The Magnificent Mendes Brothers...

As mentioned back here, we’d decided to spend the last four days of our US trip in Costa Mesa, home to the Mendes Brothers and their Art of Jiu Jitsu Academy.

As an added bonus, packing up home early gave us a chance to trial run the stringent 23kg airline baggage allowance, and conjure all kinds of stowaway tricks to get our belongings back to the UK.

The morning of the 17th December, we set off to the hire car facility, a shuttle bus away from San Diego airport.

Whilst waiting for said bus, a kindly passerby offered to take a cute couple shot, which turned less cute when she suggested we took off our sunglasses. Still, you live and learn.

Our faces were even less photogenic when we came to pay for the ‘budget’ hire car.

Ordered as part of an online deal, it had been advertised as $99 for the four-day period, with a $55 insurance waiver charge. By the time the credit card was on the table, and as a result of much headshaking and an “it’s a legal requirement, ma’am” sales pitch, that bill had nearly quadrupled, to a massive $400 (plus $200 holding fee).

Folks, for future reference, Advantage cars are best avoided.

One fright down, it was time to start driving.

Now, I passed my test way back in the nineties, and so far have a spankingly clean licence. I have to admit however that this is largely because, being a Londoner, I rarely drive and don’t own a car.

In addition, I have never driven an automatic, or in the “it doesn’t even count as a road unless it’s got eight lanes” States before.

An immediate four-way intersection, staged traffic lights and a neck-breakingly steep hill start is not the smoothest way to learn.

Two minutes after leaving the centre, horns are beeping, I am crying, and Andy is patting me gently on the back whilst making obscene gestures at other drivers out of the passenger window.

Simple but crucial problem – if a car in 'drive' should roll forward, but because of the incline is rolling back, which order do you take your foot off the pedals? As it happens the answer (thanks to Andy’s automatic driving lessons) was not unlike a manual hill start, but figuring that out under pressure was like learning to cut bomb cables whilst someone makes the 'Countdown' clock noise in your face.

Still, we were soon on the road, listening to Christmas carols in blistering sunshine and congratulating ourselves for getting the bond on our apartment back (I’m not going to detail exactly what happened, but the repairs involved extreme glue, a nail and a Sharpie).

A couple of hours later we pulled into Motel 6, apparently one of the best places in the States to bed on down and set up a meth lab.

 

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the tag line the chain go for, settling instead on “free wifi”.

Just after checking in, we realised this would be better phrased “free of wifi”, or “free wifi cheese signal on your mac but actually not enough power to hook you up to the internet” (yeah, I guess it’d be tough on the signage).

Starbucks saw a lot of custom from us in those few days.

As many of you have pointed out, this blog is largely led by photos of me and Andy eating, so here are the week’s delicacies, courtesy of one Motel 6 microwave and some plastic cutlery.

Breakfast = banana and honey sandwiches (composed on a makeshift notebook plate).

Dinner = baked (well microzapped) sweet potato with tuna and sweetcorn.

Luxurious times indeed.

Anyway, food aside, we were off course there to train at the Art of Jiu Jitsu academy, a school with more swank than a Hoxton gallery.

Seriously, this place is beautiful.

White walls, white mats, white towels, white gis (compulsory white gis, if you’re thinking of visiting), with a smattering of paintings (done by, as if it wasn’t cool enough, a skateboard in motion) and acres and acres of medals.

Somehow, whilst training, all that white made me zen out and think clearer (I have a touch of the ADHD about me).

Standing outside the door on the first day, it is the most intimidating place in the world.

We needn’t have worried.

We did three competition classes over three days, and each time I was wowed by the clarity of instruction, the friendliness of the teachers and students, and the sheer circus-like moves of the Mendes brothers themselves. One particular roly-poly pass from an opponents de le Riva guard actually made me laugh at its simple brilliance (it goes without saying that perfecting it to that ‘simple’ level was anything but).

Professor Galvao and the Atos San Diego crew had prepared us well for the tough pace in the lunchtime sessions, which are designed as a testing ground for actual competition strategy, and coupled with a Q&A afterwards.

It was an amazing opportunity, even if I did steer clear of the Ruotolo Twins, who looked distinctly like they could kick my ass.

To celebrate our survival (albeit a very sweaty, sore survival) we took a little last day trip to Ruby’s Diner next door.

Recovery drinks be damned - Andy's apple pie and icecream clocked up an impressive 1,000 calories on its own...

...whilst my peanut butter Hershey's shake was a ladylike 850.

We even managed to squeeze in a trip to ‘The Hobbit 3D’ before we flew home.

So twelve weeks in, we’ve sampled two astounding schools (to be honest, I think it’ll be hard to go back to “normal” training).

We’ve lived (for anything from four days to two months) in three different cities, in four different abodes.

I've changed hair colour multiple times, gained one random tattoo, and we've eaten...well, you know about our eating habits.

Strangely it seems both super short and like a lifetime.

We’re planning to spend the next three months in South East Asia, jumping between the famous Muay Thai training camps of Phuket, the bustle of Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh and Phnom Penh, and the deserted beaches of Cambodia and Vietnam.

