7.21.08 #70

Huntington Beach Ultimate Training Center

I was unsure of the training schedule when I got out to Huntington Beach, so I got the gym at 5ish or so and some huge guy was not overly friendly. He managed to muster only a handful of words, most of which consisted of "twenty dollars" after I paid my twenty dollars I was free to do whatever I wanted in this very nice facility. Sub wrestling, as the class was called, didn't start until 6pm. So I had an hour to kill. I watched some of the kick boxing class and watched a few guys do some striking near the boxing ring about 5:45 I got into where I thought the class was going to take place and started warming up. About 10 minutes after 6 I begin wondering is this place on GT time too? Only to find out the grappling class is going on in one of the cages on the other side of the gym. So I hurry in to class.

Class starts out a little different from how we do things, at first I was a bit unsure how to go through some of the moves. However, by the end of class I was enjoying myself. The instructor, Brady Fink, showed us one offensive move, then the defensive move. So we started out with a series of offensive moves first, jump the shoulders into shoulder lock, arm bar, then triangle. Then he showed us the triangle defense from there we ran oomoplata, the other person ran a jump over move, then we ran an ankle lock. After running through these moves we worked take downs. One guy stands in the middle and stays in until someone is able to take him down and maintain control on the ground in a strong position. I only did one takedown, I actually tried one of my judo throws, which didn't work too well, but I tried. Then we locked up and I tried for my guillotine, we wrestled around on the ground before I was able to secure half-guard from the bottom and in this case it was considered a loss because my opponent had top position. At this point, my cab driver was there to pick me up for dinner and I was running very late! Glad to be back from Cali though, I wish I would have had more time to train, but work kept me busy.