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BJJ Globetrotters Newsletter // May 2017
Dear Globetrotters,

I just got back home from a trip to New York a few hours ago and is sitting here by the computer, trying to get ready for what's about to hit me: Six camps in the next five months. My to-do list is longer than ever and I'm not sure if I'll have time to sleep at all before October, but I'm very, very excited about it still.

First up is the Caribbean Island Camp here in Saint Barth next week. The first participants are already arriving in two days, so I better get started with the final preparations!

Have a fantastic day,

What you'll find in this month's newsletter:
  • April's photo competition winner 
  • Goodbye to Christian, our former newsletter editor
  • Hello to Becca, our new newsletter editor!
  • Globetrotters Academy in focus: Off The Grid BJJ, Cocoa Beach,     Florida
April's photo competition winner
Congratulations to the winners, who won a dinner in Kairo, paid by BJJ Globetrotters!

Every month we will give away a prize to the best travel photo starring our lightweight travel gi. If you want to participate, send your photo to mail@bjjglobetrotters.com with the subject "Photo competition".
More than 120 tickets already sold for the Fall Camp
Goodbye to Christian, our former newsletter editor
This month we are saying goodbye to our newsletter editor, Christian Ifversen and introducing the new one, Becca Millar. Let's catch up with them both and find out more about their role!
Hey Christian. Let's start by telling us a bit about yourself.

Age: 37
Belt: Black
Profession: Thinker & tinkerer. I do my own (crazy) projects, and I work as a business consultant. Also part-time assassin. Check out my Linkedin Profile if you need my services.
How many years in BJJ: Around 15 years
Other martial arts: I started doing martial arts at age 12 and did the whole tour of traditional martial arts landing me at Shootfighting before I finally settled on grappling at around age 20. Haven’t looked back since then.
Where do you live: Copenhagen, Denmark
Where are you originally from: Same place!

Other fun or curious information you would like to share?
Well, I just launched a research project that hopefully will help us all understand the impact Jiu Jitsu has on our lives, and why it means so much to us all! The main part is a survey for anyone doing Jiu Jitsu should go and do right now! It takes about 20 - 40 minutes to complete. I am sure the readers will find it quite interesting to be part of it and follow the results of the research.

Oh, and a completely unrelated but curious piece of information that is worth pulling here: Christian Graugart and I once fought in a show MMA match. We’ve known each other since we were teenagers, so it was a rather friendly one. But we did manage to punch each other in the face a couple of times. Christian actually superman-punched me in the beginning of first round. Then it was sort of on, haha! You will have to track it down on YouTube if you’re curious to know how it went from there.

So, what was your favourite thing about writing the BJJ Globetrotters newsletter? What were the biggest challenges?
Reaching out to passionate Jiu Jitsu people from all over the world has been an incredible experience. As editor I’ve had the chance to talk to so many different people (not everything made it to the newsletter!), and it has been a joyride to see (and play a tiny part in) the growth of the community the past year or so.

Ok, challenges?! Hmmm, well, clearly the biggest challenge has been to not just quit my job and start traveling fulltime, haha. I’ve talked to people from everywhere from the northeastern tip of Russia to the tip of South America and all of them have been reaching out their hands, and they’ve all said the same: "Come and visit, we’ll host, we’ll help, we’ll train, we’ll show you our hometown!" The hospitality and open-mindedness in these circles is almost unreal, and the message for us all is quite clear: go out there and get it!

Other than that the challenges have been minor. Some people around the world seem to have a more loose and liberal idea of what “deadline” means :-D. But hey, I’m from Northern Europe and people tend to be a little more uptight up here. Besides, I myself was never very good at deadlines, so it’s all good.
Have any trips or stories you’ve heard along the way particularly stood out?
There have been so many good stories. One of the first stories I did was on a gym in Kampala, Uganda started by an American woman working for the Foreign Service there. 

She was a white belt with no prior teaching experience that had managed to build everything from scratch down there. 

At the time I interviewed her, they had around 50 members, and she and the members were so passionate about Jiu Jitsu.

You put Jiu Jitsu in a completely random place in the world, where nobody has ever heard or care about it, and it just blossoms. 

Sometimes it seems like It’s a freaking cactus, it’ll find nutrition in any desert!

I thought that was an exemplary story of the power of Jiu Jitsu.

