I started doing Jiu-Jitsu in September of 2011. The first trip to the main Gracie school in Los Angeles happened early in 2014, and has repeated every year since then.
This year it’s the 5th visit.
All of them have been different. The first lasted for two months, while all the others have been around two weeks. One of the visit included a number of private lessons. During the 2016 visit I was evaluated for, and received, a Purple Belt.
It is always a delight to discover what parts of the curriculum they will be covering. I have hit Guard, Mount, Standing, and this time it is Back Mount.
I thought I had a pretty competent understanding of Back Mount, but only a couple of days later my world has been totally redirected.
Each of those training days contained two classes, and the material taught was top notch and highly technical. I was learning, but nothing earth shattering, then Rener Gracie made perhaps a ten-minute explanation that hit a nerve.
He changed how I will forevermore interpret Back Mount.
The coolest thing about this year is that the real visit hasn’t even started yet. We’ve been in Palm Springs for a month, and I made the trek into Los Angeles to attend a handful of classes. Soon we will move over to Lomita, and I’ll be at Gracie University every day.
In those two weeks, I’ll have attended about 20 top-notch sessions.
It would be possible to attend a total of 26, but doing so almost killed me back in 2014, when I was four years younger. The slightly slower pace that I will be doing is plenty demanding as it is.
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