Spring Retrospective

April was a weird month and May is shaping up to be also. Due to some medical outages I haven’t gotten to train as much as I’d have liked.

The big news: we’ve changed affiliations; we’re planning a trip out to the new affiliation head after I get my second round vaccine; we found a new gym location; we’re targeting late May to reopen the gym at the new location under the new affiliation; we’re going to require vaccines because navigating the county order without them is confusing.

The order has different provisions for gyms with group fitness classes than sports, but the sports section is under “Youth Activities” so it’s messy to determine which set of rules applies to us. There is, however, a provision about circumstances where everyone is vaccinated which effectively lets us just ignore the whole deal. On one hand that pretty well ties our hands to avoid having to navigate a precarious situation with the county health department. On the other hand it’s what we would have wanted anyway, potentially with exemptions for individuals who can show proof of positive antibody test for a case that was known to have happened within the last 8 months.

I’m super excited about the new affiliation. I think it will be really good for us. Chris and Melissa have already been super responsive and welcoming. We’ll be making the trip out to LA to get some training and evaluation in with them – figure out where we’re at and what the relationship should look like moving forward. Having an affiliate head you actively want to get dinner and chat with is, to me, invaluable. That’s the kind of relationship I want; where we can just rant and discuss jiu-jitsu and get ideas about how to improve and learn from someone who’s been doing it longer.

Progress stuff – I feel like I’m on a plateau lately. A big part of the reason I’m so excited to go to LA is to get some new perspective on what’s going well and what’s not so I can try to change things up as appropriate. Hopefully we’ll be able to open the gym a couple of weeks before that so I can do some debugging with other folks outside the pod in advance, but we’ll see how the next two weeks go. Personally, I’m ready and raring to get back into teaching classes and rolling with more people (who have been appropriately vaccinated). My second shot is next week so per the order I should be okay to join the larger group at that point. From a practical standpoint, I’ll be two weeks out from the shot at the end of May, but am still testing antibody positive in my regular blood donations (last result from April 25, next scheduled draw on May 23).

I gave blue his fourth stripe on his belt. He’s been ready for awhile; I just felt weird about it until I saw that he’s been a blue belt for four years already. The black belts approved of it too, so everything is kosher.