Couchjitsu

This past weekend I was under the weather. It actually started mid-week, coming home each night after work wanting nothing more than to go to bed and sleep. I didn’t go to open mat on Friday. I probably could have, but figured it would be better if I didn’t. Saturday and Sunday I spent almost entirely in bed alternating between sleeping and watching Cheers on Netflix.

Monday morning came and I did not get up and go to my normal conditioning class. I didn’t pack my bag with my gi for Monday night technique and sparring. I didn’t even think of going to no-gi technique. I’m hoping that on Tuesday I’ll at least be able to make it to technique class.

But as I was sick this weekend and thinking about missing training I realized as much as I love BJJ, I’m glad I’m just a hobbyist. If this was my livelihood it would have been horrible to be sick and having unplanned absences from training. I don’t miss work often for being sick, but when I do, I don’t have to worry about someone getting better than me at writing code, because it’s not a competition. I’ll still go in to the office in a few days and pick right back where I was. However, if I was a professional fighter or elite level BJJ player, and I missed workouts and training because I was sick, I think I’d be worried that everyone else was getting better while I was laying in bed watching Sam, Norm, Cliff and Woody.

This week has been a rough one for me. I did my normal conditioning, technique and sparring classes, however, it really felt like not much clicked. One night we learned some half-guard sweeps that just didn’t seem to gel to me. Another night we worked some escapes from half-guard bottom, and while I could perform them in technique class, I seemed unable to pull one off in sparring. In fact, it was one of those weeks where I felt like I could not pull anything off in sparring. These weeks happen to me from time to time.

I’m not talking about getting tapped a lot in sparring, that does not necessarily bother me a lot. There are a lot of reasons to get tapped a lot in sparring. For one, if I’m the only white belt in the room, I don’t have a lot of expectations that I’m going to tear it up. Also, depending on how we start or what it is I’m working on, or what the other guy is working on, I could get tapped quite frequently. I know that if I’m going to stay in BJJ I’m going to have more taps than I can count (in fact I’ve already lost count.)

What I’m talking about, though, is not being able to do things that I want to do. Could be passing a guard, maintaining top pressure or working a specific submission. It could also be more basic things such as being aggressive, or keeping my base.  This week I felt like a rag doll, tossed about on the map and moved wherever my opponent wanted me.

As I thought about it a few things came to mind. First of all, while I love doing BJJ and I enjoy competing, I realize that it is just a hobby for me. I will not be doing this professionally nor full time. So in that sense, I don’t have to be the best 3-stripe white belt ever, I just need to be better than I was last night, last week, or last month.  As I thought about that I realized that roughly 1 year ago I was preparing for my first ever tournament. The week after the tournament I realized how easily people passed my guard and how much I essentially laid there after they passed the guard. But this week, even in my bad moments, I was moving better than I did a year ago. I do a better job of keeping people in my guard (they still escape, but I’m better.) I can see submissions and set them up, something else I couldn’t or didn’t do last year.

Secondly, I have to remember that what I’m doing is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I’m not “street fighting” or anything like that. I’m training and competing under a certain set of rules. I need to focus on learning BJJ. In Nebraska we have no shortage of guys that have wrestled. Sometimes recently sometimes 10+ years ago, but it seems as if you can always tell a former wrestler. They know how to distribute their weight, they are strong regardless of size, that is, they don’t have to look like Mr. Universe.  One reason this is sometimes tough is that in BJJ we’re taught “technique over strength.” The mindset that a smaller opponent can defeat a larger opponent with technique. Sometimes this is taken to extremes in the BJJ community and people will say things like “A blue belt should never tap to a white belt.”  I don’t think this is true at all. While some people may be new to BJJ, that doesn’t mean they’re new to grappling. I’ve spent a grand total of about 18 months grappling, and I’m 36. Some people have years and years of grappling, either in an organized wrestling or judo environment, or just in the house with their brothers. Someone can be less skilled at a certain set of movements and techniques, but still be a more skilled grappler.

Neither of these things should be revolutionary to anyone reading this. They weren’t necessarily surprising to me. But sometimes I need to take a step back and think about where I’m at. I realize that from 12 months ago (or even 6 months ago) I’ve progressed and gotten better. I’m a better version of myself from a few months back.  Despite having an off week, a week where I got beat up, and thwarted at every turn, I’m still at the point where I can recognize where I’m at, and that is growth.

