HYDROX Dublin 2025 is here, one of the biggest events on the sporting calendar. Over 15,000 hybrid rockstar athletes are taking to the turf in the hollowed halls of the RDS Arena in Ballsbridge DUBLIN 4.

Finishers patches, event t-shirts, medals and podium photos all up for grabs this weekend, either in the singles, doubles, mixed doubles and elite divisions.

Huge early controversy is brewing online from a number of Hydrox athletes who think there are too many slow pace runners, hogging the fast lane at the RDS Arena...but all eyes point to this weekend so we can find out, who's going to be HOGGING the top spot at the end of the day.

There's also a rounding up, closing discussion about the news of another cringe worthy niche sport, Brazilian JiuJitsu closing in on receiving government recognition as a sport through IMAC (Irish Martial Arts Council) so we take a quick look at who they are, and what this might mean for the sport.

Thank you for tuning in, you rockstars!

This is such a terrible time to be writing a podcast bio when your alarm is going off in 5 hours to drive to Dublin for the IBJJF Dublin Open but here I am.

I'm not even going to ask ChatGPT to correct the spelling and grammar on this one either.

It's a debrief episode on my experience competing in the NoGi Europeans last week, as well as the announcement you've all been waiting for...when are Andrew and Jean hosting another cross training session...

The Answer is actually a lot sooner than we expected, Sunday the 16th November and we hope to see as many listeners there as possible too. More information in the episode!

A lot of my training partners competed very well during the week and Team Torres has a new European Champion.

We had put a lot of good work leading up to this tournament.

I just felt like it was important, for me in some capacity to record and release this episode before I competed today.

I turn 33 today, quite a lot of the positive things that have formed in my adult life have formed from being involved in JiuJitsu.

Competing is a very freeing experience that one day I will not be able to do. I just felt like i said that it was important to think and put that out into the planet, on this day of all days.

I don't think there's a description that's gonna make someone listen or not either way, but this was my stream of thoughts the night before this years NoGi European Championships. How I hope that releasing this will help me with something else in the longer term.

See you on the other side.

So, Episode 44 of the Consistently Above Average podcast is here.

There's a big No-Gi Europeans next week that everybody is very excited for, I think, just under 3,000 people competing in Ostia in Rome next week and weekend. I believe across all divisions this is going to be a breakout tournament for people, and there are a few sleepers that are going to win divisions. We will talk about that more, hopefully before I fly over there.

The meat and bones of the topic on this episode, though, is returning to jiu-jitsu after a short or extended hiatus. We had a great one last week, so let's discuss some common fears or irrationalities you might have coming back and why we are always delighted to see you, as well as a quick guide on how to and how not to make your grand return.

For those interested at the very end, there’s also some great info on the origin of a chicken goujon!

Last week I closed off the podcast letting you know that I reached out to the Ireland BJJ organisation with some questions, both about the Emerald Cup and their evening event, the Irish BJJ Invitational.

We discuss the response, we go through the email I received, and we talk about the evening event — both in the promotion, the day itself, and the reaction people had.

I also think transparency is important. A friend of the podcast asked me recently why I had an issue with one athlete competing with a failed drug test, when previously I had no issue. So we chat about that too.

There's a huge desire in the world at the minute to be aggravated and annoyed at stuff, where sometimes it can be much easier to just admit maybe you were in the wrong. That's something I will always be happy to put my name to.

I promise, I genuinely thought it was called the Emerald Cup for the first six minutes. Sorry about that.

I'm holding myself to a public declaration of weekly episodes again. If I miss one, everyone who likes and reshares this podcast will win $100.*

This week’s episode is a single-topic deep dive into the Shamrock Cup, with a little side diversion about how obvious ChatGPT-generated social media posts have become, along with an announcement about the elephant in the room. We're still waiting on a comment, and we’ll follow up in next week's episode.

*may not be true

It's been 43 days since I wrote a podcast bio description after recording an episode and I do admit I missed it a little bit more than I thought I would.

Quick catch up and chat about what's been going on the last little while and why there's not been an episode, hard to act like everythings going great for your training when you're not able to do it the way you would like to.

That's probably a sign to have the back up plans ready in terms of the longer form guest interviews from the last little while but we will see how the next few months goes now after that.

We couple of thoughts on CJI as well within the debate of making it a spectator sport vs the competitors trying to win no matter what because the prize money is very lucrative. As well as why it seems like there are two (maybe more) versions of Craig Jones we should be aware of and how this could lead to what CJI 3 could (or could not) look like.

Chris Leddy is a Brazilian JiuJitsu Black Belt, He runs https://martialartsbray.ie/ alongside his brother Adam, He's also an instructor with David Gray Interactive https://www.davidgreyrehab.com/courses/Interactive

Chris has been training JiuJitsu since the late 2000s after befriending Darragh O'Conaill in a local weight lifting gym. Since then he has traveled, trained and competed all around the world.

We discussed Chris having not just one but two microdiscectomy operations, the most recent being earlier on this year. I'm not sure if this was a good title for the video, we discussed a lot more than what's there I had a loose idea where I wanted to go through his back operations, a famous boards.ie discussion around him competing as a white belt at the world championships in 2011 and then his journey and opening his gym up until this point.

But like most good conversations with Chris i've had it drew off into different paths and directions but we got there in the end. I will get around to the timestamps in the next day or two and they'll be posted in the comments.

It's a shorter episode this week but the whole world is now aware of some random CEO from an American company and the alleged HR worker who may or may not have been having an affair.

At a wider look, it's insane to think something that's happening every day, with little to no consequences at all can just be amplified to life altering effects with just one thing being recorded and going viral.

On the JiuJitsu discussion we have a small follow up from last weeks tournaments changing dates, a local tournament coming to a place with no effort of interacting with the local customers base, a very exciting weekend ahead of packing all your t-shirts and the deliberation of maybe, after giving off about them so much, that I should run a tournament next year myself.

We also have a voice note from a listener requesting a correction from last weeks episode and announce the next guest on the podcast which should be the very next (if not the one after) episode of the podcast.

Episode 38 is here!

boards.ie was once the old stomping ground of the Irish Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu community—people posting under usernames, some knowing who was who, others just faceless trolls. The internet hasn't changed much in that regard, and neither has the tendency for people to complain about competitions.

In this episode, we take a stroll down memory lane to revisit discussions around tournaments held in Ireland during 2010, 2011, and 2012, and the opinions that came with them.

This all came about because a listener sent in a question: on one weekend in September, there are five different tournaments happening across two days in Ireland—plus one invitational in the evening.

This is going to stretch coaches, parents, athletes, and staff very thin, raising questions about who will go where. We chat about the viability of running five events on the same weekend, and whether there's anything that could be done in the future to avoid such scheduling clashes.