One other thing, because I know my mom will worry...

Don't worry, Mom!

:)

Love to you and Dad.

Too sleepy to think of a title

Was just dinking around on google (looking up some song lyrics) and this blog post from someone named Jezza came up randomly:

"today i pledge to take responsibility for my life and for what makes me happy. it may sound simple but it's a task that requires unwaivering committment. i get one shot at life and i'm going to give it my all."

It was Jezza's birthday that day. Happy birthday to Jezza and thanks for the reminder about living life vigilantly to ensure it's everything you want it to be, not to mention the fact that it's sometimes difficult. (Is it wrong that I wanted to correct her spelling on "waivering?" The way she spelled it has a different meaning, assuming the gerund form is actually a word.)

(And yes. I noticed "committment" too. I just didn't want to be totally jerky. I'll let the lack of caps slide, though I don't know what e. e. cummings would say.)

Fittingly, I'm eating cake, left over from Carla, Tristan, and Lisa's birthdays (Carla, Tristan, and Lisa are all my co-workers at the store. Well, Carla owns the place with Gilberto), which were all this past weekend. Happy birthday to all of them! Nope, it's not a cheat day. So since the cake is full o' carbs, I'm eating a bunch of beef jerky with it so I can stay in the Zone, and maybe enjoy the cake but not feel all addicted to the sugar. Strange combo, but no stranger than 6 slices of turkey, an apple, a handful of broccoli and 3 olives.

Okay, maybe a tiny bit stranger. But I wanted cake. As Danny noted, it is happiness flavored. It's one of those grocery store cakes that has all kinds of artificial ingredients, a crapload of icing, and little pieces of Snickers as decoration. Come on. How could I not have cake? (And beef jerky?)

Plus, it's Halloween. Ron and Danny are dressed like gladiators. Lisa is dressed like a pirate. I am dressed like the buzzkill that I am--it didn't even occur to me to find a costume. But I took pictures of them--them and Tristan's python Balthazar, which they fed some mice today--and they said I could post them. So I'll do that eventually.

I've been kind of sleepy and out of it lately. I'm training and doing CrossFit as much as ever, which means getting up at 5:30am on M, W, and F, and staying on the mat as late as 10pm some nights. But add to that the fact that I have started to teach my online courses (one on program evaluation and one on writing for research) and will be picking up a consulting project this week, and you have a busy, sleepy me. It's just hectic because my learning curve for the courses is steep and the deadline for the consulting gig is only about 6 weeks away.

But Val needs some money, and is pretty fortunate she can make a decent amount and STILL have a flexible enough schedule to train and CrossFit whenever she wants. It just means I'm (yeah, enough with the 3rd person) tabling some other stuff for now: namely, deciding where to live, doing anything re: the dating scene, and sleeping enough. Oh, and competing. The California Classic is this weekend and I was thinking about jumping in. But it's not gonna happen. I'll go and cheer Jimmy on if he competes, but I kept meaning to register and not doing it, and nowadays when something like that happens, I definitely take it as a sign that I'm not interested or supposed to pursue it. So, no competing for me at the moment.

One fun BJJ development is that I have started to train a little with Cristian, a brown belt under Johnny/John/Rodrigo who recently moved back to LA from AZ. He's such a fun training partner, and he's connected to some other BJJ devotees in this area that I don't know. So I got to train with him and his friend Ray over the weekend, and am hoping to train with them this week too. We did a round robin, where two people would roll for 3 minutes and the 3rd person would rotate in. It was great to just roll. What fun!

I think my teaching is getting a little better too. One of the students commented that I am definitely gaining confidence, which I can see for sure. Part of it is that we're going through the curriculum for a second time, and part of it is that I'm finally allowing myself to believe that I actually do know a thing or two about jiu jitsu. So that's a nice place to be. I also got a compliment from a female jiu jitsu player I know: She said that if it weren't for me, she probably wouldn't have continued to train. That made me feel really good!

In other news, apparently the gold medalists from the US grappling team that went to Turkey are on the cover of USA Wrestler magazine. So that means me. I know the picture too--it's on themat.com, and Darren has it on his myspace page. I look bad. But I still want a copy. I haven't received one yet, even though I am a card-carrying member of USA Wrestling. What's up with that? I'd better call them. Don't they know who I am?

