I was originally planning to fly to Paris, then spend some hours walking around a bit before taking the train down to Montpellier. A few days ago, I got an email from someone who invited me to come to Paris for training, so I decided to buy a new train ticket the next morning instead (set me back 44 euros). This means, I can stay one full day in Paris for training, sightseeing, etc :)

I will be staying with Jerome, who is training in a gym, I haven’t really been able to find the website for yet. I don’t understand any french, so makes things a little more difficult on google :D

Looking forward to spend one night in Paris!

Today, I got two packages in the mail with clothes for my trip, one from Scramble and one from Nogi.

Got some really cool t-shirts and rashguards from Scramble and some shorts, rashguards and a hoodie from Nogi. Everything fits me perfectly, is super nice quality and (most importantly) looks really cool ;) I don’t like all the in-your-face-kill-you-and-knock-you-out clothes out there, so I think these brands are just right for me.

Huge thanks to Scramble and Nogi for the gear, it is really nice of them to support me on the trip. Please make sure to visit their websites and check out all the cool stuff they have :)

Today, I got the second shot of my Japanese encephalitis vaccination. Another 980 DKR ($170) for that, but then it’s done and I should be safe for many years. Also got a prescription for some malaria medicine.

Just got back from the physiotherapist. She thinks I might have a very small injury on my meniscus, that can get annoyed sometimes if I do a wrong movement. It most definitely comes from the toehold I was put in at a turnament six months ago. I should be able to train on my trip as long as I ice and rest for a few days it if it hurts again. And I should get an MRI scan when I get home in the summer.

So all in all, it is good and bad. I definitely have problems with my knee, but hopefully not so bad that I can’t train during the trip. Any training before I leave is not happening though.

Two weeks of upperbody training coming up!

I felt my knee was a little sore today when I started training. I don’t recall anything has happened to it, in fact I have been ill since I got back from Portugal so I have only trained once after the Europeans and that was a week ago now.

I thought I would warm it up thoroughly and do some light rolling. The soreness didn’t go away much despite the warmups, and I managed to do a handful of rounds of semi light sparring. Right after the last round that finished up the class, I rolled off my opponent and sat down in a way that put some pressure on my knee, which resulted in a pretty bad pain from the inner meniscus area.

I injured this knee at a competition about six months ago and it had actually gotten pretty good again with lots of rehab training. It has still been a little sore when stretching and so, but nothing close to what I feel today. How can it get so bad, totally out of the blue?? :,-(

I am sitting at home now with an icepack on and is really nervous about how this will affect my trip. I don’t think I will be doing any training for the next two weeks before I leave to be honest. Really bad timing for numerous reasons, but especially because I get a visit from five swedes to my gym Wednesday and I would love to have rolled a bit with them. I’ll go to my physio/magician tomorrow and see what she says.

Really bummed that this happens now, I cross my fingers that it is nothing serious :-/

Ok, I haven’t really been in a hurry with getting my gallery online, since I don’t really have any photos from the trip yet, but for quite some time, I have been looking for a simple, well-functioning and configurable Flickr plugin for WordPress to do the job. Seemed like most of them were buggy or ugly (and I hate ugly websites), but today I finally found one that worked as I wanted it to. Basically I just want it to show thumbnails for my entire Flickr stream with lightbox integration, so people don’t have to go all the way to Flickr to see the full size photo.

Right now, I only have some photos from the preparations online. Check it out on the gallery page.

I will bring my DSLR for the trip and hopefully fill that gallery with some cool photos along the way :)

I am starting to plan the US part of my trip, and my biggest problem with this is, that I have so many invitations to so many interesting places, that I have no idea where to go and where to not go.

My plan so far is to go from Hawaii to Oregon in beginning of may and from there fly to New York on May 5-6 to meet my girlfriend for six days. After that, I will head west and hopefully end up in Los Angeles for the Worlds in the beginning of June. So basically, I have a month to get from New York to L.A. while visiting as many interesting BJJ gyms as possible along the way.

Anyone up for a little roadtrip? :D

I am going to need a lot of shorts for this trip, and the first ones have just arrived. I got two pairs from Maui Fight Gear, a small company in Hawaii, who kindly sponsored them to me. The quality seems really good and they look cool, I can’t wait to try them out tomorrow in the gym!