I’m probably also a bit biased here because I fancy the outskirts of this world so much myself. I always try to go off the beaten path, and a gym on the edge of the jungle in Kampala seemed pretty much like that. I’ll visit them for sure one day.
Do you do much travelling yourself?
I have and I suspect I will do even more the coming years, as I hope to travel with my research project about Jiu Jitsu. Jiu Jitsu is a global phenomenon and so I hope to use Whywedobjj.com to bring in stories and insight from all over the world.

Other than that I have had a blast at the various camps I’ve been at, and the travel I’ve done on my own through the Globetrotters community. The camps are quite unique, but not intense in the same ways as when you travel alone. I really love getting on that plane by myself and heading to some odd destination without a clue of what is going to go down! And then I don’t really drink that much back home or when traveling alone. But at the camps it seems like the partying is an integrated part, so it’s a fun break from my more regulated normal life...

But to be honest, combining travel and training thing is also quite new to me. I’ve always traveled a lot, and still do so. In the 90’s and 00’s long before the BJJ Globetrotters movement began I was traveling the world intensively. It just never struck me to combine it with training. Back in 2003-04 I worked in Singapore where I trained Muay Thai rigorously, and I also do remember training Pencak Silat back in ‘99 in some remote Indonesian village under a chain smoking and very friendly 60 year old grandmaster wearing a funny hat and doing seemingly endless and pretty useless knife-defense katas. That was a pretty far out experience now that I think of it.

And, oh, another important journey I have to mention: I traveled to India as a playing coach of the Danish National Kabaddi team to participate in the World Cup in 2013 and 2014 at stadiums with up to 30,000 spectators. (Just YouTube Kabaddi World Cup if you’re lost here!). Those were two very intense trips to put it mildly. We mostly had our asses kicked and served on a silver platter, but had tons of fun, and managed to win a couple of fights too. We were of course sponsored by the BJJ Globetrotters, and I believe you can find the article in the newsletter lying around on the web somewhere.

Sorry, I’m digressing here, but anyways, as much as those were indeed remarkable experiences, that was about it as far as combining training and traveling until the past year, where I really started combining the two things. Christian Graugart and I trained together throughout our late teens and up through the twenties and thirties, and while we definitely shared the urge for traveling the world, he cleverly started combining the two things - traveling and training - quite early on. I thought it was cool he did it and all, and he brought back a lot of technical inspiration for our Jiu Jitsu, but it just wasn't something I felt like doing. Which is quite odd now that I think of it, haha :-D

I definitely always did find a lot of adventure traveling even without Jiu Jitsu, sometimes more than I asked for, but I just never realized the opportunities that meeting with likeminded grapplers could entail. Anyway - luckily for us all - Christian continued being a great example traveling and training and eventually decided to show the rest of the world how that is done. From there on it’s all history, and here we all are now traveling and training.
Have you got any upcoming trips planned?
I definitely do! I was in Egypt a couple of weeks ago where I met up with a small group of people from the community (check out the article on The Globetravellers (TM) in the April newsletter!). And I actually just came home from Ukraine a couple of days ago where I taught some passionate people in a small Globetrotters affiliated gym. Wonderful people and wonderful experience.

Then in May I’m teaching a workshop for Young Executives on a small island in Croatia, and later this summer I’m spending three weeks on Cyprus where I’ll teach Jiu Jitsu and enjoy a sunny vacation with my family. 

Then most probably Heidelberg Camp, and in early autumn I’m going to Macedonia to teach and train. 

So as you can see, I’m really trying to give back and also get the best from this awesome community, and travel as much as work and family allow it.

Amazing! Do you think you will have much more spare time now that you are not writing the newsletter? And do you have anything else planned to replace it?
Oh, it does free up some time, although I’ll miss talking to all the people on a monthly basis. But the good thing is I can focus on Why We Do BJJ.
That sounds interesting! Do you maybe want to tell us a bit more about the research project...
Sure! Initially it was me asking myself the question over and over again: Why do you do this? Where does the fascination come from? I mean 15 years or so, and still every time I hit the mat I feel like a little boy playing with his favorite LEGO. I totally forget myself, flow through things, talk to my friends there, and I walk away as a better person.

It has done so many things for me personally in terms of how I live my life, and how I prioritize and look at things. My basic values are impacted by my Jiu Jitsu practice. Coaching people on a weekly basis I hear the exact same thing from my students and fellow practitioners. And I meet people all over the world saying the same thing.

So it's obviously a good thing, but I am also puzzled by it, because I never heard anyone talking that way about Tennis or Football or knitting or whatever else people enjoy doing. It's like Jiu Jitsu is all-encompassing for a lot of us. Even the periods in my life where I did not have a clear focus on Jiu Jitsu, it was always there as a strong pillar and inspiration in my life.

