Archive for month: June, 2024

As we get ready for our 100th camp in a few days, I thought it would be fun to look back at some favorite memories from the last 12 years of this crazy adventure. While we’ve primarily focused on Jiu Jitsu at the camps, technique and rolling can be a bit boring to write about, so here is a non-exhaustive list, in random order, of memorable events from the last 99 camps!

The First Ever Camp

It was somehow coordinated that around 20 people—most of them I had met on a recent trip around the world—would all come train with us in Copenhagen for a week. Royce Gracie happened to be in town as well and he was actually the first instructor we ever hired for a camp. We had such an amazing time, and I knew right away that I had stumbled onto something special that I wanted to do more. They came back the next summer, brought some friends along, and the rest is history. I don’t have a single picture or video from that camp so you’re gonna have to do with the original spreadsheet of participants!

Fight Show in the Carlsberg Breweries

Our club in Copenhagen basically started out as a drinking club with a Jiu Jitsu problem and later turned into a Jiu Jitsu club with a drinking problem. We wanted to throw some big, fun parties, but we were poor. Early on, we realized that the camps could be a way to fund these dreams. One summer, we rented the recently closed Carlsberg Breweries buildings in Copenhagen and hosted a big summer party for the camp and our club’s members. We had a cage installed and ran some memorable matches; one of the kids from the club fought the teacher of the kids’ team. MMA rules. In suits. What a night!

Vodka & Violence

One of the first camps we did outside of Denmark was in El Salvador. Random, I know, but I wanted to go surfing. It was a small camp with only 20 people in a private house by the beach. We had a lot of spare time just relaxing in the garden during the day. Our beloved camper friend Oksana came all the way from Russia and didn’t speak any English. One day she was away with half the camp for sightseeing, and we decided to make a little film for her, completely in Google Translated Russian. And so, the movie trailer “Vodka & Violence” was born. I took us all day to film it because we laughed so much and had to film every scene so many times.

Swimming in the freezing ocean in Greenland

It’s already crazy enough to think that we hosted two camps in Greenland, of all places. The most remote, wild, and spectacular place I’ve ever visited. It’s expensive to get there, so I thought I would make the camp free for participants. To avoid too many people signing up for a free camp without being serious about actually going, I required a deposit that they would ONLY get back if they jumped in the ocean in Greenland during camp. Spoiler alert: Tons of people still signed up, then immediately realized that Greenland is far away and difficult to get to. I kept my word and only refunded those who got in the slushy waves with us! The camp itself was a truly amazing experience as we rolled with the locals, sailed with random fishermen to whale watch and got to know the life of people living in this special place.

“Crossface”

A handful of campers managed to put together a band and played live at the final open mat of the 2019 Summer Camp in Heidelberg, Germany. How often do you get to have a mosh pit at your open mat?

Summer Camp 2013 party & Fight Night

It was our club’s 10 year anniversary and we decided to have a big camp with a big party to end it. It was an epic location with a cage on the dance floor, where I had the silly idea to fight MMA against my long term training partner. Now veteran camp instructor Halldor from Iceland was only 16 at the time but his parents wrote a nice little handwritten note to us that said “It’s ok, Halldor can fight”. And so he got in the ring for an amateur MMA fight at the end up camp.

The First and Only UK Camp

It was the warmest week in 10 years in Bournemouth, and the camp was a beautiful, hilarious train wreck. Only one of the four big celebrity names we had on the poster actually showed up for the camp, but we had a fantastic time nonetheless.

Vikings vs. Tourists

It started as kind of a joke but ended up becoming a big tradition in Iceland: The Vikings vs. Tourists competition in traditional Icelandic wrestling, Glima. The old fighting art is struggling to stay alive, but we’re doing our part to help it as we once a year step up to get smashed by the Vikings and collect those sweet silver medals for Instagram.

“The Gentle Art of Travel” Documentary

Hands down the biggest side project we’ve ever done at the camps. Little did we know about a global pandemic lurking just around the corner, but it somehow made the long-awaited premiere an even more special experience. After two and a half years of work, we finally showed the film in a movie theater in Reykjavik, Iceland, followed by showings in Germany and Estonia before we made the film public on YouTube.

Open mat in a 1000-year old church

At the Castle Camp in Italy we had our own, private little church that dates back around 1000 years. One a rainy day, we pulled the mats in and it was perfect for an open mat!

Diving Contest Almost Became a Dying Contest

Our early camps in Belgium were in a sports hall with a swimming pool. An impromptu diving competition got us banned, but it didn’t stop us from doing it again at several other camps in everything from Olympic-sized pools to kiddie pools. It all ended in Arizona where someone dived from a giant ladder into a tiny pool, making everyone stop breathing for several seconds. She survived, but the diving competition was put to rest forever.

