Alan’s Summer Camp
What a dreamy beginner of summer I had! I took my home on wheels and headed towards Riihimäki, a small town in Southern Finland. I have friends and family members living around the area and quite few of them do jiujitsu as well so it’s very convenient when I can take care of my social life and training at once!
Anyway, woke up to this beautiful, hot summer day and Alan Do Nascimento aka Finfou was having one week Summer Camp in Heracles Academy. Alan is originally from Brazil but has been In Stockholm, Sweden as a head coach in Allstars Training Center for several years. He’s been in the sport about the same amount of years than I’ve been on this earth so I was looking forward the classes and maybe hearing some stories throughout those years.
I got to the first class just on time and as a nice surprise my brown belt brother was also there! First class was with gi and we were going through k-guard/matrix-guard and different scenarios from there, usually ending up with ankle locks. I’m very intuitive in sports and if somebody would ask me what is the name of certain guard or how to do it, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer, I just do different guards whenever they feel good of doing without any analyzing :D And I remember first time somebody showed me k-guard I wasn’t too convinced I’d implemented that in my game. But now there’s been quite a few seminars/classes based on this technique and I’m starting to warm up for the idea and actually got few successful situations with k-guard in sparring. Alan had very nice way of teaching, there were lots of reps and he was explaining key parts and principles of the techniques instead of going into super specific details.
After the training I invited myself to my friends place and we had a nice catch up over the lunch. Also they let me take a short nap in their children’s room on a proper bed, which was well needed after sleeping all these months in a van. We all drove back to the academy for the second training session, which continued the same theme as the morning class but as nogi. As much as I enjoy meeting new people, it’s always such a joy to train with old friends. There were lots of laughter and sweaty hugs to give. And because training is not really training without sauna on top, we rented a cutest little sauna by this beautiful lake close-by. To wrap up this beautiful day, I invited my dear friend Sofia for a sleepover in my BJJBiili.
We stayed the night by the lake and had a refreshing skinny dip before brekkie in the morning! After swimming and breakfast we headed to the morning nogi-class and continued with ankle locks. At this point my calves and ankles had already gotten nice summer look :D A group of us headed for the lunch after the class and we spent almost 2 hours talking and Alan was telling such interesting stories of his years in jiujitsu. The sport has definitely lived through changes throughout those years. It seemed to be such a wild west back in the days!
Alan’s classes, seeing my close ones and hanging by the lake were such a good kick start for the summer and for the next leg of the journey: 4 day Everyday Porrada Camp in the cutest Finnish summer town!