Eventually, rather than me philosophizing about Jiu Jitsu (which I do enjoy though), I thought who is better to ask than people around the world doing Jiu Jitsu? So I created the project Why We Do BJJ which at this point is a huge survey that I invite any Jiu Jitsu practitioner to do.
It's pretty damn ambitious with 137 questions, asking about everything from training habits to personality, but all related to Jiu Jitsu somehow. But I know we are part of such a dedicated, open and curious community that I actually think people will spend the 20-60 minutes it takes to finish it depending on how thorough they answer.

In the end I hope it could actually inform us statistically and with some validity how and how much the sport impacts our lives. And then of course in addition I'll publish all the personal stories from interesting people I can find through traveling and interviewing.

Eventually I’ll publish and share the result with the global community. But so far I’m just requesting everybody to join in and do the survey and share it online as much as possible, so we can get it out to every corner of the world.

Anything else you would like to tell the community and the readers?
Obviously first and foremost I encourage everybody to do the survey. But I’d also love to have people contact me with their personal stories. Stories on how Jiu Jitsu has changed lives are inspiring, and we should share them, and I’ll be glad to help with that! I’d like Why We Do BJJ to be a place where people can share their stories and experiences. So don’t hesitate! I also welcome thoughts and opinion on the project or any interesting collaboration. I can be reached via christian@whywedobjj.com or on Facebook.

Thank you, Christian, and good luck!
You are very welcome, and good luck ahead with the job. I trust you will enjoy it :-).

I’ll see you all at some of the Globetrotters camps, and hopefully at our gym CSA.DK in Copenhagen. You’re always welcome here. And thanks to the readers for reading my newsletter stories the past year. Peace, love, over and out.
Join us in Austria for our 4th legendary Winter Camp!
Hello to Becca, our new newsletter editor!

My name is Becca. I live in Northern Ireland and as you already know, this is my first time writing the BJJ Globetrotters newsletter. After hearing about Christian's experiences over the past year, I am excited to get started and to meet a lot of crazy BJJ travellers around the world!

So, let me tell you a little bit about myself and my own recent trips.

Age: 23

Belt: Blue

Profession: I work as a Tour Guide for a company called Dalriada Kingdom Tours here on the north coast of Ireland. I'm sure many of you know about the Giant's Causeway - that's where I spend a lot of my time! I also have started to do a little bit of freelance film work at 55th Degree Films.

How many years in BJJ: 3 years

Other martial arts: I did kickboxing for a few years and was introduced to that through fencing since I was 14. I took fencing up as I was doing a sport for a year for my Duke of Edinburgh Award and wanted to try something a bit different. I competed a lot within the sport and a few people that trained also did kickboxing and noticed similarities in stance, footwork and keeping distance. I decided to give kickboxing a go as a result and then found out about BJJ while training. I slowly started drifting more towards BJJ training and now it's really the only sport I do!

Lives in: Castlerock, Northern Ireland

A few months ago I actually featured in the newsletter and talked about how my boyfriend David and I were preparing to travel to America for training, starting in California and travelling across to Florida. On 1st December we started our journey from Castlerock, Northern Ireland to San Diego, California. After a year of preparing, working two jobs and saving we were definitely ready for five weeks travelling and training in America!
Our plans to get to San Diego over the first few days included a drive to Dublin, a flight to Oslo and then a connecting flight to LAX with another drive to San Diego. (The reason for going to Norway from Dublin was that we got a ridiculously cheap flight)! We had also been contacted a few months previously to say our connecting flight was delayed, but it meant getting to see a bit more of Norway so we didn't mind at all.
After 2 days of travelling we arrived in San Diego. We were staying in a place called 'Air B and BJJ' and it was perfect for us as it was central to all the Jiu-Jitsu gyms that San Diego had to offer. We trained at a few different places while we were there - we had particularly wanted to train at Pacific Beach Fight Centre with Rodrigo Medeiros, Head of BJJ Revolution Team and our own team. We ended up doing most of our training there simply because we loved the chilled out, relaxed atmosphere and we were welcomed in as if we'd always belonged there.