Buncha pics VI: More Turkey pics

Speaking of pictures, here are some more of the ones I keep meaning to post, dating all the way back to Turkey, still. I've been remiss. Yikes.

The whole gang drinking tea, singing Turkish songs, and making the tourista laugh.

Cut to competition eve, when we weighed in. You might remember that there ended up being no room for us at the hotel/compound near the competition venue. So we stayed closer to the beach. For the weigh-in, we went to this other hotel and go t to see what the other countries' digs were like. Some people, including Darren and Lisa, had to cut a significant amount of weight, so we were a little worried about them. They were fine, eventually, but it took a lot out of them.

Here's Darren looking verrrry ready to weigh in and Sanchez looking like Sanchez. We were all wearing our competition garb.

Tara and Felicia:

Midget and Bahar:

Malcolm entering the fray:

Me, in all my finery with some pretty scenery in the background:

The ladies of Team USA: Tara, Midget, Crystina, Lisa, me, Felicia, Bahar

Me and Jeff Monson (Ultimate Fighting Championships veteran). BTW, less than a week before this competition, Jeff had lost a hard-fought MMA competition via TKO against Pedro Rizzo in Texas. Then he flew to Turkey to participate in this competition. He's a badass and a cool dude. I'm lucky I got a chance to get to know him a little bit.

Me and IFL (International Fight League) fighter Matt Horwich.

Jeff and Jason:

Felicia, Coach Bob, and me:

Me with Midget, my jiu jitsu daughter.

Bill the Grill and me:

Me on the scale. I look like a sausage in that rash guard.

The ladies of Team USA, on the bus after the weigh-in. You can't hear it in this picture (because pictures don't have sound), but we were loud and even raucous.

Me and my friend/teacher Gamze in the buffet room after the weigh-in. I mentioned, I think, that Gamze was the captain of the Turkish women's Olympic judo team by the time she was 15. I met her and got to learn from her in Chicago. And she flew in from Istanbul to watch me compete and show us around! I have some pics of that too, but I'm tired of posting.

Another day, another "controversy"

I'm getting flak--and curiosity--from people for my post about being cranky that one week when white belts were telling me what to do. Flash, a blue belt I drilled with the other day, gave me crap about it; when we were working on a technique and I asked him whether it felt solid when I did it, he said, "Well, I'm not gonna be like one of those white belts who pissed you off, but it felt fine." And then we called each other names and I punched him on the arm, so I THINK he has stopped thinking I'm a belt snob. (For the record, I love Flash. He's a smartass, like me, so we get along fine. At least, I think we do. :) Other people just wanted to know what had happened to make me feel that way.

I guess I can't worry about it anymore. That week I felt the way I felt, and I wrote about it, as usual. I know I'm a fairly mellow training partner, as training partners go, and my past and future actions will confirm that--or not.

In other news, I have started working for a living. I started teaching two online courses, one in writing for research and one in program evaluation. And I'm probably going to do a consulting project for my old friend Lacey. She and I worked for the same dot-com in Chicago circa 2000. So far things are going okay, but this working is really infringing on my watching-daytime-TV regimen, especially now that I'm back to training at least every day if not twice a day.

Speaking of which, training this week has been fine. I trained with a visiting female blue belt named Lisa today. She's in from Maui, where she trains at her boyfriend's academy. She's a friend of Ouano's. It was fun to train with her! Speaking of Ouano, he worked me today and thoroughly enjoyed doing it. I got frustrated, but then I got over it. And rolling with Brian is always fun, and I got to roll with him today too.

I did a really crazy CrossFit workout yesterday called the Murph. The workout is named after a Navy SEAL named Michael Murphy, who was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor this week. Here's the workout, for time:

1 mile run
100 pull-ups
200 push-ups
300 squats
1 mile run

If you want, you can batch things, so you can do 10 sets of 10 pull-ups, 200 push-ups and 30 squats, for instance. I thought about doing that, because psychologically, the idea of doing hundreds of the same thing in a row is challenging, but then when I started with the pull-ups, they seemed to be going okay. So I thought, well, maybe I'll get to 50 pull-ups and then I can do things in two batches. But then I decided that I had made it to 50 pull-ups, so then it was downhill from there. And even if it took me a really long time, I didn't have anyplace to be for a couple hours, so why not try it as written? And I'll be damned if I didn't do just that. I'm back to remedial squats and I did the push-ups on my knees, but I did the workout as written.