This past December I competed in a local BJJ tournament. I got a silver in my division of gi, but overall I was not pleased with my performance, I was 1-and-done in all my other divisions.  As I reflected back over my performance I felt that I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. I don’t mean that I didn’t know moves. In fact, I’d guess there was really only 1 technique in my five matches that I would have been better drilling. Instead, it was more of a focus and mental preparation.  I don’t think I was really “ready” to compete mentally.

One area that this definitely stood out was in my gi division, my first match went the full time and I won on points. I was then given 5 minutes to recover before my next match. In training that doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but for some reason at the tournament, that five minutes may as well have been five seconds. I was still breathing pretty hard right before the next match started.  So I’ve spent some time thinking about this and trying to see how I can improve on it.  I’m far from an expert on mental preparation or sports psychology, so I’m not writing this as how you should prepare, only what I’m trying now.

First of all, I stopped taking advantage of water breaks during sparring. Our normal sparring class will have 3 or 4 matches and then a water break, then repeat until the time is up. Now when the instructor says “water break” I stand up and walk over to the wall where we line up to call each other out.  My thought process here is that even though I’m tired and thirsty (and as the night wears on I am THIRSTY) I want to convince myself that even when I’m uncomfortable I can still execute technique, I can still compete, I can push the thoughts of “A drink sounds nice right now” out of my head.

In a similar vein, when I do my conditioning workouts in the morning I try to not hunch over when I get exhausted or out of breath. I’m not always successful, but I’m trying to focus on standing strong even when I’m tired and out of breath.  If I hunch over or sit down then I will not want to get back up and continue, so I’d rather tell myself to not get to that point that to try and convince myself to get out of that spot.

Another thing that I’m trying is on nights when we have an odd number of people sparring, if I’m not sparring, I will not be sitting on the mat watching and waiting for my turn. Instead, I’ll be on my feet, or possibly walking laps around the mat.  It goes back to the same mentality as when I’m conditioning. If I’m on my feet walking then I’m more focused and telling my body that being tired doesn’t matter right now.

In the midst of this time thinking about the mental aspect and trying to not let my mind tell me when to quit, I was talking with someone at the gym and he’d been doing a lot of drilling specific techniques (I think he said he was drilling 100 take downs a day or something like that.) He said that when you’re drilling a takedown, you get the takedown, and the desire to just roll off the guy and sit there for a second is present. Or maybe you get the take down, know you got the takedown, and so you end up just rolling on to your hip, or falling to the side a bit. Because the point of the drill is to get the takedown. But he made the point that in drilling like that, you’re creating a pattern in your mind. It is no longer Takedown-Cross Body-Submission. It’s now Takedown-on to my hip-scramble from bad position-whatever happens next.  Basically the old saying “Practice makes perfect” is incorrect, “Practice makes permanent.”  So start practicing the way you want to perform when you resort to muscle memory.

That has helped me try and look at how I train and do drills. I feel like I’m far from doing this perfect, or even well really. But I try to examine the techniques I’m doing and decide “Is that how I want it to be permanently” if it’s not, then I try to change it so that I do it the right way. That’s really what all these mental games are to me, there is the easy way which for me is usually passive. It doesn’t involve a lot of thought, it’s auto-pilot. But right now, auto-pilot isn’t taking the best course, it’s taking the easiest course. I’m trying to teach my auto-pilot to always take the best course instead.

For the past few months, my BJJ schedule has been relatively the same:

Monday:

6-6:30 fight fit (conditioning)

11:30-12:30 No-gi technique

5:30 – 6:30 Technique

6:30-7:30 Sparring

Tuesday

5:30 – 6:30 Technique

6:30-7:30 Sparring

Wednesday

6-6:30 fight fit

Thursday

11:30-12:30 No-gi sparring

Friday

6-6:30 fight fit

4:30-6pm Open mat

That comes out to about 9 hours of time at the gym, with 7.5 of that being BJJ.  I’m not always able to do this schedule, for example, last week, I hurt my back a bit on Tuesday and didn’t go back to the gym until Monday of this week. This week, some classes were cancelled due to the snowmageddon. However, last year, I ended up with about 360 hours for the year.