The Assassination Game

The assassination game started with squirt guns at the USA Camp, but we quickly realized that the Zen Camp in Poland was the perfect setting for this if we played it with plastic ninja swords. Countless hours have been spent hiding in bushes and trees, waiting for a target to come by.

We rented a Castle. Six times.

I had an old checklist of things I wanted to try and do in life, and one of them was to rent a castle. It took almost 10 years before the camps made that possible. It was supposed to be a one-off, but we ended up having Castle Camps five times in Italy and Portugal. Those were small, intimate camps with only a few people and lots of food and wine.

Hosted Two Weddings

It happens that people meet at camps, and somehow it also happened that some of these people decided to get married at camp. Why not!

Forest Fisticuffs

The wrestling show at the USA Camp in Maine was a random idea one year, but it quickly became a new tradition that I think will keep happening for many years to come.

Cabin Parties

During the pandemic, we really missed our pub crawls at the European city camps. We still managed to do some camps in the US, and that’s when we got the idea to do a “pub crawl” between the cabins of the USA Camp in Maine. The moment we found ourselves dancing in a tiny, wooden cabin with a DJ and decorations all over, we knew this would have to become a staple of that camp.

Scooter Race

A horribly bad idea, but to everyone’s surprise, nobody got hurt during a giant race on electric scooters at the Beach Camp in Pärnu, Estonia. Not sure we’ll do that again, though!

Plague Camp

Just months before the pandemic, we had a Winter Camp where pretty much everyone got sick with a horrible fever. At some point, we just gave up waiting it out, and the open mats were a battlefield of fever hallucinations. Many of us got tested for antibodies later on, and it wasn’t COVID, so we’d like to believe we did the whole pandemic thing before it became cool for the rest of the world. Can you spot the special guest on the group photo?

50th Camp Party

The 50th camp in 2019 was celebrated in style with an epic party in Heidelberg, Germany. We somehow negotiated an all-you-can-drink deal with the place at a very good price and ended up literally drying out the bar. The staff was very impressed; the manager, not so much.

Black Belt Promotions

While we do belt evaluations and promotions at camp now and then, it’s something that we keep to a minimum. Over the course of 99 camps, we’ve promoted only four black belts, as far as I remember. Each time, it has of course been a very special moment, as it’s always someone who has been part of the camps for many years. Honorary mention goes to Giles Garcia, who got his black belt disguised as a pizza, with no clue what was waiting for him in the box!

Dodgeball Championships

At the USA camps in Maine and Arizona, we’ve had some epic dodgeball tournaments. Nothing comes close to the moment when Seb from the UK—who is slightly disabled—took out an entire opposing team on his own and sprained his ankle in the process. The victory scene was straight out of Rocky, and we don’t have any pictures of it because everyone was lost in the moment.

Someone Borrowed a Flag

There are many ways the camps have made their mark on the world. One of them was when a certain iconic flag was missing from a certain iconic castle in a certain Central European country. Legend says that a group of people (who may or may not have been campers) spotted it from a bar and decided to go borrow it in the middle of the night, scaling a castle wall that had up until that moment defended the city from invaders since medieval times. The flag was returned safely with an apology note a few days later.

The Party Camp

Everyone who went will testify that this was one of the wildest camps ever. Distortion was a street festival in Copenhagen where more than half a million people partied in the streets every day for a week. It was pure madness, and I don’t think there’s anything like it anywhere in the world. So we decided to host a camp during the same week where both Gianni Grippo and Kenan Cornelius were teaching. Incredibly enough, we actually managed to train quite a lot every single day!

Snowman Competition

When a team of Icelandic guys signed up for the first-ever snowman competition at the Winter Camp, we knew we could expect something out of the ordinary. Look at how proud they are of their art piece!

Kids’ Disco Night

We have done a lot of fun things for grownups at camp, but at the summer version of the Austria Camp, we’ve been trying to do the same for kids. One of the most fun things we’ve hosted has been the kids’ disco night. It’s approximately an hour of dancing with balloons, costumes, and glowsticks, but we often hear from the kids that they felt like it was all night long and the best night of their lives. So cute!

The First Winter Camp

The first Winter Camp in 2015 was a complete mess. We didn’t have much experience yet in organizing camps, and it showed. We all had a great time, but I slept a total of two hours in three nights and I was pretty sure I was going to pass out on the last day when I found myself basically all alone to load mats onto a truck and drive them to three different Judo clubs around the area. The later Winter Camps became better and better organized, and the only few little things we can report from there are minor occurrences, such as setting a bar on fire.

