This post will be about couple 10 kg weight cuts, injuries and finally fighting at the ADCC European Championship. So lets start with the qualification, namely the ADCC German Championships in July. My preparation for it started greatly with the BJJ Globetrotters Summer Camp in Leuven (click to see photos). It finished a month shy off the tournament and I thought I'll be able to perform great. I had couple of minor injuries during the camp so I had a week of easy training. The next week the world start to fell down as I had very bad clavicle bone injury, most likely broken, still I didn't went to doctor to hear the sentence. I happened accidentally, as I slipped on the wet floor during sparring. Anyway, I still wanted to participate and qualify for the Europeans. The next terrible thing happened as I got sick 2 weeks before the competition, which totally screwed my weigh-cut plan. I still had around 10 kilos to cut and with the illness I had the hardest cut of my life ever. I could cut only two kilos as I was sick and had to loose somewhere 8 more in just a week. And the fights started just after the scales, which made all worse...

   
Week before 74 kg and then 66 kg hit the scales

Finally I made the cut, traveled to the competition totally dehydrated for 5 straight hours waking up at 4 in the morning. So guess in what condition I went on fighting... Ah yeah the fight went terrible and I somehow survived just to run to the toilet afterwards to vomit :P


Let us now draw a line and be happy I qualified to the Europeans. The event held on 1st of October and part of my preparation was to combine holiday in Bulgaria with a summer training camp in Sozopol organized by the Bulgarian Grappling Association. Ah and just before the camp I worsened my somewhat cured injury during gymnastic rings training. The camp went well, besides my shoulder not recovering at all and dislocating a rib. So there was me sitting in the bed after training with hands on my head hardly moving at all just wondering how I'll compete at the most important event of my grappling life in just a month. Unable to train grappling I decided to have a lot of trekking around the beautiful, which I either way planned, but not that much as I actually did (click to see video with some 4K shots by me).

I recovered to some extent and two weeks later traveled to Germany to have a short camp before the event. Strangely doing grappling was still pretty risky, since I could re-injure myself, but climbing or riding a bike didn't effect me at all. So I did the techniques of training had very little sparring, only couple of which harder in the last week. Still, I trained 5 hours daily riding around 600 km bike in those two weeks and doing hours of bouldering in the gym. I also managed to climb one of my old rock projects outside, which was a great experience as well. All of this I did eating between 1000 and 1500 kcal, while burning around 4000-4500. All of this to hit the scale under 66 again starting off 76. This time my health and plan worked perfectly and I not only miraculously recovered from the injuries, but made the weight limit perfectly and didn't loose power at all!

In my first fight I fought David Kohout out of Czech Republic, whom I had the fortune to tap with a heel hook after landing a good scissor leg takedown. Against second one, Nicolas Ott, I employed brute force to secure a narrow victory in the last seconds of the fight after failing to tap him in the time limit. With the third one, and the eventual european champion Janusz Andrejczuk, we had great submission scrambles, which I just edged a bit making him to switch strategy and surprise me with a guard pass to side mount and then to full mount. I managed to escape with not much time before the end so yep I lost again by points. Here is a video with all of my three fights:

As you can see on the video portrait we were a big team there, and much of the guys of my team traveled there to watch me and Meraz fight. Speaking of which, the Yazidis bear fought very strong, and only experience cost him a medal during this competition. The other two friends Veso Dukov and Kristian Popov, fought excellent too. Veso won 3 fight by submission and was caught in a surprise by his 4th opponent in a kimura with foot, which left him no option but to tap, while Kristian seriously injured one of his opponents, who didn't tap and sneaked with a point victory. Alex Neufang lost by a point too, but I just told him already that the 99 kg division is just too big for him and on that level if someone is afraid of his sharp submissions, he'll just go for the points game, and so it happened.

Matrix BJJ team :)

Besides fighting I was very happy to have a non grappling friends to cheer me in a competition in the face of my climbing mates Amos, Ricarda, Ruwen, Matze and Maggie. I can only hope I performed well enough as they said :)

flexing with Rici and Amos


Luckily, after the Europeans Kris and Veso stayed at mine for the night, so that before their plane the next day we managed to do an epic roll session at the Matrix gym in Kaiserslautern. We rolled for hours and then ate huge burgers! Time to fly, see you again!