We also trained in Studio 540 which was an incredible place. Our class was taken by Leticia Ribeiro and the opportunity to learn from someone so renowned in the world of Jiu-Jitsu was a privilege. We took a class in Clark Gracie's academy in San Diego Old Town and dropped into 10th Planet San Diego for an open mat. San Diego had such a relaxed atmosphere that it was hard to say goodbye but we were moving on to Long Beach to compete in the Long Beach Open. We both took a bronze there - even though we had been training constantly up until the competition, competing on holiday mode and making weight was a bit of a struggle! David weighed in exactly on weight so it all worked out OK in the end.
We stayed in Long Beach afterwards in an Air BnB with a very friendly and welcoming host. We took a trip to Los Angeles before driving to Yosemite National Park and staying a night in a village called Oakhurst. Yosemite was absolutely breathtaking and a nice little break from training twice a day and competing. We then drove through Death Valley, another amazing road trip to get to Vegas where we spent a few days before flying to Miami. It felt a bit crazy travelling through different areas with really different weather conditions. Long Beach had been warm, a bit like the temperatures we would get on a REALLY good day at home but the locals there were freezing and couldn't believe we were wearing shorts and t-shirts. When we arrived in Yosemite it was then about -5 degrees and I was still in my shorts. Then we went to the other extreme of desert conditions the next morning! We were both completely wrecked from training and travelling so didn't visit any gyms on our trip to Vegas - as we were in the middle of the desert though, I don't think we missed any on our way to Vegas!
We arrived in Miami very late at night and drove to Fort Myers where we would be staying and training. We did a lot of training at Marcelo Pereira's gym in Fort Myers where we had trained before and loved it - everyone was so welcoming and glad to see us again. Our head coach from Ireland, Andy Ryan, also happened to be in Florida so we picked him up with friends Chris and Christina Del from Empire Jiu Jitsu and went to train in Cocoa Beach. The gym was called Off The Grid BJJ, ran by Frank Dukes and a BJJ Globetrotters Academy! Again, we were welcomed in and had a really fun session taken by Frank and the black belts we had brought with us. Between training sessions, we had another road trip and visited the Prehistoric Spring, Devil's Den along the way. We stayed in Talahassee and then drove through Georgia to Alabama and back to Fort Myers. A LOT of driving but well worth it.
We knew that once we arrived back home we were off to Lisbon, Portugal for the IBJJF European Open so kept up our training at Marcelo Pereira's in Fort Myers and used it as a base. It was great that the members there were keen to continue training over the Christmas holidays. We got loads of rolls in at open mat sessions and learnt a lot. Before we knew it, our time in the USA was up. We arrived back in Northern Ireland on 5th January.

We both went back to normality, but only for a week before we started travelling all over again. At 1am on Tuesday 17th January, we set off to Dublin airport again. We flew from Dublin to Lisbon, where one of our team was set to get straight on the mats as soon as we arrived in Portugal! Over the next few days we fought but unfortunately were put out first round, with the level of competition being extremely high.
Of course we learnt a lot from the experience! Later our team member Robert Brennan from Team Ryano Dublin picked up a gold in the Brown Belt Masters 5 division, John McTasney from Kyoujin Belfast won silver at Brown Belt Masters 5 and Paul Walsh (also Team Ryano Dublin) won silver in his Purple Belt division. After an exhausting few days competing and supporting team mates, we had Saturday free to explore Lisbon before returning back home on Sunday 22nd January.

As soon as we got off the plane, we had no time to relax as we were straight home and putting another layer of paint on the walls to open our new gym in Ballymoney. We can happily say Kyoujin Ballymoney opened on Wednesday 1st February and the Ballymoney and Ballycastle locations are the only registered BJJ Globetrotters academies in the country of Northern Ireland. So if anyone is visiting NI, feel free to call in and say hello! Our next adventure will be to Belgium in July for the BJJ Globetrotters Summer Camp and we are hoping to plan another BJJ training trip for this winter.

If anyone thinks that they have a great travel and training story and would like to feature in the newsletter, please send an email to bmillar244@gmail.com and I will happily get back to you! You can also find me on Facebook. Looking forward to hearing about everyone's crazy adventures!
All participants receive TWO free gis at this camp
BJJ Globetrotters affiliated Academy in Focus: Off The Grid BJJ, Cocoa Beach, Florida
"I also started teaching small classes out of a basement that my friends allowed me to convert into my own little mini academy. We had some tough training sessions!"
Francisco "Dukes" Livorsi, Off The Grid BJJ, Cocoa Beach, Florida
The featured gym of this month is taking us to Cocoa Beach in Florida, USA. Here Frank Livorsi has moved from New York with his family to pursue his dream of running his own academy with a very chilled out atmosphere in the perfect location.