Of course, I ran the second mile as I imagine a pigeon would run a mile, which is to say: with very short strides and, well, um, pigeon-toes.

And since I did the workout as written, I get to be on the board! There weren't any women on the board before Becca and I did it yesterday, and so as long as I finished, I would make it. Becca did it in 54 minutes, I think, and I did it in 1:02:23, or so. I'll take pictures of it when it goes up!

Aside to Letmbleed

Irregardless of the fact that you didnt like my speling of the word "discomfited," you and Steve72 can goe too hel.

Aside to Steve72

Discomfited

Friggin' lawyers.

Grab bag of thoughts

First, I forgot to mention that on Thursday, on my flight from LAX to Phoenix en route to Albuquerque, Mike Tyson was sitting in the row in front of me. In coach. I wasn't sure until he turned his head and there was the tell-tale tribal tattoo on the left side of his face. He is shorter than I had imagined; when you see footage of him biting Evander Hollyfield's ear, he looks pretty damn big.

He was very pleasant, and the people around him were intrigued and happy to talk to him, though also obviously discomfited. He had an entourage of two, a shorter man and a taller red-haired woman. The first thing everyone I told about it wanted to know was, "He was in economy??" Yep.

Second, the forest fires here in southern California are crazy. Apparently a lot of San Diego has been evacuated, and there are lots of highway closings and admonitions to stay indoors and not exert oneself too much. I send my best wishes to everyone who is being affected.

Third, I'll be damned if I didn't do some legitimate squats today at Petranek. Cill, the teacher, had me hold a 10-lb dumbbell in front of me for counterbalance, and it worked! I even hit the medicine ball with my keister, while keeping all the weight in my heels and my chest up, which is something I seriously could only dream about doing 5 months ago. She even got a picture of me, so I'll see if I can get my hands on it. Petranek Fitness rules! I'm grateful to them. The only drawback is that now they're going to make me squat correctly all the time.

I have a pink gi. I never thought I'd say that.

Ouano made some prototype pink gis for me and Monica, a blue belt at New Breed. It was really sweet of him. I'm not sure how I feel about it, mostly because I do everything I can NOT to draw attention to myself or my jiu jitsu. Rick likes to say that you shouldn't wear a crazy colored gi unless your jiu jitsu's worth watchin'.



Especially a gi with angel wings and a halo.

But John is happy with it, as you can see. The thing that really bothers me is that my purple belt clashes with it. I'm thinking I should just go back to my white belt. White goes with everything.

BTW, here is my picture with Barata! I had such a great time training with him. If you are ever in Albuquerque, go visit.

Really briefly...

Had an AMAZING open mat session (gi) yesterday with Barata at Albuquerque BJJ. He's about my size, and he let me play, and he had some really good suggestions for me when I'm in open guard. I tend to just press forward rather than stepping back and even standing up to disentangle my legs from the de la Riva guard. That leaves me vulnerable to being swept, because I'm leaving space for him to thread his legs through. So he let me practice standing up and backing away.

And then he'd sweep me anyway. But it was terrific. I'm also happy about my cardio, because I felt fine, and it wasn't until after we were done that I remembered we're at 6000 feet here in ABQ.

Oh, and I got a picture with Barata. I'll post it soon (promises, promises). He's an excellent teacher and a really terrific guy. Thanks to him and Don! And to Tammy. I didn't get to train with her yesterday, but I did on Friday. She's doing great.

Starting to teach one of my online courses tomorrow (the other one starts on Thurs). Went for a hike today in the gorgeous Manzano mountains. Getting up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to fly back to LA in time to get to the store by 11. Better get a little sleep.

