Tag Archives: work

Why I Like Promotions

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level-upSeeing people I train with (or am friends with) promoted to a new belt color is always exciting to me. It probably taps into the same neurochemical wellspring of joy I get from leveling up in a video game. (I just realized that it’s been a LONG time since I actually played a game, especially an RPG).

It’s a demarcation of progress. The most exciting one, to me, in BJJ is the white belt to blue belt promotion. There is so much possibility and hope for the future at that point. A new blue belt has not yet been beaten down by the reality that mastery takes a long, long, long time. When I got my blue belt, I still believed that just around the corner, I will begin my meteoric rise to amazing skill levels. In reality, the path to mastery is much more like hiking the Appalachian trail. It takes a lot longer than you think. It’s not glorious. There’s no sparklers or beautiful women (or dudes if that’s your thing) in bikinis cheering you on. It’s just a long daily grind full of simple pleasures derived from subtle improvement of skill and overcoming of challenges.

But again, I think what I like most about promotions is the same reason I like driving a brand new car: the new car smell. When my training partners are wearing a new belt, it feels like I just beat the game at the “normal” setting, and am now upgraded to the “expert” setting.

It’s amazing how a belt can be a canvas to project my thoughts on. A belt color is a set of goals, a set of techniques, a set of injuries, a set of tournaments.

In the rest of my life, there are no belt colors. When I publish a conference or journal paper, I don’t get stripes on my belt. The video-game-playing kid in me wishes that I would be “awarded” a green jacket or something like that for a week after publishing in a prestigious journal. I would wear it proudly, and write a blog post about how much I like the idea of green jackets that my colleagues would read and shake their head at in shame.

Stepping Back to Get an Introspective Look

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Due to two paper deadlines (one conference, one magazine) last Friday and presentation in Maryland today, I had to make the responsible decision and not go to training for 5 days straight. Instead, I drilled at home for about an hour every day when I grew too sick of working. Believe me, this one of the hardest jiu jitsu activities I ever do. Drilling at home has none of the fun of jiu jitsu and more excuses to not do it than I ever thought possible. In fact, one of the benefits I get from it is practicing shutting down the excuse-generating lobe of my brain.

The rare act of taking time off from training made me look at my relationship with jiu jitsu from another perspective. One of the things it made me realize is that the world does not end if I don’t come to train. People don’t notice. Whether I train 7 days a week or 3 days a week, my friends and family will not mind, in fact they probably will not notice or care.

All the goals I set and work hard towards aren’t there so that I could tell others, not my girlfriend, not my parents, not my best friend. They are there for me. For the quiet moments when I walk home and think about the days behind me and the days ahead.

lego-castle

I needed to step away to see that what I get from training is the simple quiet joy that I used to get from spending hours on building lego castles as a kid. I remember my shoulders and back getting tired from sitting in the same position and obsessively connecting the lego pieces together. I probably didn’t love every moment of it, but if there is
such a thing as happiness, I think found it in those lego pieces.

Three Years of Jiu Jitsu

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three-years-birthday-cupcakesI’ve been doing jiu jitsu for three years now. It’s humbling to think that tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are out there that have been doing it much longer than me. I am following along together and behind the crowd of a very interesting community of people. Introspection, aggression, and weird humor is all around me every time I step on the mat.

Positive Cult

I remember Joe Rogan called jiu jitsu a “positive cult”. And I think he’s onto something. It’s good to be part of a cult or two. I’m currently a member of a couple: a  local book club and a jiu jitsu / judo club. Those are two damn good choices for a cult. It helps me stay healthy, humble (relative to my usual asshole-self), and thoughtful.

Competition Goals for This Year

There’s winning and then there’s winning: I’ve been told by coaches and fellow competitors that “winning is winning”. For some reason my personality is such that the only time I remember feeling truly shitty after competing is when I won matches against tough opponents and didn’t go for submissions because I was concerned of losing. Win or lose, I want to leave every tournament this year knowing that I never “held on” to the lead, and always worked aggressively towards a submission. That’s what makes me proudest: not “winning” a jiu jitsu match, but giving everything for a submission. Too often I fail to drop my fear of failure, and pursue that sometimes-exhausting fight.

Judo: I want to put in a good full year of competition in judo. I’ve taken a few months off from regular judo training and competing, focusing exclusively on jiu jitsu and its wrestling-style stand-up game. But I love judo, both for it as a martial art and the friends I have in the judo community, so mixing it in with jiu jitsu is something that I want to do this year, and for the rest of my life,

Place of Martial Arts in My Life

As my work life grows in the breadth and number of exciting projects, I’m realizing that while jiu jitsu and judo can be a big part of my life, it will never be the main thing in my life. I enjoying my work too much to be one of the people that can’t wait to get in the gym as an escape from work. I’m lucky in that way, but also that means that I have to wrestle with the balance between work and training. I would like to find a better balance with it than last year, that I found to be too stressful too often.

Training Hard When Life Tries to Get in the Way

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I’ve been busy with work, sleeping very little. It’s a state of life I’m learning more and more about. The mental wear and tear of jiu jitsu gets amplified significantly when the stress of deadlines at work gets added to the mix.

