Fighting My Way Out of the Pandemic Quarantine
During the last few months of the COVID-19 quarantine, I took advantage of my early vaccination and remote working status to visit Utah. Yeah…Utah seems random as hell, but Utah is an amazingly beautiful state that I wanted to explore a bit more than driving through it provided a few years ago. I decided to try snowboarding and hot yoga while there but was most excited about joining a BJJ class and possibly rolling with someone new. I had only limited “sparring” with my few beginner students during the pandemic quarantine. I had no real idea how I would roll with someone after being “away” for over a year. I enjoyed the four rolls with a variety of sparring partners while visiting Westside BJJ Academy in Ogden. The school was great and you can read about it in my school reviews.
After class, I drove to the “tiny-home” I rented in Salt Lake City, and there isn’t a ton to do in a tiny home (or Salt Lake City), so I reflected on my BJJ session over a beer, my notebook, and pen. I thought about how one year prior, I had set out to complete 30 days of BJJ and failed several month’s worths of weekly attempts before contracting what I would later learn was COVID-19. After getting back to my feet, I questioned if I would ever be able to breathe deep enough to do any physical activity. On my home mats, I struggled to overcome the suffocating feeling of completing basic BJJ drills. However, while rolling with my “new friends” at Westside BJJ, I felt fatigued and winded, but it was never a concern.
While sparring at Westside, there were jeers, cheers, and coaching shouted to motivate everyone’s sparring movements. However, while training alone, I fought the constant desire to stop as no one was there to encourage or even chastise me. I would disappoint no one if I just stopped and ate the last of the ice cream in my refrigerator. I could hear the rapid sound of my heartbeat and wondered if I had surpassed my safe maximum heart rate. I worried that the ache in my back was a possible start of a herniating disc, although I had never had any diagnosis that would indicate such. I had kept in shape to participate in BJJ when things re-opened fully and maybe even rekindled those old desires to compete, but it wasn’t the opponent facing me for which I trained was the most difficult. While on the mats alone, I found that I met the most challenging opponent in myself and my natural desire to remain almost motionless in hopes of discovering some comfort by avoiding pain.
After a year of near social seclusion, the nightly ritual of unrolling my grappling-taped-together mats and beginning my training clock by falling on my back to shrimp and get back up was the most challenging commitment. After hundreds of spent calories with each solo training session, I wouldn’t have my hand raised in victory, get a pat on the back from a teammate, or comply with the unspoken accountability of a partnership built in a sparring opponent. And the most significant realization is that the only way to prepare for the opponent in one’s self is to continue to accept and negotiate the uncomfortable. I think it’s often termed as taking ownership. Suppose I didn’t take ownership of my affinity for BJJ, then who would be responsible for my commitment and drive for improvement. It’s like the old saying that “if you are often bored, you are probably a boring person.”
Taking ownership allows me, and only me, the ability to change my life. Ownership doesn’t make the task any easier, but it does prevent lost time blaming others for things only they can correct. Equally, the results of my efforts to improve confirm my ability to meet my expectations and desire to achieve “more.”
In rolling with others of course, I test my will and recall of techniques (while under pressure) to counter and out-match their adrenaline and skillsets to make what’s often touted as a, “good roll.” It was easy to hinge one’s performance on the quality of sparring partners or coaches but ultimately its responsibility to oneself. Empowering another with the pendulum-like control of my motivations and situations transfers the onus of changing my life to another person and is bullshit. The only person responsible and able to respond to me was me. Through my competition with myself, I ultimately learned that I should practice a mindset that takes ownership of my passion and push without relying on outside and sometimes encouraging, forces.
