Jiu-Jitsu in the Big Apple

When Ryan asked me if I would come up for a few days and visit him in NYC during his ADCC training camp I jumped at the chance for two reasons. First, of course I wanted to see him since he'd been gone for almost 2 weeks, but I extended my stay a few extra days so that I could train with the all the ladies on my new team! :)

OMG I haven't had so many fun rounds in a really really long time! I trained with 2 female blue belts my size, and one a little bigger who used to be a national level collegiate wrestler. A nice surprise arrived in a purple belt my size who just moved to NYC from Canada. AND Dominyka (2011 purple belt world champion in the absolute and 2nd place in the division 3 weight classes up from me) was just back fresh from her trip to Lithuania. On top of this I was able to train with both Emily Kwok (first Canadian female black belt) and Jen Petrina, another black belt. It is so rare to be in a room with a bunch of good female training partners and multiple days in a row too! Hopefully, next time I will get to roll with Tati and Lola too!

Practices were super hard. There wasn't a lot of technical instruction, mostly just hard rounds because Marcelo and Ryan get ready for ADCC during the regular practices. We did different types of training, sometimes regular rounds 5 minutes, sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes we did 1 minute only working takedowns on the feet followed by 5 minutes on the ground. A really fun option though was when we did 5 minutes of a regular round then at the 5 min mark the bell rang and we had 5 minutes to score, first person to score after the 5 minute warning won and the round would be over.

It was a little tough on my body to go from pretty much no hard training to suddenly 2 times per day of hard training. But it was totally worth it. I finally arrived back home late Wednesday night and practically crawled to Yoga the next day. So refreshing! Haha.

I can't wait to go back again in a few weeks towards the end of the ADCC training camp. I should be in a little better shape by then too since I'll have a few weeks of training hard again under my belt. :)