Buffalo Wild Wings, Black Belt Training and more!

Arrived safely in San Diego after a awesome drive from San Jose which means that once again it got time for a late night blog post, this time looking back at my last few days in San Jose. As I wrote in the last post I met a super cool guy, Dominik Cruz, from Switzerland who me and Anders hooked up with after almost every training session to go for some Jamba Juice and just talk about Jiu-Jitsu. It was also really nice to hear about Dominik's experience as his background in Jiu-Jitsu is much different than mine, where I came from a past with lack of confidence, self-esteem and other "silly" things a young kid should not really have to deal with, Dominik has been training Karate and has this never quit attitude towards the training and basically got dragged along by a friend to a Jiu-Jitsu school in Switzerland and ends up getting his ass kicked left and right but somehow just kept on pushing forward, day after day, with this Karate mentality but yet really humble and down to earth just sucking in all the information and getting hooked like the rest of us who have been through the same experience, and then he just decided to save up for a 6 months trip to the US to train Jiu-Jitsu full time. Now that's dedication and something worth respect! My hats off to him. There is many gold medals waiting to be won for him and for sure his training partners back in Switzerland is lucky to have a guy like him at the gym.

He spend his last evening, Tuesday, in the US partying with the whole crew from Caio Terra's academy at something called Buffalo Wild Wings. A nice barbecue restaurant where me and Anders was also invited. For those who follow on facebook they probably already saw my update, it was just a perfect evening with plenty of good greasy barbecue food in a really good atmosphere with awesome people. I got to know a few guys from the academy that I haven't had the chance to talk to before, so that was great also.  

On Wednesday he showed up at the academy and spend the last few hours with me and Anders getting a smoothie at Jamba Juice (what else, that place is amazing!) before he left for the airport. 

Again, I appreciate all the good tips he gave us and for the good company! I will look forward to meet up with him at the London Open and European Open.

Here's a picture from Buffalo Wild Wings and a picture with Dominik, Anders, Flavio and myself :-)

Now finally to some Jiu-Jitsu updates, as I obviously have been training as much as possible in San Jose and on one side I have had some good training sessions over there and got crushed more than once by a really good guy called Manuel, who is a purple belt world champion and now a brown belt. A super tough guy that I really enjoyed training with, on the other side I still have to say i'm a bit disappointed in myself, that I never got to "break the ice" with Caio Terra, since I later got the chance to talk to talk to him I now see that I obviously got the wrong impression of him and I perhaps was way to fast in my judgement, which is something i genuinely apologize for and hopefully I will get to share the mat with him again and listen to his views on Jiu-Jitsu. I am afterall a huge fan and I love watching him when I buy the pan-am and world championship dvd's and livestreams.

I got to train with Caio two times and he caught me in a triangle choke both times I trained with him and he's a rooster weight world champion and has won numerous absolute titles beating some huge guys, so I obviously have huge respect for his accomplishments on the mat and it was also crazy to feel how he would climb his legs from the closed guard and up to the triangle choke, without me being really able to stop it although I saw it coming from a mile away. Very good technique indeed and i appreciate he at least took the time to kick my ass.
In the two classes he taught while I was there he showed two awesome ways of passing the guard, one spiderguard pass and one halfguard(shin block) pass that both ended up in the leg drag position. Very solid techniques.

After thinking about it I will most likely not go back to San Jose to train again, as I will have to do the drive back to San Diego to get on the airplane early morning August 15th, so it just doesn't make sense to go there again, although I met some awesome guys on the mat and Flavio, the head instructor, was super cool and really has an awesome personality and a guy I would love to train with again. And also Samir Chantre was a super nice guy and although he had and injured thumb, which sucks bigtime, he still passed my guard more than once with some slick guard passes and after asking him about a position, he showed me a nice little sweep to a leg drag pass from the knee/shin block halfguard position, something I look forward to playing with when I get back home.

The best training sessions I had at Caio Terra's academy was the 3 black belt/competition classes that consisted of 5 minute rounds followed by 30 sec breaks in between, which we kept on doing until everyone had rolled with everyone. Usually it was around 7-8 rounds like that. So looking back at my week of training at the academy I'm really satisfied with the sparring I got in San Jose, so now there's nothing left than to look forward to getting to San Diego to train at Gracie Humaita and perhaps Andre Galvao.

Here's a picture from the last black belt/competition session. Some guys had left before the picture was taken so that was a bummer, still a good picture though :-)

Now as I wrote in my previous blog post, my girlfriend Sabine arrived on the 25th of July to accomplish me on my way to San Diego and in my training down here. She is just as hooked in Jiu-Jitsu, if not more, and is also a beast of the mat. Very technical with a super good defense, and a great personality to go with it so I'm looking forward to spend a lot of time with her here in California. My next blog post will be about our awesome trip from San Jose, down the coast line to Los Angeles and then to San Diego.

I have already arrived in San Diego and I got to experience and absolutely amazing nature and landscape, the mountains which are never ending are so beautiful its really hard to explain in words so I will just post some pictures here so you can see what I'm talking about.

And once again thanks to everyone following my blog, I appreciate you taking the time to read and if you have any questions about my trip feel free to ask me here or on facebook. I'm happy to know that my family is reading also and I will be looking forward to share the experience with and show all the pictures to my grandmother's and grandfather when I come back home, as they have no clue about the internet. I'm sure they will be so happy to hear about it :-)

So to everyone back home and whoever is ready, take care, eat healthy and train some Jiu-Jitsu PORRA! :-)

Michael