The cauliflower chronicles

Damn it, I finally got my first cauliflower ear, as you can see in the picture below

At the beginning of last week i recognized a little bump in my inner ear, but as it wasn't to bad and I was on a business trip the whole week I didnt worry to much about it. I think this is also a little present I took home from the Summer Camp, as I wasnt able to do any jits due to my bad shin. Never the less, went to No-Gi training yesterday and now it has swollen to a point where I am definitely gonna see a doctor today. I curiouse what he will say, but from my point of view there is only one option, which is, to drain the damn thing…

If you never see a proper drainage have a look at Kurt Osiander in the video below

As I  lended the title for this blog entry from one of my favourite books related to BJJ, I have to give it a shutout. 

The book is called: The Cauliflower Chronicles: A Grappler's Tale of Self Discovery and Island Living and was written by Marshal D. Carper. I've read the book twice so far and I can really recommend it, as it is well written and an easy and quick read for those who love BJJ and are intrested to get a little insight into the Hawaiian Culture

2nd Day addon Braulio Estima Summer Camp

so trough the antibiotics I got at the hospital, my infection got way better and I will be back training at the beginning of next week. 

Never the less, one thing I forgotten to mention, that on the second day of the Braulio Estima Summer Camp, there were also some promotions going on – I mean what could be better, than receiving your belt from Braulio Estima. He handed out one blue, one purple, one brown and also one black belt. You can find more information on here

Gracie Barra Channel Islands

It was great to see these promotions and also the feelings attached, especially for the higher belts - I mean, come on, everybody especially as a white belt, dreams of the day receveing your black - and it was somehow emotional to see such things happen, after years of blood, sweat, tears an commitment - allthough i knew Rob at that moment only for a few hours, I could imagine the effort he put in to get to this level .

1st Day of the Braulio Estima Summer Camp

As stated before in this blog, I travelled with a buddy of mine to the Braulio Estima Summer Camp held at Jersey Islands (St. Helier)

We landed on Saturday the 23rd and had a modest time before the first training started at 2:30 pm, so we first went to our hotel which wasnt that beautiful as I thought from its Internet presentation. After a quick check-in we went to a grocery store nearby to get some proper food and than went on to explore our way to the Fort Regent Center. As big as the Center was, it wasn't that easy to find, but after some searching we managed to get our way up to the center.

I have to admit something like this is not really common at our lines of latitude – this center provides you with a single point of contact for various sports related activities, ranging from the classical muscle pharm, were the big boys are lifting steal to various martial arts academies and a superior children's playground. After some further searching we found the playground of the guys from Gracie Barra Chanel Islands and were first a little unsure, if the announced 45 people would even fit into this room, but after a few minutes of waiting we were guided to the training area for the camp which was pretty big as you can see below

I really have to admit, that I was immediately impressed, looking around and seeing 4 Black Belts, 5 Brown Belts various Purples and Blues, which is not common for the gym I am training – not taking anything away from this guys. So after a short periode of self-warmup Braulio divided us in groups of four to five with the task of writing down some topics which we would like to be covered during the seminar. In addition to his topics this lead to the following three main topics for the week

• Sidemount Escapes
• Back Escapes
• Open Guard

The first day started for us with Braulio showing us a nice side mount escape when also your right arm is trapped an you can only maneuver with your left – to my surprise this escape ended in a sneaky arm bar, which I cant wait to try out on some of my training buddies ;)

After that relatively short session, we ended the day with a group photo rocking our free Camp T-Shirts

Braulio Estima Summer Camp

So I decided to participate at the Braulio Estima Summer Camp which will be held on the Chanel Islands from 23rd of June to 30th of June.

This is acctually going to be the first time training twice a day and I am quite curiouse how my body will respond to that. Nevertheless I hope that this intense week of training will really boost my game and that I am going to learn a lot from Braulio and his brother Victor.

At the moment eleven people are registred including one of my friends - so I have a training partner with me, which is quite nice from my point of view.

For sure I am gonna make daily updates during the camp on here, concerning what we learned and all the other stuff that is going to happen

Here is the link to Camp

http://braulioestima.eventbrite.com/