Training in Albuquerque

Uh, I can distinguish between San Diego and Los Angeles. Whichever Anonymous said that Alberto Crane is living in Glendale happens to be correct, I believe. I have only met Alberto once or twice, but I'm pretty sure he's in Glendale now, teaching with Wander Braga. And Glendale is Los Angeles.

Anyway, I trained at his old academy today. Don Ortega, one of my Turkey teammates, and world champion in his weight class, runs the academy now. He has two black belts teaching there, including Barata (which means "cockroach"), who taught the class tonight. No gi.

It was great. He showed a slick transition from having your opponent in your guard to taking your opponent's back while s/he is turtled. It involves lots of momentum using your free leg and lots of getting up on one shoulder and back-dooring. I'm not so good at that stuff, but I want to practice it now. He also showed another slick move, a mounted triangle that you set up from side control.

And then I got to roll with him, as well as a student named Santino and also Tammy, whom I've competed against. It was a lot of fun! I asked Barata if he had any suggestions and he said no, that I did everything "perfectly." (I must have slipped him a twenty or something).

Turns out too that Ana Laura Cordeiro is his student. Ana Laura is the purple belt who triangled me at the Mundial. She is now a brown belt. Congrats to her! It's a small world.

Unfortunately, I did not get to meet Tussa, the other instructor. According to Barata, "tussa" means "big teeth." Well, "dentetussa" means "big teeth," but over time they shortened Tussa's nickname to Tussa. He is headed to Santa Cruz for the U.S. Open. A bunch of New Breed students are going there too. Knowing them and Johnny, they'll probably leave around 3 am and get there in the morning just before weigh-ins. I'll have to check in and see how they're doing.

Anyway, it's great to be in ABQ. Adamarie and I are going to go to 4th of July Canyon tomorrow for a hike. The weather's supposed to be spectacular. I'll TRY to remember to take pics. It's like I have a mental block against it now.

I forgot to take any pictures. I'm kind of out of that mode these days. I get all shy if I do remember, and more often than not, I don't remember. I think I'm just still working on posting all the Turkey pics. But if I go back tomorrow for the gi open mat in the morning, I'll be sure to take some pics.

In Albuquerque

Just arrived here to visit my friend Adamarie and get a change of scenery. I'll also train tomorrow with Don, my teammate from Turkey and the person who took over Alberto Crane's academy here when Alberto moved out to LA. Looking forward to that!

And the most important thing is that Mike Tyson was on my flight from LA to Phoenix! Sitting in the row right in front of me. In coach. He's very imposing, though not very tall. Enormous noggin. And that tell-tale tribal tattoo on his face.

This week has been fine. Not much to report: working at the store, training, getting ready to teach education courses online. Haven't been getting a lot of sleep because I keep getting up at 5:30 to make it to CrossFit in time for the 7am class. So the first item on my agenda tonight is sleeping a LOT.

A new attitude. (Well, my usual attitude is back.)

Okay, my attitude is much better. At least, it was before this latest cheat meal. We’ll see how things go tomorrow, after my movie popcorn (Michael Clayton—good movie), Winchell’s donut, Ben & Jerry’s, and power bars. Right now I feel fine; just full and a little headachy. And almost relieved that I don’t have to have another cheat meal for another week. Weird. I still like to like all those “forbidden” foods, and getting over that psychological tic will take a little doing.

I got a lot of comments this week from people about my attitude toward white belts and advice, including some that made me think people misunderstood me. Guess it’s a function of my rhetorical limitations. So to those readers who think *I* think I’m too good to take suggestions from people with lower ranks than mine, read again. I was prickly this past week about that, but that was only this past week.

Anyway, on to other things. I’m pleasantly surprised at how excited I am about grappling again. Well, I’m not surprised about being excited about grappling again. The week off was exactly what I needed, obviously. But I’m pleasantly surprised that I still feel that way after how I taught on Wednesday. I screwed up some details on the takedown, which is particularly irritating because it’s a takedown I worked on at the training camp in Irvine before the Turkey competition. So you’d think I would know it by now. Not so much. This is why teaching jiu jitsu is so stressful to me. I don’t want to misguide anybody, and sometimes I do, apparently.