Techno Bunker

Where and how the Techno Bunker exactly started, I am not sure. But it has become a tradition that has spanned many of our camps now. Usually kicking off at midnight at some point during a camp week, it’s a lights-off, glow-in-the-dark, techno open mat.

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There are many more fantastic memories I could add to this list but I will have to stick with this. Here is a little bonus slideshow with photos of good times at camps that I stumbled over when researching for this article:

Next stop is our one-hundredth camp, starting in two days. I am currently sitting in a strange, small castle hotel next to a highway just outside of Rome, finishing up this article before we head to the camp tomorrow, early in the morning. It’s been a long and wild ride to get to this milestone and I often stop to think how on earth we ended up here.

I deeply appreciate each and every one of you who decided to join us along the way, whether for a little bit or for many years.

Thank you ❤️

Christian

Where is the gym located?
St Mary’s, Orkney Islands.

How many people train there?
25-30 current active members.

Is the gym growing – if so by how many new members each month or year?
Yes, but slowly. Approximately one new member every month or two.

What are the highest and lowest belt grades training?
The lowest is white belt, and the highest are two purple belts, including the head coach (4-stripes purple).

When did the SBG Orkney, BJJ Scotland open?
December 2022.

Some facts about you:

Name: Mick McDaid
Age: 49
Belt: Purple
Profession: Support Worker (Mental Health)
Years in BJJ: 9
Other martial arts: Muay Thai, MMA
Currently living in: Orkney
Originally from: Brighton, UK

 

Please tell us the story of how your gym came into existence
Mick moved to Orkney from the south coast of the UK with his partner for a quieter life and a more scenic location. Although he knew that there was no BJJ club, he was aware of other martial arts clubs, and was planning on getting involved with them for some training and the possibility of starting some BJJ classes. Fortunately, Mick met a few folk that did indeed end up getting together for some unofficial grappling. As Mick was a purple belt, he was able to register with the UKBJJA as an instructor and obtain instructor and club insurance. He managed to source a community hall who were willing to offer the storage of mats and provide some availability to get a schedule together. Also, on the mainland of Scotland close to Orkney, there are some quality SBG gyms, so for this and other reasons, Mick contacted and affiliated with SBG.

Tell us about the people that train in SBG Orkney, BJJ Scotland – who are they?
Although there was already a small group with some grappling experience here, we ran some beginner courses and managed to gain and retain a good number of now-committed regulars. We recently held our first grading event and had SBG UK president and third-degree black belt Casey Jones visit us to oversee things and provide a weekend of seminars. We have a Judo brown belt, Thomas, who is now a BJJ blue belt and he teaches some of our classes. Scott has vast standup experience and teaches our standup classes. We also have another purple belt, Ryan, who recently relocated here and has now started teaching a few classes.

Why do they train?
The main reason people seem to be interested in joining is due to the popularity and effectiveness of BJJ in the UFC. We also now run a couple of striking classes, and some people come and start off with those and slowly get involved with the ground game. Others just seem to be looking for a new hobby, exercise, and social group to connect with.

What are some of the challenges of running a BJJ gym in general, and in your area specifically?
All of the people who are involved in the running of the club all work full-time, and some have families with young children. So keeping on top of the admin and finances whilst trying to continue the growth of the club can be challenging. This is obviously on top of preparing and running the classes, which can at times be time- and energy-consuming.

As we’re hiring community space, there are also numerous issues with this. We have to set our mats out and put them back away for each class, and at times we also have to cancel some of our classes due to other events taking place in the hall. We’re also restricted with the range of classes that we can offer due to availability. We are actively looking for our own exclusive premises so that we can install permanent equipment and offer a wider range of classes. However, it has been proving a challenge to find somewhere so far.

 

How do you see the future for BJJ in your area?
Some of our members have and/or are now looking at getting involved in competing. So we’re hoping to start getting a competition team together and attending some regular comps. Our current training space is also slightly out of town, so hopefully we’ll get our own venue in a more central part of the mainland here, which we would hope would attract and retain more members.

What’s the best thing about SBG Orkney, BJJ Scotland
The comradeship and close community ties.

What would you recommend Globetrotters to see in your area apart from the inside of your gym?
Fantastic sandy beaches and clean, clear (and cold) waters. Plenty of wildlife and scenic walks. There are plenty of attractions, and neolithic and archaeological sites to visit. There is also a lot of First and Second World War heritage.

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Thanks for sharing! If you’d like to visit SBG Orkney, BJJ Scotland you can contact them here.

