The Other Hard Thing

This is the way...and this is also the way.

I had a setback in May that ended with an MRI and a diagnosis of a torn ligament and muscle in my left elbow. I had to withdraw from Worlds (after making such a big deal about “doing the hard thing”) which made me upset in more ways than one. I was fortunate enough to get a flight credit and to have all of my hotel booking fees returned, but what hurt me the most was not the realization that I wouldn’t be competing at Worlds, but the feedback that there were parts of my training that were not advisable given the timing before the competition.

I have had a month and a half for my arm to heal, and during this time I've asked myself why I wanted to compete, whether my training was as inadequate as it felt when I received the initial feedback about my preparation, and how I was actually doing—not just during the Google calendar slots marked “Jiu Jitsu Training,” but in all the other hours of my frantic schedule.

For me, although I was training a lot of volume, I was getting stressed and distracted in a lot of ways. For one, teaching kids classes was incredibly hard on me mentally. My slot was on a Wednesday early evening, which meant that I had to literally rush out of work way earlier than the standard sign-off time, carry extra gi weight if I was coming out of the office, cram the last bit of note-taking for the adult class after, and also somehow then survive the chaos that was kids jiu jitsu. On top of that, other parts of my life outside of the mat were becoming increasingly unstable—the mile high pile of dishes and laundry that I could not conquer, despite near comical effort levels.

I’m not the first one to have an injury when training for a competition, and I’m also certain that I’m not the first to have an injury be a wake up call. I didn’t press snooze on my training entirely (yes, I was that person who tucked their injured arm into their gi and trained with one hand), but I was forced to ask myself what was actually helping me with my jiu jitsu and what was hurting me. I had to admit that even though I’ve been good in the past about practicing good sleep hygiene, that had almost all but gone out the window (which is where I would have put my phone at night if another different room was not enough). I had to admit that I didn’t scheduel heavy sparring days that pushed my cardio. That I didn’t take good rest days because even though there are those who can train every day, I was not one of those people because I didn’t go to a luxury spa-gym that had physical therapists, saunas, and massage centers at my beck and call.

Still, I had done some things right, and those things I leaned on as well so as to not completely characterize my training as a dumpster fire. Before my injury, I had gained significant strength in my lats, a historically weaker part of my body that was needed for everything in jiu jitsu, but especially in aiding in balance when I was playing the top position. This was only achieved through consistent effort of doing many dips. I had also talked to my sports psychologist regularly to get through the most stressful issues that I had encountered in the gym. And even though it wasn’t perfect, I managed to maintain a respectable in-office hybrid attendance at my job.

And most important of all, I didn’t keep the problems bottled up by myself. To the friends who asked me if I was okay after I burst out sobbing after an awkward interaction at the gym…thank you.

I wish that I hadn’t gotten injured, but this is a sport where the physicality of what is involved makes this a real possibility. I’m not going to say that the injury was an “opportunity to pause and reflect” because that is very, very cliche. What I do know is that the injury shifted my perspective on what was really important to me in the moment, what I wanted for myself, and how I could act in ways that would help me fulfill those real desires. I’m not grateful for the injury because there are way less traumatic ways to learn such a lesson, but I’m accepting of the road that it has sent me so far.

So what does the road look like? Less glamorous than I probably imagined it would. There’s a week-by-week, day-by-day training plan now, because it turns out that winging it while exhausted and overextended is not actually a training philosophy. I text people when something is weighing on me, even when I could figure it out on my own—which, I’ve come to understand, is actually the point.

My phone goes in another room at night and I run a meditation app on my watch before bed, because apparently one redundancy was not enough for me to actually follow through. I’ve taken real rest days. I’ve gotten real sleep.

These things sound obvious.

They were not, in practice, obvious to me.

I’ve also started doing something harder: looking at what was unraveling outside the gym. Identifying why certain chores pile up, why work assignments get delayed, what my procrastination is actually protecting me from. I bought two actual hardcover books—one about the 80/20 principle, one about integrating the parts of your life that tend to compete with each other—because I am trying to be a more enlg a new person who thinks about the problem rather than just grinding harder until something else makes a scary popping noise (or two).

The version of me who wanted to compete at Worlds was doing it for the wrong reasons, in the wrong state, and would have paid for it the same way I already did. I’m not interested in being her again. The hard thing, as it turns out, wasn’t Worlds. It was this.

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Some tl;dr takeaways courtesy of Claude because I know you’re probably going to use AI to summarize anyways:

1. Volume is not a training philosophy. You can train a lot but still not be prepared well. High quantity without structure—no hard sparring days, no real rest—creates the feeling of progress without the substance of it.

2. What happens off the mat matters as much as what happens on it. Sleep, stress, home environment, and work-life chaos all fed into the injury. Training doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

3. Know which recovery resources you actually have access to. Some athletes can train every day because they have built-in recovery infrastructure (PT, saunas, etc.). Most people don’t, and pretending otherwise is a form of self-deception.

4. Examine why you want to compete. If the motivation isn’t honest, the preparation won’t be either, and the body will often reveal that disconnect before the competition does.

5. The basics aren’t obvious until you’re forced to confront the consequences of ignoring them. Sleep hygiene, real rest days, structured plans—knowing about these things abstractly is not the same thing as doing them. Negative consequences help drive the message home.

6. Getting injured is not the only way to learn this lesson, but it is a common one. Audit your training before your body does it for you.