The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Man, that sounds really fun. At some point the fight just went out of me though. Several broken bones, torn muscles, and a concussion over a 12 year amateur martial arts career just wore me out. To say nothing of the more regular bruises. Just wasn't worth the wear and tear anymore. Felt like I was always healing from something.
But man, you do make it sound fun.
I think a lot of the fun of it is the total changeup it has been for me. I last did any kind of fight sport around fifteen years ago, when I boxed briefly before the bad concussion from a car accident made me rethink that hobby. If you've been-there-done-that-got-the-twenty-five-tournament-t-shirts it might hold less charm.
I do see how people talk about BJJ being relatively sustainable compared to other fight sports, and possible to practice into old age if done right. But then I also look around the little gym and nobody past blue belt seems to be free from a chronic injury or a history of surgeries, so in practice I'm not sure it is as sustainable as we'd like to think.
I initially signed up for six months, which is where the gym sets the commitment to get the lowest membership price, on the theory that if I committed for that long I'd get something out of it and then I could reassess my feelings going forward. I'll see how I feel then. It might still be new and fun, I might be right at the point where I feel like I might be making progress!, or I might be saying I still suck and this mountain just isn't worth climbing for another two years just to maybe get to the point where I'm respectable, or I might be saying man I'm not going to keep dealing with injuries just to pajama-wrestle with a bunch of other dudes. The six month mark provided me with a convenient decision point.
Best of luck! I'm not sure I could stomach sucking at something with little to no improvement for more than six months.
I know one thing that really aged me out of martial arts was the fact that I plateaued, if not moved backwards, and I was watching people with more drive just fly past me. More willing to train 4 hours a day, more willing to train injured, somehow able to keep their adrenaline pounding the whole damned time going 110%. Meanwhile I'd get maybe 40 minutes of high quality training in, and then I was just tired, and my shitty bum ankle with half a tendon didn't want to function properly anymore, and I just didn't feel like getting punched in the head that day or ending up with bruises up and down my arms from hard blocks. But what made it worse was looking at those other guys remembering how I used to be them! Then I decided to just get out of their way.
I'm not sure I could either. Or will. Already within three months I'm anxious for visible signs of improvement, and desperate to find them. On my best days I can tell I'm making progress, on my worst I'm pretty down about it. I suppose learning to manage that is what they mean when they talk about "building character."
I had a similar experience in climbing, where I got to a plateau of around 5.12 indoor after a couple years and the effort required to push further just wasn't in me. You have to start specializing: doing fingerboard work, losing useless weight, training in boring ways that suck instead of just hanging out. I could fake my way up a 5.13a at my best, but I was never going to be much better.
This has been my history with most athletic events, from high school to today: good, but not good enough to be interesting. I suspect if I stick with BJJ for another three years or so, I could get to a blue belt level, but at that point I might as well get it tattoo'ed on my waist because I'll never make it as a master.
Yeah, I'm not sure sucking forever at something you never get better at as a hobby is quite the "building character" Calvin's Dad is always talking about. I mean, if it's something you love, suck away. But otherwise, at a certain point you have to assess if this is a proper use of your limited time on this Earth. "Building character" is only useful when it's overcoming temporary hardship, or going nose to the grindstone for truly necessary hardship. Not for doing something you aren't enjoying and suck at recreationally.
It sucks getting old. I'm not quite to the point where exercise goes from hitting new personal bests, to just trying to slow the inevitable decline and doing it because you have to. But it's within sight. I hope I can maintain my discipline when year by year I'm capable of doing less and less. I hope that inflection point could be 50, or even 55. I'm afraid it could be 45 (I'm 42) or sooner.
Simple, constantly contest new events, inventing them yourself if necessary!
I see you have also discovered the speedrunning community.
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This is the way.
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