Age: 33

Belt: Blue

Profession: Cloud support engineer for a data governance solution at a big IT company. Used to be an English teacher once upon a time (yes, I sang baby shark with a bunch of 7 year olds). Also had a one-night gig as a waitress at a strip club during my student days.

How many years in BJJ: First contact in 2018, training regularly since Sept 2021.

Other martial arts: Joined karate classes during the 90s karate boom in Poland, but my parents signed me out after a couple of classes for fear I was going to beat up boys at school (spoiler alert, I still did). My dad taught me some boxing principles (he is a boxing instructor by education), which I eagerly tested on the boys. In high school I took up capoeira for one year. I earned the first corda (white-yellow), but never learned my Capoeira name (the coach gives you a name after the batizado, first graduation).

Where do you live: Right now Puerto de Sagunto, Valencia, Spain, is the place I call home. But Spain in general.

Where are you from: An absolutely grim shithole in central Poland, Grojec. It was my life’s mission to get away from the place. If it weren’t for my parents who still live there, I’d probably never go back. Other than this, Poland is a pretty cool place to be from, and many people genuinely believe in the legendary Polish power.

Other fun or curious information you would like to share: Although I was a highly independent and capable child, my mom had spoon fed me until the age of 9. I knew perfectly well how to operate cutlery, but why bother if someone could do it for me? I had a low appetite anyway. The only thing that would do the trick and make me eat by myself was to threaten to tell my school “fiance”.

As a kid, I was madly in love with Ricky Martin (him being gay wasn’t common knowledge back then, thank god). I fulfilled my childhood dream by going to his concert in Barcelona a few years ago, and he was as dashing as ever.

I would do fashion shows for my parents using towels and scarves. Once I even employed my grandma and great grandma, who were seamstresses, to sew clothes based on my designs. There were items for me, my mom, and even some sort of a thong for my dad 🤣

I drove alone from Poland to Spain and back, which gave me serious driving trauma.

Monika Leżańska – BJJ Globetrotters

 

Tell us what inspired you to travel and train?
I’ve always been inspired to travel, so traveling and training was a natural step, especially since before Jiu Jitsu I did Crossfit for a while, where visiting other gyms is also a common thing. I have zero motivation to work out by myself, and I am not disciplined at all when I travel, so it feels good to throw in some Jiu Jitsu training here and there for my physical and mental well-being.

Gyms feel like home, regardless of the country. When I enter a gym, I am back in my comfort zone and I know what to do and how to behave. Everything is familiar and the people are not strangers – they are my training partners. It balances out the constant novelty of traveling.

Tell us about your most recent travel and your upcoming travel – where have you been and where are you going?
I’ve been on a traveling streak for the past 10 years (unleashing the beast started with ditching my ex, doing my first solo hitchhiking trip from Warsaw to Gdańsk in Poland, and going on the Erasmus exchange to Lisbon), and even more now that I work remotely and can afford more traveling. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting on a plane back from Poland after the Zen Camp to Valencia. The camp was an opportunity for me to rediscover Poland and look at it through the eyes of a tourist for the first time – and it’s so beautiful in spring. I went sailing in the Lake District (Mazury) in the north of the country, and overall I felt reconnected with my roots. Before Pärnu (Beach Camp) in July, I’m planning to visit Finland for the first time (long live matsurfing). In the meantime I’ll do some short trips with my camper van. Spain is a paradise on earth for caravaning and hiking, and my region – Comunidad Valenciana – is especially abundant in calas (small sheltered beaches) and pozas (natural pools).

Monika Leżańska – BJJ Globetrotters

What are the things you enjoy about travelling?
Because I get bored and become restless quickly, I enjoy the novelty, the thrill of an unfamiliar place, the feeling that anything can happen. The renewed sense of awe towards ordinary things – just walking down the street in a new place, watching people have a coffee etc. The change of routine, clearing my mind of daily worries. Also, I find the experience of traveling from one place to another almost meditative. I never get bored at the airport, on a plane, or in the car. I am not in my usual place (with my usual thoughts), not yet at the destination – it’s some sort of in-between space-time where there is nothing to do and I’m alone with random thoughts…

I am a huge advocate for couchsurfing, which I use both as a host and surfer. Over 50 people must have surfed my couch in Lisbon. There were 2-week streaks where I just washed bedsheets over and over, because every 2-3 days I had new visitors.
Thanks to couchsurfing I met people I would probably never meet in normal life and I got to peek into their daily lives, hear their stories, learn their recipes, and compare our habits and languages. I saw places I would never see otherwise. I visited bars and restaurants and natural spots hidden from tourists. In Thailand, I got to do a road-trip with two Thai girls. We camped at a natural park with a bunch of other locals, where I was the only foreigner.

