Eddie is my son. He is the reason we found this place, and honestly the reason any of this exists. Like a lot of kids, he bounced through sports early on — surfing, baseball, swim team from the time he was small. He was good at things. He just got bored. My daughter was doing the same thing on a parallel track, and my wife and I were spending most of our weekends running between schedules, trying to keep up. At some point we made a decision. Both kids needed to pick something and commit to it.
Eddie tried jiu-jitsu first at another gym. It fit well enough that we stayed for a while, then found a better situation and moved. That lasted about a year before COVID stopped everything. When things opened back up and it was time to find something again, I did more research than I probably needed to. That research kept pointing me back to one place.
Drive to the Pit Martial Arts in Arroyo Grande, CA. As seen driving West on Grand Avenue.
The Pit Martial Arts sits in a commercial building in Arroyo Grande, CA, that you would drive past without looking twice — except for one thing. On the side of the building there is large Bold Letters that say THE PIT and to the right the logo - a muscular grim reaper wearing boxing. That logo does not leave a lot of ambiguity about what happens inside. There is a parking lot, a roll-up garage door in the back that is usually raised, and whatever class happens to be running when you pull in. I remember parking that first day in March of 2023 — Eddie was ten years old — seeing people moving around through the opening and not being entirely sure what we were walking into.
What I knew from the research was that this was not a strip mall martial arts school. The Pit had produced two UFC world champions — Chuck Liddell and Glover Teixeira. That is not a marketing claim. That is a fact that takes most gyms a lifetime to get close to, and most never doI did not know what that would mean for a ten-year-old kid who was a little nervous and had not been on the mats in some time. But I figured it was worth finding out.
Eddie's first jiu-jitsu class went well. He came off the mat smiling, which for a kid who doesn't say much spoke volumes.That was also the first time I met Adrian Iriarte ( Follow in Instagram )— the jiu-jitsu instructor, a Hawaiian Kempo black belt and a jiu-jitsu black belt who has been teaching at this gym for longer than most of his students have been alive. I did not know much about him yet. I would.
A few months later Eddie started the kids Hawaiian Kempo program. What happened after that is a longer story — one that involves a contact sparring class, a coach named Tanner who gave a kid a chance when he probably did not have to, and a ten-year-old white belt who turned out to belong there. I will get into all of that.
That was the beginning. I have been coming through that entrance ever since, watching, training, and eventually filming. This blog is where I write about what I see. The YouTube channel is where some of it ends up on video. Between the two, I am trying to document something that I think is worth documenting — a real gym, real people, and what it actually looks like to train and compete at a place that takes this seriously.