In February 2011, I found out that I had been accepted with full funding (tuition waiver plus a living stipend) into the Master’s program at CU-Boulder, ranked second in the nation for its geography department. It wasn’t even a question that I was going there. The first thing I did was Google “Brazilian Jiujitsu gyms in Boulder, Colorado.”
“Colorado has some of the best jiujitsu programs in the country,” my training partner Sean, a Coloradoan, informed me. I was stoked.
In July 2012, I moved to Boulder and stayed with my friend’s Dad for 10 days while I looked for affordable housing (not an easy task). Besides him, I didn’t know a soul in the entire state of Colorado. The next day, I took my first “trial” class at Easton.
“What did you think?” asked James after the class. “I loved it! Sign me up!”
“Ok, that’ll be $179 a month,” he said. I nearly choked. “I’m going to have to think about that,” I thought.
Walking around in the too-bright sun, I pondered what I was going to do. My living stipend barely covered rent and food. But I knew it was worth it. What else was I supposed to do? I knew I would spend way more on that with psychiatry and meds if I didn’t sign up. I called James back and signed up. I considered it an investment in my mental and physical health. From then on, I started training twice a day—once in the morning and again in the evening. I competed for the third time in February 2013 and received my blue belt from Elliot Marshall the next day. I moved to Xinjiang, China in 2014 to start my PhD research.
They had a small gym there and they invited me to be a coach. I trained there until 2017 while traveling around Asia. During those years, I trained in Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Guam, and Spain.
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