Arizona Highlight

This is our third year visiting Arizona for a month of winter. Each time I've trained at the two relatively near Gracie Jiu-Jitsu academies.

They aren't really close to where we stay, or I'd attend a lot more classes. The Scottsdale place is a half-hour freeway drive away, and the ride to the place in Phoenix is over 45 minutes long.

Both schools have very solid instructors. They and all of their students made me feel very welcome.

To synchronize as best I can with my wife, and the friends that we travel with, I only train in the daytime. Luckily, both academies have several such classes per week.

This year, the daytime sessions in Scottsdale are very lightly attended. They have all been between 3 and 4 students, including the instructor and me. As a result, there isn't any real instruction, that all being reserved for the larger evening classes. Mostly, we just roll, or work with partners on whatever. I like all of that, but it doesn't inspire me much to make the drive; leaving holiday fun behind.

Phoenix has bigger daytime sessions, but for one reason or another they haven't been having much instruction either. Part of the month was their chapter review time, and for a couple of days the instructor was away leaving things in the hands of his helpers. There was one real class of excellent instruction done by one such substitute teacher, but that has been it. Most of the other sessions have consisted of some warmup exercises, a drill or two, and then rolling. Like Scottsdale, this is all fine but doesn't motivate me to attend regularly.

For the month, I made it to about a dozen classes in total.

The exception was that at my first drop-in at the Phoenix place, I found out about an upcoming weekend filled with a training seminar by Pedro Sauer, a huge name in Jiu-Jitsu. I attended all of that as well.

A highlight happened at the very last Arizona class I went to. It was the only evening class I attended in the entire month.

I worked with a nice White Belt during the beginner class. This was followed by a smallish advanced class.

There were a couple of Blue Belts, three of us Purple Belts, the Brown Belt who runs the school, and a visiting Black Belt. The class was sort of halfway between a lesson and and open mat time. There was a really nice atmosphere.

The highlight followed all of that. The Black Belt picked me to roll with.

Now there are Black Belts, and there are Black Belts. They are not all equal. This guy is a bona fide Gracie guy. He is big, and strong, and young as Black Belts go.

The roll started like all good ones do when the two participants are as different in skill level as we were. The higher guy takes it easy, and the lower guy tries to make something work on him. It went exactly that way. I never even got close to making anything much work.

My Black Belt then started to turn it around, and started working his own attacks. I went into almost full defence, not that I had much choice. He didn't go nuts on me, but there were some moves that he tried that I stopped, and that he would try again slightly differently. This meant that I'd actually prevented the move from working, and he was trying to figure out solutions. This happened several times. We rolled for a very long time. By the end, I was pretty nearly spent.

In parting he said with a smile, "You've got SOME Jiu-Jitsu."

That made me happy.