Ana Laura: “I want to be back at the 2014 Pan!”

Ana Laura with Master Carlos Gracie Jr after receiving her black belt

The landscape of female competition Jiu-Jitsu is missing one piece since 2009.

Gracie Barra’s medium-heavy Ana Laura Cordeiro has been absent of competitions since she suffered a pretty serious injury to her lower back.

GRACIEMAG.com talked to Ana Laura earlier today and got some promising news about a possible return to competitions.

“I finally had my operation last June in Brazil and now I’m in the recovery process. I’ve already been able to work out, walk, climb stairs without feeling the pain I was feeling for the last four years”, told us Ana Laura.

She also told us about the surgery itself: “It lasted five hours! The doctor had to cut the muscle on my back and then reattach it with 50 stiches. Now I have four titanium pins and a thing called a cage, that helps the discs to stay apart, preventing it to pinch the nerve.”

Ana Laura also talked about the importance of finding the right doctor for the surgery: “I talked to a lot of doctors and most of them said that it was too risky to try it and that there was a big chance that I could never train again. But this guy had a 30-year experience with this kind of surgery and assured me that it could be done and that I was gonna be able to train and compete again”.

The recovery will take 6 months, but Ana already has goals set for the near future: “I want to be back at competitions at the 2014 Pan! The doctor said that I have to wait six months to be back at hard training, but in two months I will be already drilling in the gi”.

Watch Ana Laura competing against Gabi Garcia in the 2009 Pan, still as a brown belt, her last competition.