steppin up - training '07

[stricker]

hey dan,

cheers, hope you had a good xmas as well mate... too much coriander, it's a concentration thing, more coriander meant relatively less lemongrass, galangal, chilli etc in the paste (handmade i'll have you know ). i've got a few things i want to achieve over this little break from work etc, one of them is learning to cook tasty (as opposed to purely functional) food. I did a tagliatele with dolchelatte and cream sauce last night that was super tasty...

laters, jon.

[stricker]

Ok now its (nearly) 2008 looks like this blog thread is coming to a close...

I called this "Steppin up" as i wanted to up my level of training from 3x a week hobbyist to 5-6 days a week, sometimes 2x a day more of a "amateur fighter" level, and i wanted to step up to the plate and compete.

Did I achieve that... well, yes and no... I think pretty much yes for the uninjured part of the year...

On the training level, i had a good few months of training hard six days a week, when i was doing the thai boxing mondays and fridays as well as the usual mma tues, weds, sats, and mma judo on thursdays. Man i miss that... Then, when extra muay thai got closed down, I added more little morning sessions, nothing great but just getting me moving in the a.m.... So, yeah i did achieve this goal.

Competing... well, I did my first amateur muay thai fight, that was awesome, learned so much from that one experience... I want more than anything to do more of them...

Also did my first, and second, submission wrestling tournament. They were fun, and again I learned a lot... The pressure of trying to win, and more importantly to not make any mistakes really changes things. Made me realise my ground game is more one dimensional than i thought it was.

Both my stand up and ground game have come on so much since then, most of it really is that mental thing, and just understanding what goes down and what the whole point of training is...

Looks like i'm now heading for a couple of months waiting around, then arthroscopic surgery, 3-6 months basic rehab, then another 3-6 months i'm gonna take to be in a GPP mode before getting back into competition mode.

My biggest aim actually is to be in shape for the amateur boxing season that starts in september '08. See how i can arrange training to do more am muay thai fights...

Meantime i'm learning escrima single stick while i'm one armed, hopefully doing more groundwork light 'learning' sessions, and learning a lot of stuff for the future...

Well i guess that wraps up 2007, cheers everyone who's helped me out and had a little chat here...