One Blue Belt’s Perspective, Three Years Later

The good, the bad, and the ugly on (almost) one year at blue belt and three years since I took my first jiu-jitsu class and signed up for a soul-crushing, body-breaking sport that would change my life.

Today is my “re-birthday,” or “gi-birthday (?),” marking three years since I walked into the basement of Broadway Jiu-Jitsu, stepped on the mat, and never looked back. In the last three years, jiu-jitsu has become a part of my personal identity. It’s now as much a part of who I am as the fact that I grew up in New Jersey (a lifelong fact) or that I have celiac disease (an eight-year-ago discovery), even though it’s only a relatively recent addition to my life.

In writing this, at first, I was quick to downplay that three years isn’t that long a time, especially when people I train with have been doing this for decades. But then I got down to some of the math. Turning 30 this year, and doing jiu-jitsu for three years that means I’ve done jiu-jitsu for a meaningful 10% of my life. If I characterize only the last 8 years after college as adulthood ones in which I had genuine control over my own time, I’ve spent more than a third of that time doing jiu-jitsu.

If we are the sum of the ways we spend our time and the people we spend it with, then with more time in this sport, I should be pretty smart, self-aware, tough, humble, hard-to-rattle, calm in the face of crisis and flux. I’d say I am some of these things already, but not as much of the others as I would like to be yet. And that’s what keeps me in the game.

In the last year, I went from white belt to blue belt (May 20, 2019), so I can’t call this post some version of “One White Belt’s Perspective,” anymore. Writing my “blue belt’s perspective,” I’d say my journey in my almost-first year at blue has been more enlightening than the two years at white that preceded it.

Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good: there’s no question that I’ve gotten better.

Even when I am having a terrible training day, beat myself up, and have nothing nice to say about my jiu-jitsu, I can’t deny that the evidence supports that my game is moving ‘up and to the right.’