day 1 of sparring

it is 1:30 am, friday morning. thursday sparring went by and we are all exhausted. today's fights included chinedum at men's welter, ana at women's welter, lolo at women's light, mike at men's fly, and alicia at women's fly.

but first, i arrived at ATL at 5:00 AM ET, and considering I left at 10:40 PM PDT, that makes it a mere 3.5 hours to fly from san diego to atlanta. that means i got basically 0 sleep. on the up side, i got 0 sleep because i was busy pwning n00bs on the delta airplane trivia game. i won all three rounds of 20 question trivia, and scored the day's highest overall score on the second game.

but then, since shuttle tickets were $17 each from the airport to a hotel, i said fuck the police, and went to sunshine car rentals to get a car. the gross total was $115 for car, under 25 price, and gps system for ONE day. with about 7 people's worth of $17 tickets it would be worth it. but in hindsight, it may or may not have been worth it...i did get to use it to buy supplies such as pasta for alicia and lolo, but now alicia and mike are busy returning it and being lost.

but i had an extremely lucky day. and i was extremely good at remembering small things and providing for people, such as getting the car, getting pasta, checking in all within the 15 minutes of ordering the pasta, and bringing gear for people to borrow. *oh shit chinedum still has my old mouthpiece.* but as my phone died in the airport (i have to charge it basically every day or else) i had to walk into the terminal to meet them, and i basically had a window of 30 seconds before jetblue passengers rush through the airport and they were lost outside of phone contact forever.

but i run into alicia as i was running across the terminal and they were reentering the terminal. maybe one in a million chance of that happening, and 2 seconds earlier or later i would have missed them.

back to the sparring. chinedum's leg was injured so he had very limited fighting capability. but his gun (the right leg pada) worked wonders and won him some huge, loud points in his first match. I don't know if he had other matches after that but after a whole slew of coaching madness he was called (last call for chinedum before disqualification) for his next match. he fought rupert? rufus? hamon, had some bullshit calls and bad kyungos, and lost before the medal rounds.

the cause of the coaching madness was that we only had chinedum as a coach (mike snuck in once in a while) and at one point, ana, lolo, alicia, and mike were all on the floor. at that time, chinedum was unlocatable, alicia'd dropped her mouthpiece, and everything was crazy. meanwhile, the rest of the tBos gang were still stuck in the snowstorm.

finally we got the matches through. lolo lost her first one, unfortunate because somehow she couldn't get her padas to pop. ana won her first match, but i remember talking to liza on the phone in the last 30 seconds - "ana's at 0-0..oh wait, she's up 1-0, i have to run and tape alicia's match..on wait, ana's just won 2-0." her second match was against nia abdullah, and she actually did VERY well - nia only scored 2 points, and not actually really good ones the whole time.

mike's matches were full of typical mike energy. he was all over the place, hit one very good front leg axe kick on his first opponent to win like 4-2. after a shoeless coaching drama, mike lost 0-4 to RMC's jermaine. in the last several seconds mike had so much energy trying to get him kyungo'd out, it was crazy.

but the shoeless coaching drama involved mike sitting in the coaching chair immediately after sparring, so he didn't have shoes. somehow the ref didn't care about his lack of a coaching badge, but did care about him wearing shoes. so as mike went to get some shoes, alicia turned to see why mike had run off, and she turns around and her opponent had attacked with an axe kick and was trying to knock her out. alicia's fight was very good - she lost 2-0 but fought much smarter than ever before.

at about 10 pm the rest of the crew, hungry, ragged, tired, showed up at the airport. tomorrow will be our chance to fight.