With some of the couchsurfers I’ve built friendships that lasted for years, some of them until today. I even got my first teaching job through couchsurfing.

Can you give us some examples of experiences you had that make it worth traveling and training?
Globetrotters camps! To the camps I owe so many amazing people with whom I became friends. Like Jakub Siberski (aka. The Last Man Standing) – we visit each other and have so many adventures together (yet we remember so few)! I got to see my idol Craig Jones at a seminar in Thailand <3.

I enjoy the sense of belonging to a Jiu Jitsu community. The people are genuinely happy to receive visitors at their gyms; I have always felt very welcome. It’s a great way of measuring my level not just against people from my club, but a wider population of athletes with a variety of different styles. I learned a lot of useful things and tricks from other practitioners and coaches. Visiting other gyms also helped me mentally before competitions by removing the fear of facing strangers. I step onto the mats with more confidence and one less layer of anxiety.

What has so far been the most surprising experience for you when traveling?
I had so many adventures, big, small, weird, strange, and heartwarming, that it’s hard to pick a few.

I got close to getting married in Marrakesh so that we could stay in one room with a male Moroccan friend. According to Moroccan law, a man and a woman cannot share a room unless married (it applies to Moroccan citizens only). I even went to the washroom to wash my feet: my thought process was that one shouldn’t get married with dirty feet 🤣🤣🤣

Almost got arrested for wearing shorts in Rome. Okay, not me but my ex, and getting arrested was probably out of the question. My ex had a habit of pulling up the legs of his shorts (a habit shared by many Crossfit people, someone please explain). On that hot August day he was wearing a long tank top, which combined must have made him look like he was not wearing any shorts at all. Clearly it must have been a violation of some Roman street rule (no male shall bare his legs in public or something), because we got approached by the polizia, who first inspected his lower body and instructed him to pull down the legs of his shorts so that they cover his thighs. The polizia-men were totally fine, however, with my tiny shorts barely covering my butt. Viva l’Italia!

In some small Spanish village we struck up a chat with a local, and when he found out that I was Polish he started reciting Witold Gombrowicz (a modernist Polish writer) from memory and explained that he learned the language by himself because he really enjoyed his writing. Mind blown.

Among the people I hosted on couchsurfing, there was one psychologist specializing in dreams. I am usually a very rational, down-to-earth person, but I do acknowledge there are things beyond our comprehension. We talked a lot about sleep-related phenomena, like lucid dreaming. During her visit, I experienced it for the first time, without trying or exercising. It was a thrilling experience. We also had a very interesting dream-therapy session, which made an unpleasant recurrent dream I used to have go away.

Monika Leżańska – BJJ Globetrotters

Are you a budget traveller – and if so how do you plan for a cheap trip?
If there was an award for budget traveling, Polish people would get it without a doubt. The desire to travel and explore is so deep, it’s really impressive how far we can stretch our tiny PLN budgets. I managed to travel a lot as a student by means of couchsurfing, staying in the biggest dorms in the cheapest hostels (some places I’d rather forget), sleeping in my car, wild camping sometimes (illegal in most of Europe), traveling to where I had friends; no taxis, only public transport, getting food and drinks from supermarkets rather than eating out, doing stuff that is free, planning things ahead and doing research to avoid tourist traps, choosing options for locals rather than for tourists (eg. a hotel-provided taxi in Marrakech is 4 times more expensive than one hailed in the streets). Traveling with hand-luggage and being smart about packing.

Even though now I don’t need to be so disciplined and I seek more comfort when traveling, the above habits are still my default and I can choose to break them to treat myself, or when I am tired etc. The accommodation is a secondary thing to me, I don’t travel to spend time in a room. So as long as I have a bed and a shower (will pay extra for no cockroaches), I am good. I definitely spend more on experiences now, like trips, classes, sports activities, cultural or historical attractions, but overall the student mentality allows me to travel a lot and not ruin myself in a blink.

If you were to pass on travel advice to your fellow Globetrotters, what would it be?
I think Globetrotters are a bunch well versed in the art of traveling, so I’m not sure what else I could share. I can highly recommend couchsurfing (or matsurfing); people are often shy or worried about staying at a stranger’s place, but in my experience the pros outweigh the cons. Same for hostels. I also love traveling alone – I very rarely travel with other people, and as much fun as it is to travel with company, I find those solitary trips more enriching and I usually do more things and I am motivated to be more active and outgoing. Also, get a van :D I absolutely love my #vanlife trips, the freedom to sleep wherever I want and just roam around.

Thank you to Monika Leżańska – BJJ Globetrotters for making this interview