Good grief. Only the second day of Holidailies, and I nearly forgot to make a post!

Busy day today that started out early with getting the Kid ready to go to “Breakfast with Santa” at her school. Funny thing though: She had a Christmas party at her karate school last night, and “Santa” showed up to hand out presents. This morning, I went to wake her up and told her that she was going to have breakfast with Santa Claus. She looked at me and shrugged and said, “Mom. I just saw him last night!”

I couldn’t really say, “Yeah, but this is a different Santa!”

After that it was my turn to go to the karate school for a “submission grappling” class. It was my first time trying this class out, and I’d expected it (possibly naively) to be a class in judo/jujitsu/hapkido-style grappling. Instead it felt far more like a class for people wanting to compete in MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) tournaments. (There was even some conversation about some recent fights. I had no frickin’ idea who they were talking about!) The first fifteen minutes of the class was some fairly intense calisthenics, followed by about half an hour of boxing-style punching drills. It wasn’t until the last fifteen-twenty minutes of class that we started working on a couple of grappling moves. Don’t get me wrong–it was an intense workout, and the instructor definitely knew what he was doing, but I’d really been hoping for a lot more grappling/wrestling and a lot less boxing-type stuff. (I have zero interest in ever competing.) I also had to restrain myself from laughing out loud when one of the other students told me that he had no intention of going to the ground in any fight he got into. I wanted to say, “Dude, have you ever been in a real fight??” Every fight I’ve ever been in (and yes, I was a cop for long enough to get into quite a few) has ended up on the ground. ::rolls eyes::

However, it’s quite possible that I just misunderstood the focus of the class. I know next to nothing about ultimate fighting, or MMA competitions, so, for all I know, “submission grappling” is an insider term that means “the kind of fighting and grappling used in those sort of competitions.” But I’ll give the class a few more tries. It’s definitely a good workout, even though it didn’t focus very much on the areas where I feel the rustiest. (Unfortunately, it’s really darn tough to practice joint locks, throws, and grappling by yourself! :P) I guess at some point I’m just going to have to find someone willing to be a warm body so that I can work on getting my Hapkido proficiency back to where it needs to be.