Musings from the BJJ Gi #29, lesson 60, stripe 3!

I'm just posting the milestone BJJ experiences for the time being, as for now and into the near future, it's primarily just more knuckling down and getting many more repetitions of the same group of lessons in, trying to bring the fluency up a bit more. But yeah, Combatives stripe 3! Getting there, slowly but surely. My partner and I had a 5 week training hiatus between stripe 2 and 3, as we were both demolished by the flu, which also developed a secondary bacterial lung infection, and we both had to get on a reasonably heavy dose of antibiotics to prevent pneumonia developing. We were intensely sick for about 1 week each, but the recovery took another 3-4 weeks, lots of coughing/wheezing, low energy/lethargy, mental fog, and just that general post-antibiotic weirdness that you get. But we've been back on the BJJ horse for 2 weeks now and have our momentum back.

I had an interesting thought about the long journey of BJJ while we had that period away from training due to sickness, being that; BJJ is such a giant, almost infinite activity to take on, where progress is very slow, where the knowledge and skill set is so vast and complex that it takes many years of consistent training to even come close to considering yourself a competent BJJ practitioner. With that known, I think every progress milestone you hit, be it a new stripe, a new belt, or just moving up to the next category of classes in your academy, that milestone isn't just symbolically representative of the section of your BJJ journey which you conquered, but also every other obstacle in your life which you successfully dealt with during that period, in order to allow yourself to continually, consistently turn up to training, and keep chipping away at this goal, during good times and bad. It represents the sicknesses and infections you overcame, career and social obligations, relationship breakdowns, financial challenges, transport issues, bad weather, university lectures/assignments/exams, mental health issues, anything and everything which can and does happen to people between BJJ milestones, that new stripe or belt or medal or class represents every obstacle you overcame in order to keep on training, and keep on moving forward.
Some food for thought anyway. Just keep turning up!

• David