They are currently rebuilding their website, so I’ll post a link to them when they’re done :)

Back home from Portugal, and the test is passed :) There was actually plenty of room in my bag, especially when I bring my ripstop gi instead of a heavy cotton one.

Bringing both the small compact camera and the big DSLR worked fine. I could import from both to my ipad with no problem and even video from the small camera works flawlessly on the ipad for editing and uploading to YouTube. Image quality seems great with the small cam too and importing them to iPad, editing and uploading to the blog, flickr or facebook is really easy.

I brought a lot of my business cards for this website and threw them all over the seats in the hall every day, so maybe it’ll give me a few extra visits to this site. Also got to chat a bit with different people, Ryan Hall invited me to Washington D.C. and I also got a contact from Alliance in Atlanta. Two gyms I would like to visit for my preparations for the Worlds in June.

In general, I was pretty excited about how much people knew about my trip. Tudor, who is running a gym in Romania, I will be visiting, came up to me to say hi, super nice guy who I am looking forward to visit. I got a photo with Felipe Costa for the Kauai Kimonos sponsored athletes page on their website and I met someone in the airplane, who was a reader of my blog and told me he just taught my slowrolling “system” in his class the other day. Super nice to hear that :)

This BJJ community is really something special, and I can’t wait to get out there in three weeks and meet everybody :)

Competition wise, I lost my first match 5-2, but was pretty pleased anyways. I will do a post about that on ShogunHQ later today :) UPDATE: Post is online, read it here.

I also found a new iPad application for blogging called BlogPress. It seems much better than the wordpress app and it also supports video uploads, here is a test of that:

Today, I am heading to Portugal for the 2011 Europeans. It will be a five day trip and I will use it as a test for my globetrotter travel, to see how it will work to bring all this stuff that I plan to bring. Packing my iPad, DSLR add pocket camera to see if it is too much to have with me. Will also try and blog from my iPad there and post some photos from my cameras, to see how it all works out “in the field”.

Having found all the stuff I need to bring for this short trip and put it out on my table, I can’t help wonder how on earth I am going to have enough room in my backpack for all the stuff I need to bring on a four and a half month trip around the world? :)

Yesterday, I bought myself a nice little pocket camera for the trip. I ended up choosing the Canon Ixus 130, which has a very nice size and also seems to take good quality photos. Even more important, is shoots beautiful 720p video, so I will use it to do some videos from the trip, instructionals and film my matches when I enter competitions.

I am looking for a few rashguards to bring for the trip. I think they will be much better to train no-gi in, compared to tshirts, since they are easier to wash and dry in a short time.

I don’t know which one to get though. If anyone out there have suggestions for what rashguards to get where, please let me know! If you would like to sponsor me some, please let me know as well ;)

I’ve been looking a bit for a basic backpack to use for my gi and stuff when I will be going to training during the trip. A local martial arts shop sponsored me one of those for the trip, so it was nice to cross that off the list :) Thanks to BudoXperten for the support!

I got my awesome globetrotter gi from Kauai Kimonos about a month ago and even though it has been love at first sight, the A3 size was a just a little too big for me. I could use it with no problems, but the size wasn’t 100% perfect.

Today I got a surprise as I, completely unexpected, received a brand new A2 size gi from Kauai, totally out of the blue. It fits me perfect and Jonathan (the owner of Kauai Kimonos) made it even cooler than the first one by adding a beautiful embroided “We Are All One” logo on the back of it plus throwing in a pile of personalized patches for me to pimp my gi’s with.

What a cool surprise and very nice of Jonathan to do that for me, thanks!!

Gracie Magazine features an article about my trip today, check it out:

http://www.graciemag.com/en/2011/01/a-brown-belts-around-the-world-experiment-in-jiu-jitsu-hospitality/

Does anyone know how to get the cheapest one-way flight from Asia (preferably Tokyo) to Hawaii? Can only find super expensive tickets :-/

Today, I got the first of two vaccination shots against Japanese encephalitis. Each of the vaccinations costs a whopping 980 DKR, equivalent to USD$ 170. It does last for life though, but still pretty expensive, I think :)

I need to figure out, wether or not I should get some malaria pills. They are even more expensive, so gotta talk to people living in the areas I go, if it is necessary or not.

I put a countdown timer on the blog and looking at it right now, it says 43 days and 12 hours till departure. Times runs so fast, it doesn’t feel like it was very long ago, I got the idea to do this project and here I am with just over a month before I sit on the plane towards my first destination.

