Sweat diving headfirst into my gi (or as my wife calls it, “your karate outfit”) like a schoolbus full of kids being let out to the public pool on the first day of summer vacation. My breathing being brought down to 10% capacity by a 250lb dude sitting on my chest and only 15 seconds left until the round timer saves me from an almost certain doom. “Shit, I can’t breathe! This dude’s so heavy. You are NOT getting this arm!”, my mind screams at the top of it’s lungs. He gets my arm and leans back into an arm bar… this is not good. At the second he leans back to compete his dastardly task, I attempt the “hitchhiker escape”, roll the wrong way and end up rolling right into the submission. I couldn’t tap quick enough, stopping him from pulling my arm off my 170lb body.
I recently restarted my Jiu Jitsu journey with a couple of trainers from Vitru, the home of TLO. I had been training pretty heavily before the pandemic and then… well, you know… I wasn’t anymore. It’s been a little over 2 years and I was back in it last week for the first time. I’m actually about to do it again in about 2 hours and I’m not really looking forward to it… at all. I’m not looking forward to getting mashed, thrown, smothered, choked and laid on. I’m going to do it anyway though. Once I’m there and in it I’m cool but there’s always a part of me that doesn’t want to do it. It’s not comfortable, it doesn’t feel good all the time and there’s a rumor that I’m in my 50s… I don’t really bounce back like I use to.
Would I rather stay home, drink beer on the couch and watch “Succession”? Yep. That’s not how it works though. I do it for a myriad of reasons but one of the most important is that… it’s fucking hard. It pushes me to my absolute physical and emotional limits. My endurance is stretched like salt water taffy in the humid July heat. It makes me face some of my most systemic, primitive and deep seated fears. It’s hard.
The “facing” of these things is where the medicine is though. I train in this way so I can handle anything else that presents itself to me out in the “real world”. I do hard things so I can do hard things. When you’re choked to the point of almost passing out, a crisis in the office is easier to handle. When you “roll” to the point of almost puking, when the kitchen floods it isn’t that big of a deal.
You schedule hard things so you can do hard things when they come up spontaneously. It doesn’t have to be Jiu Jitsu. It could be meditating when you don’t want to meditate, holding plank for 60 seconds, holding plank to the edge of muscle failure, doing push ups everyday, taking a cold shower… anything that will press you into an uncomfortable place so you can sit in it and make it a friend or at least familiar. This way you’re not shocked when something uncomfortable comes up in another theater of your life. Do hard things so you can do hard things. Alright, you’re up.
