i should have nickmadrid.com up by monday…i hope

class started after lance gave the announcement that i know many of us were hoping for, he was splitting up the class into two groups so that we all will get more ring time. starting monday, one group will meet at the regular time of 10 until 12:30 and the other group will meet at 1 until 3:30. joe, patrick, andy, ross, brad, joel and myself will all be in the afternoon class. this group is the exact collection that i wanted and i’m very happy and excited about what will come of this.

anyways…we started class by running the ropes to “break a sweat,” and break a sweat i did. crisscrosses and drop downs will do that to you. after that we ran through our bumps. we then immediately moved into learning another new thing, the tackle off the ropes. we all got the pleasure of getting put into a headlock by chris, pushing him off toward the ropes, freeing ourselves of the headlock, and then getting tackled by the big aussie, slamming down to the mat. our next go around had us working together this time adding a drop down having the tackler running over us just to receive another tackle. fool me twice…

next up we started taking arm drags. first, we took them from the wrist and then we took them from the elbow (think barrel of monkeys). right before lance gave me my first arm drag, he lifted up my sleeve to see my tattoo. he looked, but did not say anything. chris, on the other hand complimented my arm a few days back and asked where i got the work done. after we took our bumps from the arm drags we began giving them to one another to close out the day. i threw my arm drags o.k. but lance said i need to get off my feet more. i was one of the last people to take a throw from someone and lance said, “nice bump, nick.” not a bad way to end a day at swa.

this weekend will be nice, ufc 103 @ hooters with the boys saturday night. i’m glad things are picking up as the first two weekends here sucked.

2 weeks down. 10 to go. the split will bring new opportunities as well as new challenges. now that the class is smaller, i have to push myself to stay on point with my group. everything i do will be under the microscope now that 15 has turned into 7.

i’m ready.

we started class about 15-20 minutes late today because we were talking all things wrestling with lance. linda mcmahon’s senate campaign, ribs (practical jokes), the wellness policy, and why certain people got fired. having the opportunity to pick the brain of lance storm is a great and often entertaining perk to training at swa.

there really isn’t much to report about today. it was essentially a review day to evaluate where everyone is and to try to get those that are falling behind, for one reason or another, up to speed with where we all need to be to continue to make safe progress.

my roommate informed me this evening as i was making dinner that lance e-mailed us and is thinking about splitting up the class into two groups. fewer people = more time for drills = happy nick. but, the downside of this is i don’t know if we will get to choose who is in what group. i want to train with the best in our class so that we can keep moving forward and push each other to learn and get better. i guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

i think today was a real eye opener for the people that are really struggling. i know personally, i need to work on my chain wrestling (as i mentioned before i see that as my weakest point thus far). i just have to work on some little things and i plan to review over the weekend. i must RELAX like frankie says.

day 10 tomorrow. almost 2 weeks down…crazy.