For many people, jiu jitsu is a break from the outside world. There is something about grappling at near 100% that takes you away from the concerns and stresses of work, family, and life in general. On most days, jiu jitsu is that for me as well. But it’s not too rare when showing up to train hard requires a significant amount of willpower.

I think I read an interview with Carlson Gracie, Jr where he said that you should only compete when you are absolutely excited to be there. I think the same applies to training as well, except that if you are training for competition you shouldn’t just be excited to “be there”. You should be excited to try and work so hard that you hit your limit and are forced to overcome it or deal with the disappointment of having failed to do so.

It’s the Dan Gable ideal that he often talked about. Gable’s goal in practice was to work so hard that he would not be able to get off the mat on his own strength, but would need to be carried off. He never succeeded at that, but he always worked harder and harder to try to reach that point. The reality is your body can take nearly infinite punishment. It’s your mind that’s almost always the limiting factor.

I know this, but still it’s hard to remember it when after an hour of training, I feel my jiu jitsu game breaking down, frustration rising, physical and mental exhaustion seemingly setting in. And then the fact that I’m several days behind a deadline for work starts creeping in, and then life’s nagging questions start crowding my already weary brain.

I think about this a lot when I’m planning out my day, and I think anyone who is juggling priorities has to think about this and be brutal in saying “no” to things that take up time and do little to help you progress towards your goals (“enjoying life” being one of those goals).

Anyway, the two practical goals I would like to work on in training this week and beyond are:

  • Be quiet, train hard, and don’t be afraid to be friendly in conversation and drilling, and  yet intense on the mat (with good clean technique, and making sure to do everything possible to avoid injuring my training partner). I find myself at times unwilling to turn up the intensity especially against people who are much better than me. I owe it to them and to myself to try my hardest (again, with clean technique) to sweep them, to pass their guard, and to challenge them in whatever way I can.
  • If someone accidentally knees, elbows, or hits me in hard training, I will not complain, will not show it on my face, and will not take a break. But most importantly I won’t get frustrated. Frustration leads to bad technique, use off too much energy, and opens the door for ego to enter the session.

A Weekend of BJJ and Judo Tournaments

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I went to a couple tournaments this past weekend. On Saturday it was BJJ with The Good Fight and on Sunday it was Judo with Tech Judo Invitational.

I rarely do back to back tournaments on the same weekend, not because of physical or mental reasons, or even financial reasons, but because I usually have a ton of work and taking out two complete days is too much for my to-do list to handle. And I don’t kid myself anymore: no one ever gets any work done at the tournament, or after the tournament for that matter.

Of course, I had a ton of work, but you only live once. Competition keeps me honest in the rest of my life, so I ignore all the obvious “reasonable” excuses and go fight.

I won all my BJJ matches. I won the brown belt division and lost in the black belt division in Judo. The following are two video “blogs” documenting the experience at those two tournaments. I’m playing around with this format, and hopefully will learn to make it a bit more interesting than just video of traffic for 10 minutes.

“Sleeping Half my Life”

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In casually searching for information about sleep, coffee, and hard training, I came across a 2007 NY Times Article that mentions the following facts about two endurance athletes.

“Deena Kastor, who won the London Marathon last year and set an American record, said she sleeps 10 hours at night and takes a two-hour nap every afternoon. Steven Spence, a marathoner who won a bronze medal at the 1991 world championships in Tokyo, had the same sleep habits when he was training.”

That’s 12 hours of sleep a day! Of course, these are elite-level athletes, but still I began to wonder how much sleep I need. Given how much work I have and how much I train, sleep has often suffered. I’ll find myself often staying up till 3, 4 am and waking up at 8 am. I’ll take naps throughout the day when I feel especially exhausted, which my work allows me to do (whether I work from home or go into the lab and sneak off to a couch for a quick power nap).

The question I started asking myself is should I make sleep a bigger priority. In other words, should I plan my day around sleep? Should I force myself to finish the absolute most important tasks before a hard deadline of (say) midnight?

There are no good answers here, because a lack of sleep doesn’t have a well-defined immediate effect on performance for me. Does it for anyone? So it’s a long learning process, much like every other aspect of life.

Hit the Road Jack

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I’m becoming more and more of a fan of the Fightworks Podcast. A lot of the conversation is at times uninteresting, but there a few gems, especially when they interview world-class competitors.

They do a poll every week and on October 30, 2010, they asked “If your relationship with your significant other depended on it, would you quit training BJJ?”. Link to the poll

It surprised me that 49% of people said they would quit BJJ, and only 38% said they wouldn’t quit.

This got me thinking about my own relationships and what makes a relationship with a workaholic that trains jiu jitsu succeed or at least last longer than a week. I’m obviously passionate about what I do. And I think if the girl likes the “passionate” part, the relationship will work. Meaning, she doesn’t have to necessarily care about the activity (research, judo, jiu jitsu) at first, but in her value system an obsessive pursuit of a goal should be high up there. Otherwise, it will seem ridiculous to her the amount of energy that I allocate to work and when I’m dead tired from work spending the remaining moments on the mat training.