But between then and now, there’s Christmas…

What I Learnt At Atos

Today was our last BJJ session at Andre Galvao’s Atos Academy. We opted for the competition training. Something about the way we could have a four day break afterwards made us weirdly brave (not brave enough however, to have warmed up with the 10am class beforehand).

Two hours in we were more sweaty, exhausted and sore than we had previously thought humanly possible.

I had (accidentally) sampled a competition class before, on a day when Andy was injured, so was wise to the painful practices that went on in the 12-2pm slot (13 minute same-person-stays-on rodizios anyone?) but it still hurt.

Michael Liera Jr. pushed us through movements, specific sparring and speed drills in a manner that would have made Professor Galvao proud. Put it this way, at 12.45pm I felt utterly destroyed and like the class should definitely be winding down, and then we did another hour.

But as the Convoy Street part of our adventure draws to a close, I feel kind of sad.

I can’t speak personally for Andy (though having listened to me bang on every day on the bus trip home, he could probably speak for me) but our 11 week gatecrash of the Atos environment has taught me some amazing lessons. Even if I haven’t yet mastered that darn leg drag.

1) For a relatively small club, Atos has a disproportionately high number of world champions. We’re not talking “once got an honorary bronze at a local competition here”, we’re looking at several times a year, several years running at the top of the global podium.

Having watched those people train (and sampled the rate and precision with which they rip my limbs to pieces) it is a worthy result of hours and hours of drilling, every day of the week. You might just be touching hands on the mat, but mentally they have already passed your guard and secured 7 points, because they’ve done it 40 times at speed against every person in the class. Actually, mentally is the wrong word; they’ve done it so often it’s as automatic as breathing.

If you’re training for a competition with them, it’s amazing. If you’re up against them, be afraid, very, very afraid.

2) Given that disproportionate rate of world champions, you would expect to find one or two egos in the dojo. To be honest, if I even placed in the Worlds, I’d be wearing my medal to class every day. But you’d be wrong.

You’ll be able to identify the champions by the way they slice through your legs as if they were tissue paper, but bragging is kept very much on the downlow. And regardless of my very unchampionlike performances on the mat, everyone has gone out of their way to help me improve.

I think it’s a top-down result of having an eight times world champion with an obvious love of teaching and a devotion to his students’ wellbeing at the helm, but you get the feeling any progress you make is part of an overall victory for the club.

Which, given we could have just as easily been the BJJ equivalent of live mice fed to a tank full of snakes, is rather nice.

3) On the subject of winning, Atos fully endorses the “feel safe to make the mistakes during rolling” mentality.

People here spar hard, like they’re in a competition, but there is a distinct absence of douchebaggery, and no-one is going to mock or berate you if you try something and make a mess of it. The only mistake you can make is to just lie there, under those world champions, and stop trying.

If you score points or a submission, you’ll touch hands and start again. If they do, the same thing happens.

There’s a certain freedom in knowing it doesn’t matter if you have a bad day on the mats, and over the months I’ve seen myself slowly shifting from absolutely petrified, reactive defence lockdown to more practical defence, more continuous escape efforts and a submission attempt or two. This for me is big progress.

4) Respect is a big thing at Atos. Everyone works when Professor Galvao tells them to. Noone swears at each other or messes around.

But overall it’s a family environment (in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word).

It’s not unusual to see Sarah, Andre and Angelica’s daughter, playing by the side of the mats, or with her dad before class. Many of the club members come as a family package and there’s hanging out across all age groups.

I’m not sure whether it’s because there are two brown belt women in regular attendance, or because Andre is so obviously enamoured by his wife, but as a woman I have never found anywhere as comfortable to train. Sleazy comments, pickup efforts, or antiquated “I don’t really want to go with a girl” putdowns are noticeably absent. I felt equal, if smaller and a bit naturally weaker, to any male student on the mat.

5) Jiu Jitsu is changing, it’s a fluid, ever-morphing commodity. We’ve all seen the traditional stand up guard passes and collar chokes, but there’s a whole world of new moves that are being invented to foil the old-school repertoire.

If you train at Atos, you’ll soon notice the predilection for close-range, seated moves, and inversion.

Well this week anyway (they’ve probably devised something more devious already).

We were in town just long enough to attend the Atos yearly grading, an event which even 27 x world champion Renato Laranja chose to rock with his presence. It ran an hour or so over time, and was filled with Professor Galvao’s proud stories of his students. And (in a completely unpredicted turn of events) both me and Andy picked up a first stripe for our purple belts.

Professor Galvao, Angelica, Chelsea, Mike Carbullido, Michael Liera Jr, Manny, Rick D, Matts Langford and Smith, Y J, Carlos, Jason, Sabara, Savannah…the list goes on and on, but I want to say one big collective thank you to everyone at Atos for making us feel so welcome, and helping to restore my interest and confidence in Jiu Jitsu. I’m very proud to wear that stripe, the t-shirt, and reflect your training in any way.

We only wish we could have stayed longer, and of course, we’re already busy saving for our allgalvao.com subscription…