Self Reflection.

It's frustrating.  It's disheartening.  It's poor performance in a tourney.  With a crushingly low success rate during the round robin portion of a tournament, I've been searching for a reason or an excuse to console myself.  Basically whining away the hours until I realized that a low win to loss ratio doesn't always reflect on the quality of your fighting.  Some times it just means you've been getting better.  The threat presented is much greater as the hours of practice you've been doing being to prove that the dip in the couch has been missing you. This ultimately leads to upper tier opponents taking you more seriously and thus taking you out much more quickly.  There are always ups and downs.  It's important to realize this and not loose focus.  

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A New Leg Up!

After a bit of hit-and-miss, one country away and a move later, my new leg harness arrived! It's been a bit of a jumble trying to coordinate from person to person and event to event to make sure the leg harness and I ended up in the same place at the same time.  Whew!

These are high impact plastic laced together with 550 parachute cord.  The knees are of the same plastic, and friction welded together down the front of the kneed cop.  All in all they weight less than any harness I have ever owned, and should last a very long time.  Unlike the blue plastic pickle barrel, the high impact plastic is much thinner and will require more strategic padding.  I intend to line these with neoprene, i.e wetsuit material, and wear some hexpad shorts as well if needed.

New leg harness also means new hip belt.  I have been using a standard weight lifting belt in place of this since that is what came with the other harness I've been wearing.  Not the best belt for anyone, women in particular.  The edges of the belt end up digging into the top of the hip bone and/or put pressure on the lower back causing pain.  The C-belt pattern accommodates the natural hip shape as well as distributes the weight of the leg harness along the core of the body rather than centering it on the lower back.  More on this later when the belt has been completed!

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