Goings on...

I apologize to all my readers for not writing sooner, however, I didn't want to bore you with nothingness. I was able to train with Ana a few more times after my last post and the last day we finally turned the notch up a bit on training and it was a blast! I hope she comes back to visit again! I've never had so much fun training with anyone. :)

New Years Eve was a good time, Ryan and I just had a few friends from the gym over and had a surprise visit from another good friend and his girlfriend. We got dressed up, ate and drank a ton and then missed the countdown to New Years thanks to the guys doing car bombs. We had to have our own countdown at 12:04am. We pretended...and finished off the champagne, lol!


Who would have thunk that a party of of only six (with two additions for about an hour) would be so exciting? How does this happen you ask? Well, start drinking at 8pm with a few individuals not used to drinking heavily - that is a surefire way to provide ample entertainment for the entire evening! Watch out though, one guest may take of his shirt, threaten to punch the host in the face, almost burn the house down and then round out the evening by puking half digested meatballs all over the guest bedroom before going berserk for ten minutes then crashing out for the night...lol!

On January 2nd, I went to my second cousin's wedding out in Bowie, MD. Had a BLAST with the fam! Yeah that (below) is just my parents and sibilings...there's a few of us, lol!


Today was the Copa Nova tournament run by Fightworks out near Dulles. It's a small local tournament but is growing in size each time, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, Ryan got the start time wrong which made us a little late going in today. I'd been sick all week so before we arrived Ryan had informed me that I couldn't compete if it wasn't in my own weight class. Well they told me at the desk that there was no one my weight in the no-gi and not a single other female purple belt signed up, so there went that idea...bummer.

We believe in getting everyone out to compete and gain tournament experience as soon as possible so we had some mixed results, but definitely some shining moments as well. Shout outs for most improved definitely go to Rick Slomba and Kenny Savercool (both won their divisions in the gi with 3 and 4 matches respectively). Most surprising excellent performance was probably Will Cutler who just joined the gym about 2 months ago and with no prior grappling experience at all won 4 matches in the men's white belt on his way to second place. It was quite a performance! Additional notable performance mentions go to Quang Nguyen for sweet movement skills and Andy Ruffner for a much improved ability to listen to the coach's advice. Great job guys!