It's been a while.

I decided to come back to this after about 18 months because I've made the decision to go into a fairly intensive training regime to prepare for the upcoming Pan Pacific BJJ Championships being held a the end of November.


First, a quick update on how things have gone.


Not well would be the short answer. I missed all the goals, but for several good reasons.

First is a baby. Hector, who was born on 24 November last year. So many of my plans for the year were thrown out by just how massive a disruption a pregnancy and then a baby are.

Second is the unfortunate fact that I completely axed my knee in training in March last year, tearing my lateral cruciate ligament, hamstring tendon and the cartilage in the knee. I didn't realise that I'd done anything that bad at the time and it wasn't until a few weeks later when I made it even worse that the problems really set in. Turns out that being unable to even walk reliably isn't conducive to maintaining your goals for fitness and weight loss.


Cue depression, anxiety and chronic overeating as a coping mechanism. A wonderfully bad combination. It's only been in the past few months that I've felt that I have regained at least 80% function in the knee and can now reliably weight-bear on it and not instantly collapse when I jog or have other impacts on it.


For all that though, I still have had a few good achievements. I got one stripe in a grading in November last year. I've roughly maintained my weight at about 170 (certainly nothing to be proud of, but given some of the other circumstances I'll take what I can get). And in February I won Gold in my division at the Inter Gracie Oceania Competition hosted by Gracie Oceania in Sydney.

So, with the Pan Pacs coming up, I've decided that I might as well go back to the plan I had last year. I'll be putting up more details in the next few days and will be putting up daily updates as well. Lets just hope that no potential opponents read this.

If you are, then I have a totally awesome open guard and have no interest whatsoever in pursuing an arm triangle or kimura.