Name: Frank "Dukes" Livorsi

Age: 29

Belt: Black

Profession: BJJ Instructory

How many years in BJJ: 10

Where do you live: Cocoa Beach, Florida

Where are you originally from: Catskill, New York

Ok, Frank, let's hear the basic facts about the gym from you...
My academy is located in Cocoa Beach, Florida. It has only been open 8 months now. I found a great location with the beach in the front and the river behind us - surrounded by water! It's such a bonus having the beach directly across the street!

So what made you decide you wanted to open up your own academy?
I founded Off the Grid Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in upstate New York where I am originally from. My family and I literally lived off the grid. We found it was more important for us to spend time with our son and enjoying the things we loved most - family and Jiu Jitsu. So we made it work, and living off the grid was how. I trained and taught a ton at my hometown academy 99/1 BJJ formally known as Black and Blue MMA.
I also started teaching small classes out of a basement that my friends allowed me to convert into my own little mini academy. We had some tough training sessions and some busy classes for the size of the space. I called it Off The Grid BJJ. I always dreamed of owning my own school and had high hopes that one day that dream would come true. It has honestly been the only thing I am passionate about.

After our daughter was born I had to go back to full time work, operating heavy machinery in a log yard. One day I really hurt my back bad and got taken off the yard in a stretcher and ambulance. I couldn't walk, sit, lay etc. Worst part was I wasn't able to train. I couldn't work and things didn't look good. I figured since I needed to start over anyway, why not move out of New York since we HATED cold weather and snow and go the the beach to carry out my dream of owning my own academy as well as allowing my kids to grow up in a much better area with more activities like surfing and skating all day!! My family gave me the OK, and we packed up and drove to Florida. We found a spot and one thing led to another. I kept my original name and got to work. Classes started out 1 kid at a time, small adult classes and continued to grow from there.
Tell us about the people that train in the gym – who are they?
Since I live in a beachtown, and specifically 11x World Champion surfer Kelly Slaters home town we have a lot of surfers, groms, skaters as well as entire families with adorable kids who can be super cute and kick butt all at the same time! We have some aspiring fighters as well as competition Jiu Jitsu fighters. It is a very wide range of different kinds of people but all amazing in their own way. All of my students have become family.

We have around 15 steady kids and 15-20 steady adults so far. We are growing more and more every month or so.

We have white, blue, purple, brown and black belts. Well, I'm the only BJJ black belt but I have a student who is a BJJ purple belt and Judo black belt. I also just promoted my first brown belt who has been with me since day 1 of the grand opening. He’s always training, always learning and always rolling. He had his purple belt for almost 3 years and he really grew with me in those 8 months. It was an honor.
Why do people train at your place?
They all train for different reasons but we all know how to train hard, stay humble and help each other no matter what so we always have great sessions regardless of the goal. Everyone wants to just get better so they push each other and stay positive. They are all very fast learners and are really looking better and better everyday.

That's great! So what are some of the challenges running a BJJ gym?
The challenges of running a school would be time. It's a 24-7 job. It's very demanding. You need to do a ton more then teach classes. You will lose sleep over and over and still feel like you haven't gotten ahead nor even caught up. You'll be filling out interview questions at 3:30am because it’s the only time the kids are sleeping! 
As hard as it is, I wouldn't trade it for anything though. I love mopping up the mats and knowing they are clean and ready for next time, high fiving the kids after an awesome class and helping all my students with the holes in their the looks on my adult students faces after showing them a rolling bow and arrow choke, cleaning up water bottles after a good night of training and the great times we share on the mats together outweigh any obstacle. I do it because I love it, not to become rich. I see Jiu Jitsu in Cocoa Beach growing in the future. I honestly feel I will have hundreds of students eventually and it will be just as big as surfing is here. The potential is there and I am not willing to give up.

What’s the best thing about your gym?
The best thing about my gym would have to be the great vibes everyone creates.

What would you recommend Globetrotters to see in your area apart from the inside of your gym?
My gym is a beach style Jiu Jitsu academy. Other than my academy tourists would love the surf and acai bowls in Cocoa Beach. Also the very laid back atmosphere where you can skate barefoot and shirtless into a cafe and eat. I love this town!

Thanks a lot, Frank, and good luck with the gym! It definitely sounds like you have a great place to visit. If you would like to get in touch with the guys from Off The Grid BJJ you can do that here!
 
 
 
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