Those who know me know that my attendance at the gym is not spectacular.  Those who don’t know me, you don’t know me because my attendance at the gym is not spectacular. Over the past 6 years that I’ve been a student at The Academy (six years?!?), my attendance has been spotty at best.  Even early on before the wife, house, and child, I trained 3 maybe 4 times a week.  But as life’s responsibilities added up and I moved further north, my training time took even more of a beating.  I still managed to earn my purple belt, and then I bailed.  I was in a major training “valley” (see Jay’s post on peaks and valleys) and instead of reassessing my training and goals, I pulled the chute and left the gym for a year.  I’ve been back for a few months now and I am paying the price for my time off.  Leaving for a year was a bad choice, but this post isn’t about that.  It’s about coming back and some of the things I’ve been doing to try to accelerate my return from the world of suck.  Grappling is a perishable skill after all.