For the first time in my life I truly feel like a winner. I’ve been learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) on and off since 2006. I started my BJJ journey at Indianapolis BJJ and trained for a few months before headed to university at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, IN. The cool thing about IU is they have a ton of martial arts classes and clubs. I was lucky enough to be able to train somewhat frequently but not nearly enough to really learn Jiu-Jitsu. After many years of not training I again for a few months trained at an MMA gym called Vortex MMA. I ended up getting injured from weightlifting and again quit training BJJ.

Since 2022, I’ve been training 3-4 times a week at Fargo BJJ. In September, there was a submission completion where I placed first in the Gi and second in No-Gi for my weight and belt.

On September 30th I received my blue belt from George Andersch.

The crazy thing about BJJ is that about 90% of all people who start training never receive their blue belt. I’ve always found that to be such a crazy statistic. My current goal is to keep training and work towards my purple belt when I move to Chicago. I expect it will be a few more years for that to happen, but I’m extremely determined to continue pushing towards my black belt.