Goodbye, Vegas.
Vegas was another short, but interesting destination on my trip. It was cool to stay with Martin Kampmann and his wife and get a glimpse of the life of a full time professional fighter.
I know that many people dream of standing in the cage in front of thousands of people, but not many have an idea of just how much time, work, sweat, blood, pain and dedication it takes to get there. I had one MMA fight back in 2003 and quickly admitted to myself, that I don’t have what it takes to do it. I highly respect those few who manage to keep up that lifestyle and Martin is one of them. He is in my eyes one of the most intelligent and technical fighters in the UFC at this moment. The last two fights have ended in close decision losses, leaving him with losses on the record but a lot of new fans.
Watch out for him against John Howard on June 26th!
Early training at Xtreme Couture today
I felt really tired this morning, when I woke up. Have definitely been a little too hard on my body lately, but I decided to go train a little bit in Xtreme Couture nevertheless.
It was just me, Martin and Kyle and we did lots of situation sparring for a couple of hours. Rolling with guys like this who are in really good shape, I can really feel how my strength has declined on the trip, not having done any physical training for more than three months. It was really good training though and when I first got warm and up in gear, I felt pretty good.
I will rest now before the competition on Saturday. I will be interesting to see how I feel, if this is enough time to recover. I probably should have stopped training a few days ago, but I didn’t want to miss out on training with Martin in the gyms here in Vegas. A good, solid warmup and I will be fine hopefully :D
Made it to Vegas, trained at Drysdale’s first thing.
I left San Francisco early this morning after two good days there. It was a short flight to Vegas, where my friend Martin picked me up and we drove directly from the airport to Drysdale’s gym for a few hours of high intensity no-gi training. Robert was teaching a class on the guillotine which is something I have been working a lot on on this trip, so it was very cool to get some input there from one of the best in the world.
I had some good rounds of sparring. I feel a little tired and also didn’t want to go too hard at this time, but it was still very good. Lots of high level guys there.
Now we are resting a little bit before going to Xtreme Couture for evening training. I may or may not skip it, since I don’t want to risk training too hard only three days before competing at the Worlds in LA. I’ll see when I get there.
