After realizing that I had neglected my mount escapes, I’ve dedicated the last several weeks revisiting and refining how I deal with this position. My escapes weren’t terrible, but my preference for guard meant that I was rarely forced to fight out of mount.

As I forced myself to let people mount me, I had flashbacks to being a white belt stuck under the giant blue belts I used to train with. The horror. Sweat dripping on me. My chest crunching. The steady inch toward a higher and tighter mount. Even though it’s been years since I’ve felt that desperate under mount, part of my desire to work on the position is driven by those memories: I know how bad the position can get, so I need to take it seriously to keep a position from going from bad to worse.

So every training session, I ask a few big guys to hop into mount, give me pressure, and get mean.

While I worked on this mount project, I found myself underneath mount somewhere else. Our fulfillment company moved locations, and while I won’t bore you with all the details, it was a perfect storm of unfortunate events that left us way behind. Some orders took over two weeks to ship, some of our inventory was lost only to be found in a different box weeks later, and our new shipments were still waiting to be updated while we finished organizing.

As our inbox started to fill with “Did my gi ship?” requests, we kept our elbows tight and started to work our way out from underneath this terrible situation. We updated everyone on what was going on. We went to the warehouse and rolled up our sleeves and helped moving boxes and shipping orders, something we haven’t done since the warehouse was located in my parent’s basement. I have continued to spend two days a week at the warehouse.

Through this whole ordeal, I was able to stay remarkably calm, and we are slowly working our way out. While we are not completely out yet and it still sucks to be under mount, I would say we are at least getting back to half guard, and working our way back to closed guard soon. I will continue making my three-hour drive to the warehouse on Monday mornings to help ship and organize our inventory, and we hope to be back to shipping our orders within 48 hours soon.

In the meantime thank you for all your patience. We are not happy about how these events played out, but when you’re stuck under mount, your best bet is to admit that you’re in a bad position and be proactive about tunneling your way out. You might want to ignore it and just hope that it gets better, but that’s not how any of this works.

Face the problem head on and get to working that upa.