I've forgotten to post here again, problably because there has been so much other stuff going on.
But in short, in April my coach Joacim Bergman (Hilti BJJ brown belt) held a seminar at our academy for 3 days. It was a very good seminar and people liked it, first day we did some takedowns, pulled guard and worked for immediate sweeps from there. The second day we worked on butterfly guard and on sunday we trained deep half-guard on my request. Great seminar.
I also attended the second Hilti training camp in Turku in April, great day. Hilti BJJ black belts Sauli Heilimö and Åke Zaar showed us some techniques mainly, good stuff, some stuff I actually implemented into my game, so I'm happy! Plenty of sparring, I think I did maybe 12 3 minute rounds with other purple belt, 2 3 minute rounds with brown belts and one round with a blue belt. So I was exhausted. The there were some new belts awareded, 2 brown and a few purple belt, Tuomo got his purple finally. And then some no-gi rolling, I rolled maybe 7 or 8 rounds as I was so exhausted. Good day, learned a lot of got to roll with a lot of new cool people. We were around 100 people attending that camp.
In early May I got injured, popped something in my ribcage when I was choking Ville from the turtle. So I was out for 2 weeks, held one class but didn't roll myself. 3-4 days before the finnish bjj nationals I got back to training. My ribs were still sore, but it was ok. No weight cutting as I was in 82,3kg this time (because of the ribs I couldn't bother cutting). The result wasn't very good... but it was my first time fighting in the elite (purple, brown & black belts) division.
On saturday we fought in the absolute division, I won my first fight (the picture) by bow n arrow. We were problably 3-4 minutes fighting stand-up, or we were pretty much very cautios both, I threw him with my #1 throw and landed in half-guard. I managed to pass pretty fast and he tried to turtle up and I took his back and worked the choke.
Then I lost to Janne Autio in the second match by armbar. On sunday I lost my first fight to Jukka Korpelainen by bow n arrow.
Our club won 1 gold in the white belt males -70kg and silver in the white belt females -64kg. The other guys fought well and won several matches, but didn't place on the podium unfortunatley.
As a Hilti BJJ purple belt I have permission to grant blue belts with permission from a black belt, so I awarded my first and only blue belt so far to Jussi, who won gold (he also won gold in the finnish opens 2009 in -64kg).
I've been to a physiotherapeut 3 times now due to constant back problems and he has managed to get it pretty good now, feels great tbh.
Last week was a great week for training, lots of rolling and hard rolling. Felt like I had some real flow, maybe because my back works properly again :)? This week was just studies for exams, but now I'm done with them and this morning I started with a nice no-gi roll of about 30 minutes with Tuomo.
I got a good feeling about this summer, lots of hard training :)