The rest of the week was good, though. Got in a lot of good sparring on Thurs eve, and then Friday Johnny, Vince, Vera and I paid a visit to Kahlil, Jason, and David at Roger Machado’s academy. Kahlil had asked me to come by and train with his teammate Jessica, who is getting ready for the US Open in Santa Cruz, one of the longest-running tournaments in California. It was fun! I was able to start working on some of the latest techniques Johnny has been showing us, including an armbar setup/sweep combination from the guard and a defense to the collar choke from the back. It's always fun to roll with Johnny and Kahlil, and Jessica is tough too. Good luck to all of them at the tourney this weekend! (I'll be in Albuquerque visiting Adamarie and training at Albuquerque BJJ, which my Turkey teammate Don is running now that his instructor Alberto Crane has moved out here to LA).

Friday morning was a banner day for me CrossFit-wise, too. I wrote about how on Monday the workout included 100 pullups and I couldn’t make myself do them without one of those giant rubber bands. Well, I got a chance to redeem myself on Fri, when I did 65 unassisted pullups. So I’m pretty excited about that, especially because when I first started CrossFit, I couldn’t do a single unassisted pullup. So this stuff really works.

I also heard that Eric Burdo got his black belt from Rodrigo Medeiros in Vermont on Saturday! Eric runs an academy in Richmond, VA. Congratulations to you, Eric!!

And Heather Reese got her purple belt from the Migliarese brothers at Team Balance in Philly. Congrats to you too, Heather!

AND, happy birthday to Darren tomorrow! He’s an old man in his late 20s now, I think. Jeez, these friggin’ babies I hang out with.

Another thing: October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. There are big pink ribbons hanging on telephone poles and things in Santa Fe Springs in honor of it, and it reminds me of the ordeal my mother went through last summer. So I’m grateful that she is healthy and cancer-free, that my dad was there with unflagging support, and that I’ll be with them at Thanksgiving. We’ll have lots to be thankful for.

Tomorrow it’s more CrossFit (I hope I’m not too draggy), working at the store, helping teach the beginner class, and no gi. I also have to get ready to start teaching my online education courses. I have a couple teleconferences on Tuesday. It's gonna be a busy week. So I should think about getting to sleep soon so I can get up at 5:30. I know it sounds crazy, but I kind of like getting up to do CrossFit. There's the whole not very much sleep thing, but I like the routine: listen to Kevin and Bean on the radio, do the workout, hang out at a bagel place near the store for a bit before heading to work.

Ugh. My stomach hurts. Too much cheat meal.

Buncha pics V: More Turkey

Here's more in my continuing attempts to post all my pictures, from Turkey and beyond.

Here's Felicia, Bill, Bruce (Bahar's coach), Bahar, and Matt eating--yet again--at the buffet.

Bahar with her napkin cootie-catcher. Remember those?

Freaky-deaky mannequin. There's something not quite right about those eyes.

Beach wrestling: Bryce vs. Jeff. I think Jeff won, but I don't know for sure.

Don watching beach wrestling, and probably the scantily-clad ladies.

Jeff chatting with Lisa, who was cutting weight. That teeny girl had to cut 10 lbs. And she did it, successfully.

Bill trying his hand at beach volleyball.

Ramon in the camouflage shorts.

Felicia flashing the V-Dub sign and sporting her new hat with Turkish words on it that we don't understand.

Bahar rockin' her Turkish words hat too.

Crystina and Tara.

Jeff getting ready to compete.

Pretty view from the beach wrestling stands.

A whole buncha people after the beach wrestling competition is over. I'm wearing the sunglasses they gave us at the North American Trials in Las Vegas. I didn't realize until I saw this picture that they make me look like an insect. I still wear them.

Felicia and me with our Turkish friends. We shopped at their souvenir store and then on our way back to the hotel, they invited us to have tea with them. You drink the tea out of a glass with a handle and put a sugar cube between your teeth to sweeten it.

I got rhythm. Oh, and look at all the evil eyes over my left shoulder.

