#14 Master Europeans
Master Europeans, Barcelona, Spain
May 4, 2025
My first international tournament! I’ve never been to Europe and was super excited for my first city to be Barcelona for the Master International Championship - Europe. It was only a week since my last tournament in Boston. I arrived in Barcelona on Thursday, my matches were on Sunday, then I’d be flying home early Monday. Fortunately, I had a cooking class scheduled just a few hours after landing. This helped ensure I didn’t go to sleep and fall victim to jetlag - a technique I learned from Caio Terra. It worked, and I had no problems with sleep and energy the entire trip.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were all about sightseeing and eating. I always travel with a scale and noticed I was losing weight each day. 20-30k steps a day and fairly healthy eating made it so I could have actually made weight the weight class below.
My matches weren’t until the afternoon. The venue wasn’t walking distance from my hotel, and on this Sunday, the roads outside my hotel were closed for a festival. This made getting an Uber extremely challenging. Took me about 1.5 hours and over almost 2 miles of walking to finally catch an Uber. Luckily, I left early for the tournament, but I was cutting things closer than I would like. I got to the tournament, changed, and my name was up in the bullpen. My weight class match had just two of us in it.
My opponent and I started with a back and forth josseling each other for a takedown. I got my hand on the back of her head a couple of times, and I think if I had committed to sprawling, I could have gotten her down. We eventually both got penalties for stalling. After the stall, I decided to pull guard instead. I’m fighting to get her into my closed guard but she’s eventually able to settle into half guard. She’s able to close the distance and has me flattened out. I have frames near her shoulder and face, but there isn’t much I’m doing with it. She eventually is able to isolate my arm and get an americana. I tap fast, since my shoulders are terrible. Silver for losing. I didn’t feel totally outclassed, but she definitely felt stronger than me, which makes sense if she weighed in on target and I was 10lbs under. 2 hour wait for the open class bracket. The venue is directly on the beach overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. I kill time by sitting by the beach, on a beautiful sunny day.
Five of us registered for the open class. I’m ranked #2, one of the advantages of doing so many tournaments is even though I don’t win, I’ve accumulated a decent amount of points. So, I have a first round bye along with two others in the bracket. The opponent in my weight bracket is in the first round and loses, knocking her off the podium. I’m up next against a woman that is significantly taller than me. Nothing I’m not used to at this point. She pulls guard and I end up on top of half guard. I’m on top! I’m never on top! This immediately goes to my head making all strategies leave my brain. I dive down for an ezekiel choke, my favorite submission from top of half guard, but she’s still mostly on her side. I didn’t take the time to flatten her out so the attempt isn’t great. I get an advantage for the attempt, but she is able to push me off her and back to her knees so we’re in a dogfight position. I put a whizzer in, but I’m rarely on this side of a dog fight and I have no idea what to do with the position. My tournament brain vs sparring at the gym brain are still not aligned, and in this moment, I wish I had a coach with me. I just need someone to tell me what to do. She ends up bulldozing me down and gets two points for the sweep. I take an elbow to the chin during it, which is pretty common in these tournaments and something you learn to shake off pretty fast. I’m now on the bottom of half guard. I have a lockdown in place and crossface her, while she’s trying to bear down her forearm into my throat. I’m able to frame off the arm meant for my throat, but feel pretty stuck. Every time I try to move to a choke attempt, that forearm comes down to my throat and I retreat back. I feel stuck without an answer. Time eventually runs out and I lose 0-2. I absolutely felt like my bjj was better and this was a could-have-won. The loss earns me a bronze medal. I watch the next matches and the winner from round 1 finishes the #1 seed pretty quickly. Then the woman I lost to, fights in the final match losing to win silver. The gold medalist had 3 matches finishing them all and was definitely deserving of the win. I don’t think I would have beat her, but I should have executed better for silver.
So I left Barcelona with a silver and bronze medal. I absolutely felt like I got better with each match between Boston and Barcelona. My shoulder starts killing me about an hour after the tournament, and I realize the americana from my first match did more damage than I realized. Within 8 hours I was on my 14 hour journey back to Seattle. My son met me at the airport and drove me directly to noon bjj class at the gym, where I was able to immediately work through the problems I had during the matches. Luckily with some rest and light PT, my shoulder recovered quickly - no serious damage. I can’t wait for my next tournament!
Key Takeaways
- Cross face more, and more importantly cross face the correct direction! My last match, I was cross facing, but it wasn’t the direction I should have been cross facing, so I ended up stuck.
- I didn’t feel outclassed in the tournament, like I have so many other times. I just need to execute my game better. Position before submission. Getting on top got me way too excited, and I rushed a sub attempt. I need to stay poised and not sabotage myself into a loss.
Current goals
Win a bracket
Score a takedown
Places I visited
My mom joined me on this trip. It was her first time leaving the US and she was very excited to get her first passport stamps. We stayed extremely busy, taking several tours.
