Now that the summer is ending I have decided to pretty much summarize how things have gone and my thoughts on it. Coming into my last highschool summer, I decided to try and take advantage of this by doing what I love the most. With a car and a job at the gym nothing could keep me from training day in and day out. My schedule pretty much looked like this: mon/wed/fri-noon class bjj and evening bjj, tues/thurs-bjj then judo, sat-bjj.
In the beginning I lost close to 10 pounds because of all the training, but with the bad nutrition came bad training. I remedied this by pigging out as much as I can to keep a steady balance. This summer, I enjoyed it like a 17 year old should, no care for nutrition, no care for drama, no summer classes to deal with, just me, my friends, and Jiu-Jitsu. Did I mention I have a CAR!? The best feeling in the world is waking up, not having to worry about catching the bus or riding my bike and just rolling up to the gym “like a boss”. It is the ultimate freedom, somedays I wonder what I would do with out it, then I realize that I would be riding my bike and catching the bus like last summer.
For most of the summer we have been working on mainly butterfly guard, since I usually only pull guard anyway I really enjoyed this. I now think that my butterfly guard is my best postion and the elevator sweep is my best sweep. Towards the beginning of the summer my instructor told me to stop going to deep half guard (probably because I’ve been submitted from deep half at almost every tournament I lose). Heartbroken, I had lost my go-to; I was just an empty soul trudging down a dark alleyway with no where to go. It seemed as if the butterfly guard came at the perfect time, brought me into its house and made me a cup of tea. Me and the butterfly guard are inseperable now, I’m doing things with my hooks that I never thought imaginable. It seems like this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
I have been woring the morning shift at my gym before the noon class which was pretty brutal (5 am to 12 pm), but I mean what other job has hours around jiu jitsu? I had all the money I could have wanted but there were no tournaments for me to spend it on! In my other blog post I already explained what happened at Diamond State Games, and the only other tournament I competed in this summer was in the Us Grappling Maryland Championships. This one being the weekend after my moms birthday, my funds were pretty depleted so I could only enter one division, I decided to enter the only division I have never won which was the white belt absolute division. Not too much to talk about in this one though, I had two matches with guys that seemed to be doing their first tournaments. I don’t want to sound conceited; but I wish I could have rolled for more than a total of 4 minutes with someone who was pushing me harder. Either way US Grappling put on another great tournament and I wish every tournament was run like theirs! I know they can’t control who pansies out for the absolute division. Anyway, I came out with the gold! I also finally hit a (sloppy) drop seio-nage! This was one of my goals in competition.
The reality still hasn’t set in that this is my last summer to really train hard at my home school with no worries. In a couple months I’ll be 18 and by next year I’ll be shipping off to college (for which I am currently looking for). I’m really looking foward to the future though, next summer I plan to train in Brazil for a couple months and to compete in the Rio Open, right before I go off to florida for college. The main thing that troubles me about going to college is leaving my school, I know I can go back and train durring the summer and winters. But thats like giving you a whole new family and in three years they are just ripped away from you. I did a lot of growing up at Dave Trader Jiu Jitsu and I plan to do a lot more in the next year. After I get done with college I will be back to continue on my path to win mundials at blackbelt.