Time for an attitude adjustment

Okay, so maybe it wasn't the cheat meal that made me cranky, seeing as how I still am. Taking some time off from training has messed not only with my timing, but also with my attitude. The past couple days I have found myself bristling when white belts give me suggestions or correct my technique. Normally this doesn't bother me, because if the suggestions are good ones, then I can use them, and if the suggestions are bad ones, then I can just chalk it up to an ego issue, but I think this time the ego issue is mine. I can tell I'm a little rusty, and it's making me defensive. So I'm not being what I like to think is my usual relaxed, even beatific (okay, that's going overboard) self.

You can argue that white belts shouldn't be giving purple belts suggestions anyway, and when I was a white belt, I would never have dared to do that. I still am very careful about how I point out to a purple or brown belt details they might be omitting based on what the instructor has said. But I find that a surprising number of white belts try to correct the technique of higher belts, across all the academies I have visited. I still haven't figured out whether it's a gender thing, ie, men thinking they know more than I do simply because they are men and I am a woman, though that is probably part of it.

Anyway, right or wrong, that stuff happens. And normally I can just laugh it off and use the suggestions if they are useful. Because I do forget details sometimes and sometimes the reminders are helpful. But yesterday and the day before it has pissed me off a lot. I've known some people who have actually pulled rank, and said things like, "What color is your belt? And what color is mine? So why do you think you can tell me how to do a technique?" Etc. I have never done that and never will, because I've often thought that that says more about the person pulling rank than the lower-ranking belt. But I need to adjust my attitude, because I could feel myself being hostile and defensive without even saying anything.

So I'll work on that, and I'll start by expressing gratitude for some things, including:

1. The people I get to train with. When I allow myself to, I learn from each and every one of them.

2. My car. I have been feeling very sentimental about it lately; we've been through a lot together and it's still so reliable and trusty. It's like my Silver or my Hidalgo. That's kind of an apt comparison, because over the weekend when I was headed to my apartment and fumbling for my keys, I must have pressed the button that locks the car, because the car, which was parked nearby, beeped. I know it was me pressing the button, but since I didn't mean to press the button, it was like the car was whinnying at my approach. I love my car.

3. Andy said my squats are getting better. So I think they have officially graduated from "abysmal" to "horrible." I can feel that they are getting better, and that's really cool!

4. I have so many great opportunities to make a living without having to work a 9 to 5 job. I will be starting as an instructor of some online education courses in about 2 weeks, I have been editing a BJJ technique book, I still work at the store, and I'm going to talk to a former colleague about a possible consulting gig.

5. My family and friends, of course, for obvious reasons. They love me without reservation, and sometimes they give me presents!

6. Cheat meals, my recent food coma notwithstanding. This weekend I think I'll have chocolate chip cookies and maybe half a dozen bagels with chive cream cheese.

Okay, that's better already.

Here's what we did for your donations!

This is a video montage of the Fight Gone Bad fundraiser. I'm not in it, but you can see a lot of the people I work out with, including my teachers Andy and Dawn, and my fellow 7am classmate Chris.

Thank you again to everyone for your support! We're all still riding the afterglow of what an amazing event it was.

http://www.youtube.com/athletesforacure

My cheat meal made me cry

My jiu jitsu pal Greg is asking for help in getting new lights for a sports field in Danbury, CT, where his daughters go to school. It doesn't cost anything; just go here http://www.newfridaynightlights.com/ and vote for Danbury. Good luck, Greg!

About my cheat meal. I think it did make me cry. Here's the deal. After 2 weeks on the Zone diet, I gave myself a cheat meal yesterday. A cheat meal is anything you want to eat, no measuring, no ensuring the proper proportion of carbs to fat to protein, just pure hedonism. Of course, you can't make a cheat meal extend into a cheat day/week/month, but I guess the idea is that if you don't give yourself a little break every now and then from the measuring, chopping, and calculating (and, in my case, the monotony of the 5-6 protein sources that work best for me), you run the risk of leaving the lifestyle completely. (Am thinking about it as a lifestyle as opposed to a diet.)

So I debated for a long time about what my cheat meal should be. Asked friends. Thought about it a lot. (Yes, it sounds obsessive. I can only say that I'm not obsessive the way I used to be about food as a teenager; I'm just new to this so it takes more of my brain power than it probably will down the road). And then, funnily enough, when it was time to decide, I froze. Couldn't really think of anything "cheat-y" enough. So I went for a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate cake. And topped it off with some peanut butter M&Ms.