Paella Cooking Class - We landed at around noon, took about an hour to get through customs and then another 30 minutes to our hotel. I scheduled a 6pm paella cooking class. The class starts with a tour of the outdoor food market where you buy ingredients for the class, while learning about the market. The only time the market is skipped is Sundays and public holidays when the market is closed. It was Thursday, but also Spain’s Labor Day - which I didn’t know until we got to Barcelona that the entire country was on an extended 4 day weekend. So we didn’t get to go to the market but the class was still very fun. There were 8 others with us, 6 Americans and 2 Canadians. We started with each of us making our own Sangria. We were provided juice, wine, rum, and sliced fruit. I kept my alcohol free, essentially making a fancy orange juice. We then got started on making our seafood paella. The class was organized really well, ensuring everyone got some hands-on experience. My favorite part was learning how to clean and cut the squid, shrimp, clams, and mussels. In between, giving the paella time to cook, we’d go back to the dining table to chat and eat some premade tapas. During one break we made a Valencia cake that was orange and almond flavored. Our host ensured everyone had a job to do. It was well organized and really fun chatting with the other people in the group. The paella ended up being very tasty. Everytime we came back to the table another batch of sangria was waiting for us, so by the end of the night I was the only one not tipsy from the constant sangria and shots of liquor provided.
Salvador Dali tour - My Mom and I are both fans of Salvador Dali so when I realized he lived close to Barcelona, I signed up for a 12 hour tour exploring his museum in his hometown, and the seaside town where he did much of his painting. It was an early start and our tour guide would be picking us up from our hotel to drive us out to the countryside. In total about 2.5 hours outside of Barcelona. We met our guide and got into the car to find our ‘small group’ tour was even smaller than I expected. A couple from Minnesota joined us and it was only the 4 of us for the entire tour. We first drove to Figueres where our guide took us through the Dali museum. After showing us some of his favorite pieces we were given 2 hours to explore on our own and grab lunch. From there we drove to Cadaqués, a seaside town Dali spent a lot of time in. Here we explored and did a little shopping. We then visited Dali’s studio and home, Portlligat. This was a guided tour, which had strict entry times, so you had to be one time and couldn’t buy tickets more than a couple hours in advance. We then made the 2.5 hour drive back to Barcelona with beautiful country scenery along the way.
Park Guell Guided Walking Tour: This was a large walking tour of a huge park in Barcelona designed by the architect Gaudi. It was cool hearing about the history of the park and the design is definitely unique. It was up on a hill, and I’m glad we Ubered to the park. It was a beautiful day so we decided to walk back. I enjoy walking in cities new to me, it gives me a sense of what living there might be like. It was a very long walk, but I wanted to take the opportunity to stop by the La Sagrada Familia. The place was crazy with how many people and tour buses were around. It’s a church designed by Gaudi that’s been under construction for 143 years. They think it will be done next year. I tried to get tickets a week in advance and they were already sold out. It’s absolutely impossible to get tickets the same day, but seeing how insanely busy it was, neither of us were disappointed we weren’t going inside.
Tapas & History Food Walking Tour: I usually like to do food tours at the beginning of a trip so I can go back to places I enjoyed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get this one booked until the end of the trip. It was a tour of the Gothic district and had a lot of walking and a lot of history. I wasn’t super impressed with the tapas we got, and not any of the restaurants I’d be running back to. But just walking through the district and seeing the shops, I wish I had more time to visit. The area was really cool, had so much going on, and I really wanted to explore more. Overall, it was a good experience for learning about that part of the city, but if I did another food tour I’d definitely pick a different one.
Majestic Hotel & Spa: I had no idea where to stay but a friend recommended the Majestic. The hotel was beautiful and had a great central location. It was pretty expensive and I’d probably try another hotel next time, but I was definitely comfortable. The only problem we had were alarms going off around 5am the night before the tournament. They said they were theft alarms and no one could figure out how to turn them off. I quickly realized I have no idea what alarms sound like in other countries. It didn’t sound super urgent, but it was enough to wake me up and have me wander into the hallway to get the scoop on what was going on. So many people evacuated their rooms only to come back and report that there was no emergency, the hotel just couldn’t turn the alarms off. Not what you want, the morning you are competing. The hotel breakfast buffet was great but expensive. We opted for breakfast room service instead which was excellent, since we weren’t eating enough to justify the cost of the buffet. Overall the room service was great in the hotel.
Restaurants I visited
Babula Bar - I went to several restaurants and enjoyed them, but it was hard to keep track of what I had where. Babula Bar was my post tournament dinner and by far the best meal of the trip. I asked the concierge of my hotel to recommend a place where we could get good tapas, walking distance away. They made a call and we had a reservation at Babula Bar, just a couple blocks away. We started with mocktails that were super tasty, then dove into a few different dishes.
Crunchy balls filled with raw salmon - with passion fruit, teriyaki, avocado, and sriracha
Grandma’s Bravas - baked new potatoes with aioli and brava sauce
Seasonal mushrooms with truffle
Scallops with red cabbage foam
Sourdough bread with smoked butter
Black garlic salmon sashimi
Everything was amazing and my next trip to Barcelona will definitely include this restaurant.
Upcoming tournaments:
July 12 - Phoenix Open
Sept 13 - Toronto Open