I’ve bought the first ten tickets, got vaccinated, insured, and renewed my passport. I also got some gadgets for the trip, such as a flashcard reader for my iPad so I can upload photos on the road, and a funky tripod so I can hopefully do some cool long exposure shots somewhere out in the world. More importantly, I finally got my pimped out, super light weight globetrotter gi from Kauai Kimonos, which I think will be perfect for traveling. I still need to find some nice grappling shorts, new shoes and other stuff, but it is not so urgent and I can probably buy some of that cheap on the way.

My training preparations has been pretty tough, but I want to be in the best shape possible for this trip. First of all, to handle all that training (combined with jetlag, strange food and so on), which I think will put a lot of stress on my body. Most places, I will only visit for a few days, and I want to get as much training done as possible each place, so there won’t be many breaks. I also wanna try and hit some competitions, and being fit for that is of course always important. Last, but not least, I want to do my best to avoid injuries, which I think are less frequent when I am strong and flexible.

I started doing my physical training for the trip in the end of september and have been doing it since with no breaks, besides a few days here and there due to Christmas, tournaments etc. Mondays and wednesdays, I do a cardio/endurance workout with the guys from my gi class, who are also competing at the Europeans. We are doing basic circuit training and has upped the amount and intensity along the way. Saturdays, I do heavy lifting, mostly for upperbody, since I still have problems with my herniated disc. It is getting much better though, and I can do things like boxjumps, lunges and similar, which was impossible just a year or so back. I also, try to do a basic stretching routine daily.

It is very obvious, how I have gotten in much better shape over the last three and a half months, I have been doing this training. In the beginning it was extremely exhausting to finish the workout, but now I can do a much longer and harder workout with no real problems. Wednesday we did six rounds of five stations with lunges, clean & jerk, sledgehammer, tireflips and ropeswings, and by the end I felt like I could go six more rounds (and that was even the same day I just got vaccinated). When I get really tired from working out or rolling, I only need to rest for a minute or so to get my breath back, and I feel fresh and ready again. My movements in jiu jitsu feels faster, more explosive and my grip feels really strong compared to earlier. Really nice to be in this great shape, I recommend it ;)

Grappling wise, I have been rolling consistently five days a week, and I can feel how my body gets more used to the high volume of training. Six months ago, three times a week were more than enough for me. I am very blessed to live a life without an alarm clock, so my body is allowed to sleep as much as it needs to recover ever single night. I think that plays a big role in my energy needs for all this training. I have also done some extra sparring with a very skilled brownbelt from another local gym as preparations for the Europeans, and has gotten a lot out of it. Nice to roll with someone who has a different style than what I am used to, and can put a lot of pressure on my game. I will need all the defensive training I can get for all those headhunters in the gyms out there, who are hungry to test out their meanest headlocks on visitors from out of town :D

With all this training, keeping my weight up has been very difficult. At some point, I dropped all the way down to 76 kilos, so I decided I had to start eating A LOT more. I managed to crawl my way up over 80 kilos now, but I would like to hit 82-83 by the time I leave. I generally have difficulty keeping muscle mass, so wanna have something to lose during the trip, so I don’t end up competing in -70 for the Mundials in June ;)

My plan is to keep this workout going until the day I leave, so hopefully I can stay injury free for that.

Went shopping with my MasterCard on AirAsia.com today and got three more tickets. From Kuala Lumpur, I will go to Kuching in Borneo, where I was invited by a small gym. I know nothing about the place, but I read that there should be some amazing nature and I really want to sail a canoe through a quiet jungle river, so that is my mission for Borneo :)

After Kuching, I head for Singapore for a few days, before I go to Bali to visit Jonathan from Kauai Kimonos. Don’t know yet how long I will stay in Bali, but it will be minimum 10 days or so, since I want to surf there and also spend my birthday there (april 4th), before I move on. Next stop from there will probably be the Philippines, but not sure yet.

Got all three tickets for less than 1000 dkr (around US$170), so that was not bad at all :)

I was bored the other day, so I fired up Photoshop and made some “business” cards, so I don’t have to write down my web adress all the time on the trip.

I also made it to the doctor today to talk about vaccinations for the trip. I am thinking I’d rather be safe than sorry, as I really can’t afford to get too sick on my trip due to my travel and training schedule. I got one for Yellow Fewer today, and they’ve ordered a few more for me to get in a month or so, right before I leave.