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Right now I'm at a tiny gym in a small town called Baza (about an hour E of Granada). Gym's called (gymnasio) Zayton. I've trained at so much bigger, and in most ways, better gyms, but I really love it. Which reminds me. . . .
Funny story I'll try to keep ...eh....relatively short: When my wife is Spanish, so whenever we´d visit her family for a holiday or the summer, I'd want a gym to train at, but her town was too small (I asked around). But my wife and her sisters' old TKD coach was a family friend, and in his 50s. We went out for drinks with him/ran into him at a bar a couple of times that summer, and we'd always talk combat sports. This TKD instrucotr, every time, would tell me about this small gym, with a guy who says he teaches bjj and "mma", but that I could totally go there, humiliate him in front of his class, and take his job (!?!), easily. (He knew that I'd trained wrestling and bjj for years, and did a bunch of ammy mma fights a decade+ previously). I shrugged it off as the liquor talking, because he would always laugh while saying it . . . the first several times. . . and forgot about it until the next summer.
That next summer, the guy bumps into me and asks why I haven't "challenged" the gym, kind-of-but-not-really seriously, so I decided to just go to a class of the guy's and see what it was like and size the guy up.
So I went that week to a no gi class, whooped on pretty much all the students (some were young and others old, and not a big class, so it wasn't a good measure of much), and then at the end of class the coach comes up and asks if I want to spar. I asked him stand-up w striking, or grappling, and he said just grappling.
And.he.beat.crushed.tortured.manipulated. the ever-living shit out of me. He subbed me like it was absolutely nothing. Over, and over again. I could get nothing off against him (still can't four years later!). Turns out he'd trained in Brazil under an OG black belt (my coach was even present at an actual gym-challenge fight, on grainy film!), also got a black belt in TKD, then came back to Spain and trained with a few other black belts (preetty small community back then), and became a police officer in a small town.
So we have some decent students (mostly college age-ish or fellow police officers), but no one else is anywhere near his level.
But the craziest part imo is that he's obsessed with bjj (and to a lesser extent mma). I mean he wakes, sleeps, dreams, eats it. It's his hobby, passion and literal obsession. His bjj pedigree is fine, but I swear he's so good because he's constantly finding, learning, showing, (literally) dreaming of subs, sweeps, and new bjj/grappling techniques. He's in his mid-50s now, still a bull, but holy shit he just knows 10,000 weird moves and holds, and he practices them on mats at the police station . . . .so that's all he's been (paid lol) to do for the last 25 years. . .
Haha, so anyways, yeah my current gym set-up is really weird, but I get to roll with this guy whenever I want, so it's all good. Plus, showers and a weight-gym upstairs! I'm also great personal friends with the coach now. He's simply an awesome guy. . . .turns out the animosity from the TKD guy was from something over a girl 20 years ago! Of course -_- SO I'm GLAD AF I didn't actually challenge the guy to a real fight.
