One Brown Belt's Perspective, Seven Years Later

An annual reflection on the role of martial arts in my life, in which sidelining injury might be the greatest teacher in the game

Welcome back, readers! If you haven’t seen much from me (you probably haven’t), you’re about to find out one big reason why.

If you really like this post, I’d love to hear what you want to see more of next, whether it’s a grisly dive into surgical rehab or other notes and reflections from an unexpected off season. Comments and DMs open.

Now, without further ado…let’s break a leg (sort of)!

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This wasn’t the post I was expecting to write this year.

When I started thinking about this post, I thought I’d be traveling to Orlando, Florida by the time I posted it. It was supposed to be a heartfelt post about competing again at the IBJJF Pan American Championship—the tournament that sparked my “road trip-meets-jiu-jitsu sabbatical”—and about what returning to the hallowed ground of the Silver Spurs Arena meant to me on the seven-year anniversary of my first jiu-jitsu class. 

That’s not the post I get to write this year. Unfortunately. 

I am not in Florida competing.

I am on my couch counting.

Counting the weeks since I experienced my first sidelining injury (six weeks).

Counting the days until surgery for that injury (twenty-seven days).

Counting the months until I might be able to get back onto the mats after surgery from that injury and be a semblance of my former self on them (nine months, at minimum).

As I write this, my ACL is fully torn and my MCL and meniscus partially torn from a freak accident in a tournament in February. It was early into my first match of the day—barely thirty seconds into it—and half a minute was all it took to completely change the shape of my year and my life.

Gone are the hopes and expectations I had had for a full and fruitful competition season, along with the PTO requests to fly out and fight in certain tournaments. Gone are the usual barriers on my daily schedule to go sweat and socialize with my training partners at the gym. Here to stay for the next year are physical therapy sessions and painkillers, the trademarks of the long walk down one of the most notoriously difficult recovery paths in the sport.¹

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I’ve been quiet online and in my writing of late in part due to grieving the injury and accepting the fact that what I had hoped to accomplish on the mats in 2024 is going to be severely limited. I had wanted to win a Pan and World Masters Title at Brown Belt this year. Instead, achievement for me will look like being able to get back on a mat, period—and this might not be possible until the very end of the year and only for the lightest of drilling. 

Patience is key, and refusing to accept the risk of re-injury, I’m willing to take the time needed to come back correctly. Realistically, I don’t expect to train hard again until a year from now, hoping that the next time I write a BJJ anniversary piece, it will be one in which I can share the joy of a return to the thing I love, assuming I still love it and I am unafraid of it at the end of all of this. How much I truly love the sport and how much I want to keep the sport in my life will be tested by everything I am about to endure after surgery. 

The pursuit of worthwhile endeavors requires unconditional love. Not pretty. Not romantic. Unconditional. Unconditional love can be ugly. In my case, it’s “drill into my bones and stitch a piece of cadaver into me” kind of ugly. It’s “rely on my spouse to help me use the bathroom because I will be temporarily incapacitated” kind of ugly. But I believe that how you do one thing is how you do everything, and whatever that thing is that you can’t live without, you have to keep choosing it and fighting for it, accepting the inevitable pain, heartbreak, and loss along the way. 

It remains to be seen how much I will want to choose and fight for jiu-jitsu in the future. My guess is that it will remain in my life, but it will not hold and claim the same kind of space in my life that it did before this injury. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but only time will tell to see how this part of my recovery narrative plays out.

In the meantime, I’m reevaluating my definition of success for the year when I think about training and other physical pursuits. Realistically, scoping success off the mats doesn’t look too dissimilar from scoping success on them, because the goal is similar: I’m chasing proficiency in certain skills and techniques by the end of the year. What changes is the substance of the goal: while I wish my areas of focus could be “master the longstep pass” and “become truly comfortable and knowledgeable in inverted positions,” instead it’s going to be “re-learn how to walk by the end of the summer.”

Success will be about cultivating the strength to do basic activities on my feet unassisted: shower, go up a flight of stairs, walk without crutches. Triumph for me will not come in stepping to the top of a podium, but in being able to step on a plane and enjoy a real honeymoon at the end of the year. 

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When planning out this post and trying to figure out what I want to say, I’ve been asking myself:

What does it mean to me to celebrate this jiu-jitsu anniversary when injured? 

What does it mean that this next year of jiu-jitsu will be spent hardly doing jiu-jitsu at all? 

What does the sport mean to me when I’m forced to be physically distant from it for close to a year?

These are questions that will take me the next year to answer–as a friend of mine says, it’s hard to write the story while you’re still in the middle of it. I’m convinced that this story and how I made it through the injury–and made the most of the injury–will only make sense in hindsight. 

But to close things out, this is one thing I do know for certain:

I used to believe that competition was the best way to test and to improve my jiu-jitsu. Nothing quite compares to the tournament feeling of people coming at you as hard as they possibly can, forcing you to practice jiu-jitsu in its most effective, most submission-oriented, and most self-defending way.² 

Now I believe that injury is the truer test of my jiu-jitsu: not of the techniques, of course: I can’t move my leg in an athletic, pain-free way and it will be many months until I do so again without a ghostly recollection of the injury. When I say that injury is the truer test of my jiu-jitsu, I mean that it will be the test of whether I can continue to live by and master the principles that the sport has brought into my life and the questions it’s asked of me over the last seven years.

How will you frame and protect yourself in a dangerous situation?

How will you endure pressure or re-balance yourself in a challenging circumstance?

How will you transform the shape of your problem–by managing distance, adjusting your angle, changing your positioning–in order to solve for a path to victory?

So while I won’t be able to really train for the next year, there is reason for me to appreciate the role of jiu-jitsu in my life: both the role it has served for the last seven years, and the role it must serve in the year to come: as a teacher of adaptation, resilience, and creativity.

Call it self-delusion or call it sunny-side-up acceptance, but I have to believe that the comeback road ahead—more than any executing a certain technique or entering a tournament—will be the most meaningful one in my jiu-jitsu journey so far.

To end on a higher note, one pretty picture from the last year of jiu-jitsu, prior to injury: a group shot from my wedding, featuring a critical mass of women whom I never would have met were it not for the sport.

1. ACL surgery is hard in general. It is especially hard for jiu-jitsu given the nature and demands of the sport. There are some people who can get by without ACLs, and surgery isn’t the right option for everyone, but after three doctors’ opinions and many friends’ advice, I’ve concluded that going through with the procedure is the right decision for me.

2. In principle, at least. I won’t sugarcoat it. There’s plenty of strategic gamesmanship and stalling, too.