I’ve done roughly the same number of hours for the past year. Although, the individual class times have changed, and open mat only started back in August. So there have been some changes that have come up here and there, but by and large, I’ve been getting about 7 hours a week of training.

During this time, I’ve had several people ask me how I do it. How I’m able to put in that amount of time, especially since I’m not a young kid anymore. I was thinking about it tonight and I realized a few things. First of all, I’m not doing anything that extraordinary.  It’s 7-9 hours a week. There are countless people doing BJJ across the country that are doing BJJ that often.

Second of all, I think the way that I am able to “do this” is consistency. It’s something I enjoy, why wouldn’t I want to work at it?  I realize that I’m not the best at BJJ, I’m not a prodigy. I’m not someone that can just see a move and instantly pull it off. So, if I want to be good at this, if I want to win matches at a tournament, if I want to win gold, then I’m going to have to work on it. So, in that sense, it isn’t really a labor, or maybe it’s a labor of love.  I have a focus, I want to get better, so I’m going to have to work to get there.

Thirdly, it’s a lot easier than it appears from the “outside.”  Most of us work 40 hours a week, but nobody ever asks “How can you work 40 hours a week? How do you do it?” I actually liken it to my time in seminary. When I started seminary, our two kids were 2 and 4 months. Even when we left, they were 5 and 3. So I had 2 young kids. I was working on a Masters of Divinity which involved quite a bit of reading and paper writing. I took between 12-15 hours each semester. I also worked 30 hours a week. The last semester I was there, I had to pick up about 10 hours of hands on ministry.  That’s a lot of time involved, with a family at home. I had several friends that either weren’t married or were newly married, a lot of them asked me how I did it. How did I go to seminary, essentially work full time and have kids.  What I told them was, it’s not like I woke up one day and had a wife and two kids. First, I got married, then we had one kid, then a couple years later had another kid.

My BJJ schedule is like that as well. For the first few months I went to 2 technique classes a week.  Then I started adding a third one (Saturday morning.) Then I started adding 2 more technique classes. So I went for about 5 hours a week on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. Then after doing that for about a month, I started going to sparring class twice a week, which made about 7 hours.  At that point, I was going to class Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. Occasionally, I’d go to a competition class that we’d have on Sundays.  Then after a few more months, I added Fight Fit.  So it’s not as if I started BJJ one day, and the next day I was doing 9 hours a week at the gym.

Basically, it comes down to this. I added classes at a slow interval, but I never felt comfortable. I was always pushing myself. When I felt like I wasn’t pushing myself as much, I’d add another class.  That’s how I do it.

There is absolutely nothing special about what I do, or how I do it.

Tournaments are a big deal in BJJ, at least for the people who compete. They’re a chance to compare your skills to other practitioners. They’re a chance to compare your skills to the last time you competed, to see how you are doing. They’re the fun reward after weeks or months of practicing and drilling.

But the downside of tournaments is they’re often pricey. If you go to a local tournament, it’s usually between $50-100 to enter depending on when you sign up. If it’s more than a couple hours away, however, you normally have to factor in at least one night of hotel costs because it’s hard to get to a weigh-in by 8:30 or 9am, if you have to drive 4-5 hours. In addition to the money, there’s the risk that you might not get many matches. For example, if it’s a single elimination tournament, you could lose your first match and be done. Even if you win your first match, if you have a small division, you might not get many matches.

So it makes sense that some people are a little hesitant to sign up for a tournament.  However, I think sometimes they end up shooting themselves in the foot.  This is for people who at least express a desire to compete, not everyone will want to, so I’m not writing to those guys.

I think if you have a desire to compete and you are thinking about a specific tournament you should sign up as early as possible. I think that for a few reasons. First, and most simple, a lot of tournaments have an early sign-up fee and a late-sign up fee. Sometimes the difference might not be too significant, other times, I’ve seen it be $40 or more.

In addition to saving money, it helps the people running the tournament. If they know they have 50 or 75 people pre-registered, that helps them at least start to do some work. They won’t have complete brackets until everyone signs up (assuming you can sign up the day of) but you can have a good idea of how many brackets you will have. Imagine running a tournament and the morning of the tournament you don’t know if you’re going to have 5 people or 50 people sign up.  The last tournament I competed at saw either 3 or 4 guys sign up in my gi division the morning of. That was one division (master white belt under 185lbs.) Average that over the all weight divisions and all age brackets and you could possibly have quite a few people added to your tournament in a very short time frame.  I’ve never run a tournament, but it seems to be a kind of foolish to sign up the day of and then complain about the tournament running behind schedule. (I personally would prefer no day-of signups, but that’s not my call.)

