Eli Olson often mentions his jujitsu training in his vlog, Flowstate, but a few days ago, in the video above and looking quite fit (btw), he let the world know that he has an MMA fight scheduled for tonight. Olson will fight Josiah Lagazo at 145 pounds in the newly re-vamped Trinity Kings 10 (formally Trinity Sport Combat) in a Hawaii at Kapolei.
“I actually started training jiu-jitsu over twenty years ago,” he said in a local interview. “It sounds crazy because I’m still in my twenties, I just always loved it. I fell in love with martial-arts and I’ve had my black belt for a few years now and because of training so much jiu-jitsu it connected me with a lot of friends who are professional fighters and they started to ask me over the years to help them with their fight camps. That was Martin Day, Louis Smolka, and they were in the UFC so I was like, wow, this is pretty cool. I’m just a local boy professional surfer but I’m helping these UFC fighters in their camps and for years they were trying to get me to take a fight and I was like, no, I’m surfing or I’m traveling, I’m too busy. Finally, I was like, you know what? They told me hey, there’s this card coming up, the Trinity card and I was like, I’m not traveling, waves are pretty slow and I can actually commit to a full camp for once and I just said let’s go and hit the green light.”
Olson says he’s been putting out less surfing footage because he’s been deep in training mode. Sounds logical. He also mentions in the interview that he feels like he’s more prepared to take a beating (although we hope he doesn’t) because of his surfing.
“I do think that I have a head start on the average person for dealing with nerves,” he said. “It sounds crazy but with big wave surfing , whether it’s Jaws or Waimea or Teahup’o, you have to overcome those mental battles and you have to be okay with whatever the outcome is and you kind of have to know that you really are putting your life on the line every time a wave is big. So, dealing with that with preparation and training and just like callusing the mind to be able to overcome huge obstacles like that, I do feel like that will help me out.”
You can watch the full video with Hawaii’s KHON2, below.
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