Exhausted

I still remember my first Brazilian Jiu-jitsu class.  It wasn’t so easy to find in those days.  It took a little effort.  I was training Jeet Kwon Do, and my Guro (teacher) had met someone who’d opened a BJJ academy not too far away.  My Guro thought it would be a good idea for us to check it out, so we did.

It was a Saturday morning when I found my way to a giant warehouse in the industrial area of Portland to meet up with a few of my friends as well as a few that would become friends by the time I finished the three-hour class.  I wasn’t smart enough to know what I was getting myself into for those three hours.

We started with a few warm-ups to get the blood flowing—pretty standard practice.  Then we started with the line drills that, at that time, were completely new to me.  We did the rolling, the falling, the shrimping, and all the other stuff that is pretty common practice in Jiu-jitsu world today.  I figured that we’d move into the technical instruction portion of things next, because that was the structure of most of the martial arts classes I had attended before.  But this instructor had a different plan.

Instead of starting with a block of instruction, he decided that we all needed to exercise together.  For the next half-hour, he guided us through a tortuously exhausting regimen of body-weight calisthenics—pushups, sit-ups, squats, etc.  In the beginning I thought we’d knock out a couple dozen of each and then get to work learning this new Jiu-jitsu stuff.  But I was wrong.  Every time a circuit came to a close he would just start us again.  We kept doing exercise stuff.  It felt like it would never end.  My every muscle quivered and twitched—it all burned.

Mercifully, it did finally end.  I could barely pick myself up off the floor—and we hadn’t even started the Jiu-jitsu part of things yet.  My pride—or my ethos (one or the other)—had not allowed me to quit on any of the movements, so I had nothing left.  I stood and looked around at the rest of the class, slightly relieved that I wasn’t the only one in the group who was struggling.  We were all dripping with sweat and moving slowly.

“OK,” the instructor yelled.  “Let’s bring it in and get to work on technique.”

He paused for a moment, then looked at all of us—I felt like he was looking directly at me.  “I know that was hard,” he said, “but I had to take your strength away from you.  All of you are completely exhausted, so you’ll have to rely on the technique, not on strength.  You’ll have to do the technique right.”

So I take pleasure in weaknesses, insults, catastrophes, persecutions, and in pressures, because of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.  (2 Corinthians 12:10) 

I think that might have been the first time I realized that my best learning happens when I’m exhausted.  It’s a hard path to travel to get to that point—the point where I’ve got nothing of myself left to fight back.  But once I’ve reached that place, I think I can finally be taught and I can finally learn.  I’m a hard-headed guy.  I’m colossally arrogant.  I’m pain-avoidant and comfort-seeking.  If I’ve got any strength left, I’m going to use every iota of it to resist learning, especially if the learning is uncomfortable or painful.  It takes a lot to get me out of the way. 

I have to be exhausted.

I have to be willing to be exhausted.

This morning was a bit rough, but it was also absolutely necessary.  I’m getting ready to compete.  It’s been more than a decade since my last competition, and I need to prepare.  I need to be willing to be exhausted.

 I’ve got other teammates who are getting ready to compete, as well.  We have tournaments on the horizon.  We separated out from the rest of the group on jumped into some hard rounds.  Those who have trained competitive combat sports know the kind of rounds we were doing—positional sparring to submission, winner stays in to take on the next in line and the winner stays in until he stops winning.  There was no time limit.  The only way to end the round was with a submission.

I knew it was going to be rough, and I knew it was going to be necessary.  I don’t have time not to be willing to be exhausted.  I have too much to learn in too little time.

I wear a black belt and my ethos tells me that it’s my place to represent it, especially when I’m training with my team.  They deserve the very best version of me.  I’m a pretty big guy, even though I’ve cut quite a bit of weight in recent months.  I tell myself that I need to be willing to be exhausted.  My pride doesn’t matter.  My ego doesn’t matter.  My learning matters.  My example in front of my team matters.

So, I decided I needed to be willing to be exhausted.

It honestly wasn’t that hard to get there.  I might have some skill and I might have some size, but nobody was giving anything away this morning.  They all came to fight and they all wanted to push the pace. 