Finally, by signing up early, you let other people in your age, weight and rank know that you’re competing.  Now unless you have name recognition and people are scared of you, that actually serves to help you out. How many times have you heard someone (or if you’re like and are on internet forums, read from someone) who a few days out said “I was thinking of competing, but there’s only one guy in my division, it doesn’t seem worth it.”  And I can understand the argument.If you spend $60 and go to a tournament, compete in one match and get silver (or even if you get gold) you could have bought a medal for much less than the $60 you just spent.  But how many other people might there be out there saying the same thing? What’s the number of people in your division to make it worth it?  What if you don’t sign up and that guy just spent $60 to compete against nobody?

In the end, if you sign up early for a tournament, you’ll probably save money and you might encourage other people to sign up, making it an even better deal. Personally, every tournament I’ve decided to go to, I signed up as close to the day that I decided as possible.

As I posted recently, I’ve been trying to focus on getting better at one thing, arm bars in my case. After doing this for two months I noticed something, I have only pulled off one arm bar from guard. I’m getting better at attacking arms from side control and mount, but whenever I seemed to try one from closed guard the other guy always seemed to escape.  Last week I worked with someone and they pointed out that I rarely get caught in an arm bar from guard, and I’m just a white belt.  He helped me see I needed to be trickier in setting them up. Nobody was going to just walk into my arm bar unless maybe it was their first time sparring. That gave me something to think about and try to work on.

Still, I was a little disappointed, I believe that the arm bar from guard is the first attack that I learned. It’s a basic attack, by that, I mean it’s foundational. My mindset is that I’d prefer to be awesome at arm bars and lapel chokes even if it means I never get awesome at a brataplata. To me, there is power and elegance in simplicity.

Then last night, I was at open mat. There’s usually a lot of rolling, although over the past 2 weeks I’ve tried to dedicate some time to work on something that I need to get better at and not just spend 2 hours of rolling.  Thankfully, one of our instructors, AC, was there with a few minutes to kill between his private lessons. He came over and asked me what I wanted to work on, so I told him that I’m having a terrible time with arm bars from guard. He got in my guard and had me do an arm bar.  Then in about 5-10 seconds, he diagnosed a major problem with my arm bar. It basically boiled down to me giving way to much space to my partner or opponent.  He showed me how to make some changes to my set up and execution. For example, he had me change my grips, and how I brought my feet around. But even more important to me, was his explanation. He could have just said “You’re doing your arm bar wrong. Here are the 7 steps you should be doing.”  That didn’t happen, though. Instead, he showed me what boiled down to 7 steps, but talked much more about the reason for each step.

The teaching session was about 1 round on the timer. But in that period, he had me get in his guard and demonstrate a better way at doing the arm bar. Then he backed up and showed me how I was doing the arm bar. He let me feel the difference between them. He talked more about principles than movements. Don’t get me wrong, he showed me specific movements such as pinch tight here, move your left foot here etc.

Up until this point I’ve really thought about BJJ in mechanical terms. My mind went through a checklist like this:

• Get a grip on his arm
• Move his arm across my center line
• Put a foot on his hip to trap his shoulder
• Kick with the other foot to off balance him
• Swing the foot from his hip to across his face
• Extend my hips until he taps

That has helped me, to think in those steps. But now I’ve experienced first hand the difference between learning steps and learning philosophy or the thought process of a move. Now, I’m not so bold as to say that is the only way I’ll learn from now on. I know beyond a shadow of doubt that I’ll still be learning by steps for quite a while. However, I now have a goal for how I learn, I want to get to the point where I can start diagnosing problems with my game by noticing what I’m doing wrong (e.g. leaving space) and not just going over a check list in my head.

It’s a lot like learning a language. You can sit down and learn 100’s or 1000’s of vocabulary words. But if you stop there, all you’ll be doing is speaking your native language using foreign words. For example, I could speak Spanglish, using Spanish words in an English sentence structure.  That will get you started, but if you really want to be able to speak another language, you have to understand the language and begin to think in that language.

