Day 12

Due to staying out until 5 a.m. I deliberately slept through training, as did most people in the camp. Instead I hit the internet café, picked up some stuff at the market and was back in time for afternoon training. Did a session of ground and pound with Gaz. We started out with an intense warmup and had a really good sweat going by the time we got to technique. We learned some punching combos from being in your opponents guard. Next, from your opponent in your guard we learned arm control to cross face to guillotine to liver punching to kimura to triangle. I've found that good grapplers use their ground game the way boxers use punches. After practicing these techniques awhile, we sparred with one person starting on top and one on bottom. The person on top practiced the combos we learned and the person on bottom practiced the submissions. I did good from both positions and was able to pull off kimuras, triangles and an armbar. Technically we hadn't practiced armbar but he had warned us to keep our hands palm down on your opponent so you can stop the armbar attack. It was a lot of fun sparring ground and pound with the boxing gloves. Wakes you up getting hit and brings your concentration up. Also felt good to practice submissions while being hit grappling and submissions are usually practiced independent of striking. Thus if you know you aren't going to get hit you only have to defend against the submissions. As usual, the more variables that are introduced the more the game changes. We did a few rounds of sparring and got minute water breaks in between. Once a guy was late getting back in the cage between breaks and we had to do pushups for a while. Good times. When most of us were at the point of physical exhaustion Gaz put a heavybag in the middle and said we were each going to basically do a burnout on it. We would mount the bag and he would call out combos for us to do. Either fast punching, deliberate punching, hooks or overhands. I went first and Gaz would call out something like 5 deliberate 4 hooks 2 overhands etc I pretty much had to crawl away when my time was up. Ground striking seems to be pretty novel here, and a lot of the Thai trainers and Muay Thai students stopped to watch our sparring and burnouts.

After practice a lot of us went to Jimmy's Lighthouse. Jimmy's is an open air restaurant/bar under a lighthouse next to the pier and boat docks. When we got there Maddox was talking to his girlfriend back home via webcam on his laptop and it turns out they also have free wifi. I got a huge serving of stir-fried beef, mushrooms and peppers with oyster sauce for about 2 bucks. Gary and I also ordered coconut milk. Basically they just cut it open and put a straw in it. He said it was cheaper to get them at the market but really hard to get it open. The radio was playing alt country bluegrass stuff and there was a nice breeze coming in from the ocean so Kevin and Gary, Rick from England and Aussie Adam and I stayed around talking and sharing stories from Thailand and back home. Adam said when he was in South Africa some of the neighborhoods were really dangerous with a high incident of carjacking. One of his friends outfitted his bmw with flamethrowers on each side that would roast any would be carjackers.