John Danaher

So things started moving.

We had a core group of athletes training at a local gym, which was very, very generously offered to us by the head manager of Roka Sunglasses, a company here in Austin, Texas.

They have a private corporate gym, which we were able to train in.

And these talented youngsters from around the globe essentially came together and I said, you guys are going to have to train harder than you've ever trained in your lives because you've got less time to get ready for this than anyone.

And you're going to be going up against people potentially who...

know exactly what i teach because i've been teaching them a lot longer than i've been teaching you in addition to the other best people in the world so it was a an incredible challenge for them and i must say all of them gave literally everything they had everything i asked for they gave twice as much and um we had a crazy training schedule as many as three classes per day

I know that sounds easy, you know, three classes a day, but try doing it sometime.

These classes are not your average classes.

These are preparation for ADCC.

Very, very hard.

And we had many people come in and try to train alongside us, and they fell off by the side of the road within days.

Forget about weeks, months, or a full year of this.

I gave a very abbreviated set of skills for the athletes.

I chopped everything down to what I believed were the most essential skills.

Anything that wasn't essential to ADCC preparation was just pushed aside.

And they had to focus almost entirely on ADCC, with one exception, I'll come to that soon, over the period of their training here in Austin.

So it was...

compacted by time and also by uh the breadth of skill that i taught everything was just purely for adcc preparation in a very short period of time uh dan manasoyo and luke griffith and oliver taza all won european trials and got into adcc nicholas miragali was already a superstar so he was invited but he had to show himself so we enrolled him in local

shows here in austin where he had his first three uh nogi matches um and with each match you could see progress being made and so that convinced the adcc people okay he's good enough to to compete um he ended up winning decisively a match against one of the greatest american grapplers of all time rafael lavato and this was like a clear sign that his

Indeed.