I realize now, that the higher belts think in BJJ.

For the past 2 months I’ve changed how I roll. For the first year or so of rolling I went at it like most people do. I’d look at it as a match and just try to not get submitted while trying to submit the other guy. I didn’t care if I submitted my partner by kimura, triangle, omoplata or arm bar. All I really cared about was that I was getting submissions.

There were periods where this wouldn’t be true. For example, after my first tournament, I spent about a week or two trying to work on not letting someone pass my guard. Or there would be times where I’d focus only on not getting arm barred. But for the most part, I’d spar without any real plan or objective.  I was just having fun in sparring class.

But a couple months ago I was talking with a teammate and he mentioned when he started out he focused only on one move. Trying to figure out how to set it up from any position, how to finish it etc.  He encouraged me to do the same thing. So after Thanksgiving I started focusing only on arm bars. There have been a couple time that I would see a choke from side control, but I’d pass it by and look for the arm.  Doing this has helped me in a couple ways.

First, it made me look at how to get out of certain positions. If I’m trying to arm bar someone and I’m in someone else’s mount, I have to get out of mount to be able to do anything. That’s obvious, as there are no submissions from mount bottom, but it’s something that I didn’t always think about. I’d think about “I have to get out of here” but I never had a reason other than that being mounted isn’t a good thing. But when I started thinking “I want to find an arm bar” I had a goal for escaping mount more than just getting out of there.

Secondly, it’s helped focus my time outside of training. Since I’ve started BJJ, I’ve enjoyed watching BJJ videos on YouTube. But I never really knew what to look up. I’d typically end up watching videos of top black belts competing. But I never really knew what techniques to look up. But now that I’m focusing on arm bars, I can look up things specific to that. For example, I’ve struggled some with an arm bar from mount. I could get to the position and have their arm, but they could grab their arm and prevent me from extending it. This week, I watched a video of specific ways to break their grip and finish the arm bar.

Focusing on a single move for the past two months has helped me get a better, deeper understanding of the move than I did in the first 12 months of training.

This was the first full year of me doing BJJ. A lot has changed in the past 12 months. I started the year as a one-stripe white belt. I had not competed in any tournaments. Also, I weighed about 200 pounds.  Now that we’re in December, I’ve got 3 stripes on my belt, I competed in four tournaments, and I’m down to a shade under 185 pounds.  My tangible progress looks like this:

The paper medal at the bottom was from my first tournament. We drove out to Bettendorf, IA. My wife and kids came along and sat through 4 boring matches where I lost rather decidedly.  As I walked back over to where they were, and slouched down to catch my breath and drink some water, my kids handed me that piece of paper, it says “You’re the best of the best.” It just about made me cry.  Other than that, I got 3 bronze at my next tournament, and a silver at each of my next two.

As I wrote after my first tournament, I’m not a BJJ prodigy. If I’m going to be any good at this, I’m going to have to work at it — hard. And that’s exactly what I did this year.  I’ve logged 354 hours this year (and I’ll probably hit 358 by new years day.) That comes out to almost 1 hour a day every day of the year. Below is the chart of my activities (courtesy of the app I wrote, Mat Time).  I spent 150.5 hours in technique class and another 101.5 hours sparring, that was the majority of my time, both of those are in gi by the way. The 3rd highest activity is conditioning at 39 hours. Each conditioning class is 30 minutes, so that means 80 days this year I got up and made it to the gym by 6am for a workout.  All of this is surprising to me. I don’t mind getting up early, and I don’t mind working hard (some might say I’m addicted to working.)  But what is surprising is that this is 350 hours of me working on a physical activity. I wouldn’t bat an eye if I put in 350 hours on a side project, or on over time at work.  But to spend 350 hours exercising and getting better in BJJ is something I never really thought I’d do.

 

So now that I can look back and reflect on where I was last year at this time, I have some goals for 2014. To be honest, I wasn’t focused on a particular goal for 2013, I just wanted to get better. For 2014, I think my goals will be:

1. Win a gold medal
2. Compete at IBJJF Chicago
3. Get my blue belt
4. Get to 170 pounds.

Number 2, I suppose is the easiest of those 4, it involves me signing up, paying and traveling. But it’s also intimidating. I’ve only done local tournaments, and IBJJF tournaments, in my mind, are bigger deals.  But I want to continue to test myself, and I think that’s the way to do it.