I have to say, what people tell you will happen, and what I didn't really believe would happen, has actually started to happen: it tasted good, but it didn't bowl me over with its deliciousness, as I had been expecting. And I think part of the reason it tasted as good as it did is because I was pretty hungry. So maybe I will someday actually kick the sugar habit, in that maybe someday I won't even like the taste. But that will take some psychological work too; I like to like sugar.

I felt sluggish the rest of the day (ate around 4), and also felt a craving for sugar the rest of the day like I haven't felt since I started the Zone. So that was useful information.

But the thing I really noticed is that when I woke up this morning, I felt really cranky. I got to Petranek Fitness for the workout as normal, but when I saw it involved pull-ups--lots of them--I could FEEL myself just shutting down. I have difficulty with pull-ups, and I couldn't even bring myself to try doing any unassisted ones, though I have done them in the past. I felt like crap during the entire workout and came really close to bursting into tears. My eyes definitely watered. And during the parts where we had to run, I was flat-footed and slower than usual.

I really think that normally I would have been more game to push myself. Not today, though. Today I just didn't have it in me. I don't know for sure that that's because I flooded my system with carbs yesterday, but I suspect it didn't help. I think I'll do the same thing next weekend: have a cheat meal on Sunday and see how I feel at the workout Monday moring. Apparently, according to Sears (the author of the Zone books and the scientist who worked out the diet), some people have experienced a reduction in the symptoms of depression as a result of the diet, though that's probably long-term. But the diet is also supposed to help you with athletic performance, so there you go.

Well, I'll just keep doing my own experiments. And in the meantime, I'll try not to take my cranky, tearful mood, which is lingering, unfortunately, out on anybody else. Unless they deserve it. You know, by looking at me cross-eyed. Or breathing. (And no, I know what you're thinking, and it's not that.)

Buncha pics IV: En route and in Turkey

Finally putting up more pics. It just takes a long time.

Me and Myrna, Chris' girlfriend, at about 6am Los Angeles time, right before we got picked up to go to the airport. Malcolm, Lisa, Don and I stayed at Myrna's apartment the night before the flight. She was a terrific host, and she must really love Chris to take us in.

Waiting for the shuttle at the ass crack of dawn.


Cut to our 8-hour layover in Frankfurt airport, where Tara and Malcolm slept the sleep of the dead...

...while I did not because Ricky kicked me in the head once or twice in the name of "shifting position" on those uncomfortable airport chairs.

Flash forward to Antalya, where we waited for a while for a shuttle to take us to the airport. Wow, I wish it had been that quick while we were traveling.

The shuttle took long enough so that Tara, Lisa and I had time to go to the restroom. We passed by a row of offices and when I peeked in, I saw a few prayer rugs on the floor--as well as a praying person lying near them. Turkey is 90% Muslim, and this was the first indication I saw of that. I had been concerned about the political and religious climate there, but there was no reason; everyone was so friendly and nice. Antalya is a resort town, so I'm sure it is fairly secular in order to be attractive to tourists. But I also got the sense that the Turks I met were genuinely friendly. More pics on that eventually. Meantime, I decided not to take a picture of the prayer rug and praying man out of respect.

Okay, here are some random pictures:

Me and Midget on the way to the venue to train

In Turkey, the Dur sign is just a suggestion rather than a mandate. That's fine, although since everyone takes it as a suggestion, it seems like there are many near misses.

The competition venue. (BYOTP.)

Tara and Midget horsing around

Closeup of Tara's butt. Yes, it is a nice butt, but I'm more interested in what it says on her butt. (For those of you who don't know, Valhalla is my screen name on that grappling forum I spend way too much time on.)

View from Felicia's and my hotel room:

Did I mention that every meal was a buffet? Here are Darren and Felicia in the breakfast room. It's safe to say there was probably some ball-busting going on, on both sides.

Bill, filling his grill.

Juliano and Bryce, being themselves as only they can.

The beach is that way.

Or is it that way?

Tara breaks the tie, and Bill is right! BTW, this pic is from the weigh-in. More of those to follow.