It’s been a great year. I’ve enjoyed BJJ immensely. Despite bruises on just about every part of my body, sore muscles, a broken toe, numerous sore elbows and calves from armbars and ankle locks, I look forward to getting back in the gym. On days where I don’t go to class, I enjoy the time to let my body rest and at the same time, I can’t wait to get back in there.

I look forward to the new white belts that will be walking through Mid-America’s doors in the coming months. Not so that I can smash them or beat them, but so that I can train along side them and (hopefully) help them learn to love the pain of BJJ as much as I do.

Results

To start, let’s look at my goals for the tournament yesterday:

1. NO losses by submission
2. Decide when the match goes to the ground
3. Win by submission
4. Have a winning record for the tournament
5. Medal

The only one I can definitively say I did was #5. I got silver in my gi division.

I thought about crossing of #2, that one is a bit more subjective. I got taken down twice, and had someone pull guard once. And that is the main reason I didn’t cross it off. But from talking to one of my teammates who was watching my matches, he thought I did very good standing up. Even when I didn’t take it to the ground, I put up a fight, attempted to gain position and work my take down. I did hit a double-leg, which was a first for me (I wound up in a guillotine, but that’s another story.)

Three of my losses were by submission, a guillotine, an ankle lock (that’s still a little sore), and some sort of weird Americana.  I didn’t win by submission, I tried. I couldn’t get my choke sunk in and I couldn’t get an arm free when I had an arm-bar.  Finally, I didn’t have a winning record, I wound up 1-5. Winning my first match in gi to go into the finals. Then losing every match after that.

Thoughts

First of all, I’m very happy with my silver medal. It was in gi, which if I’m only going to get one medal, I’d prefer it in gi over no-gi. And it wasn’t second out of 2. It was a 5 man bracket. So that could be the best medal I’ve gotten to this point.  Also, this is the first tournament that I’ve won my first match at. The other 3 tournaments I’d lose the first match and wind up in the losers bracket. But this time I came out and won my match. Which I was happy about, because it meant I wasn’t starting slow.

The medal not withstanding, I was fairly disappointed with my performance in this tournament.  For starters, I did a horrible job of relaxing and breathing in my first match. I was completely winded, for no real reason. It was bad enough that the rest between my first and second match was not enough for me to regain my breath completely.

Secondly, I didn’t really have a game plan for my matches. I think that hurt me. In the first two tournaments, my plan was to pull guard and go from there. For some reason though, I didn’t really want to pull guard, and my take downs weren’t great enough to hit with any certainty. In the past, I’ve gone in with a definite game plan.

To be completely honest, I think my biggest problem this weekend was a lack of mental preparedness. I’m NOT saying that my competitors weren’t higher skilled. They very well could have been. But my disappointment isn’t so much that I didn’t win 4 medals in my 4 divisions. It has more to do with my performance. As I thought about it last night, it made me think of a game like golf. In every golf match the players are competing against other golfers, but they’re also competing against the course. Someone could lose a golf match but have their best game ever, because it’s still a personal sport. Obviously BJJ is slightly different in that the guy I’m competing against is trying to impose his will. What he does has a direct impact on me. However, BJJ is also like golf in that there are still things for me to do regardless of what my opponent does. For example, my loss by guillotine was from me being in the bottom half-guard.  He was able to get the choke and win, but there were things I could have done better, even if I lost. I could have worked on bumping him up towards my head, I could have worked on escaping my hips and getting out of the bad position, but I didn’t.

After the first tournament I was at, I was talking to one of my coaches, Charles. He won gold in his division, and I made some comment like “Well you won, so that’s all that matters.”  He replied, “No, it’s not.” And I thought he was just saying that at the time because that’s something a coach should say. But I can start to see now how true that statement was. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to win a gold. It’s a goal, and I’m going to pull it off. But even in my win yesterday, I have a lot to work on and improve.

I left the tournament yesterday disappointed but not defeated. I will be back at Mid-America tomorrow working on all sorts of things that I need to work on. I’ll keep improving. The next tournament I sign up for, I will be more mentally prepared, I won’t make the same mistakes. And the best part is, I know that my team at Mid-America is just the group of guys I need to get me there.