The first couple rounds weren’t necessarily easy, but I was fresh and feeling loose.  I hit most of the takedowns I wanted and felt like I was flowing pretty nicely through my position and submission sequences.  A couple of my teammates are significantly smaller than me, so I didn’t run my heaviest game at them, but I was able to impose my will.

But there’s a thing about those kinds of rounds—if you win you have to stay in and take on the next challenger.  If you win that round, you take on the next challenger.  Eventually, no matter how conditioned you are, you’re going to get tired.

I definitely got tired.

There was a young brown belt in the training group.  He’s very good.  He’s been training since he was seven years old.  He’s taken the very best that any of we teachers have to offer and made it his own.  He trains hard and he trains well.  He’s a handful…and he’s become something of my archnemesis—my archnemesis in the best of ways.

As I embraced fatigue even the lightweights were putting me in danger.  They were starting to pressure through my guard and hit sneaky takedowns on me.  Then my archnemesis would rotate in and things would get even harder.  He was doing the same rounds as I was, so I would like to think that he was also fatigued.  But he’s younger and far more flexible than I am—and he’s trained with me for so long that he’s got my game totally dialed in.  In short, he’s extremely dangerous to me.  He’s a legitimate threat.  Any mistake I make he makes me pay for.

And that’s what made it so much fun.

Our rounds were long.  I’m training, primarily, for six-minute rounds.  I’m pretty sure our engagements went much longer than that allotted six minutes.  He’s tough.  His defense is on point.  His guard is sneaky and fluid.  I was running every pass in my arsenal at him while fighting off Kimuras and Loop Chokes.  Sometimes I’d make it to a dominant position and start to hunt for submissions.  But he doesn’t give anything away.  I’d find myself digging and grinding with some truly vicious submission attempts—and he would weather it.  He would weather it to the point where he could escape or even reverse the position.  And then I would be on defense, trying to weather his storm as he returned my efforts with vengeance.  Eventually one of us would win.  Sometimes it was me, and sometimes it was him. 

Winner stays in to take on the next challenger.

The rounds were constant and continuous, with very little down time.  I’d get beat by position or submission and step out to step back in what seemed like only seconds later.  It grew more difficult to stand to my feet at the end of each round.  I was breathing hard.  All of the sweat that had been inside of my body was now soaked into my gi on the outside of my body.  The little guys were giving me fits and lower ranks were bringing nothing but heat.  I didn’t even bother trying to tie my belt back on anymore.  It was a waste of precious energy.

Seventy-five minutes into our rounds and we kept meeting up, my archnemesis and I.  Every round we fought was an epic battle of determination.  And that’s where I finally started to learn.  My body was at the end of itself, and that meant that my spirit and intellect had to take over.  I had to get out of my own way to remember what I knew about Jiu-jitsu.

I started making smarter decisions about my movement—after all, energy is an expendable resource and I had very little of it.  I was choosing positional advantages over risky submission attempts.  I knew that I couldn’t afford to lose dominant position because I wouldn’t have the resources to fight out of an inferior one.  Sometimes I did get reversed, or I did get my guard passed.  But in my exhaustion and fatigue my body remembered how to do the actual technique, just like my first ever Jiu-jitsu instructor had intended.

If I take your strength away you’ll have to rely on technique.

I labor for this, striving with His strength that works powerfully in me. (Colossians 1:29) 

God has always spoken to me loudest in my exhaustion.  My brain is busy, my body is always on the move, and I don’t tend to sit still very well.  Focus is a difficult thing most of the time.  I struggle to hone my attention when I pray or meditate.  My mind just doesn’t stop.  It doesn’t stop until I’m finally exhausted.

Sometimes I think the exhaustion stems from my resistance to God.  I’m certainly obstinate and I want to fight against Him, just like Jacob did when he demanded a blessing that God had already promised.  I don’t think my resistance is always born out of deliberate struggle, though.  My mind is traitorous and treacherous.  My mind is a whirling storm of doubt and second-guessing.  Sometimes I like to fight, other times I wish I could stop fighting.  I don’t know how to calm the storm.  I can’t do it myself.

He got up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Silence! Be still!" The wind ceased, and there was a great calm. (Mark 4:39) 

I think that God often lets my resistance run its course.  He’ll let me struggle and flail.  He knows it’s not always malicious (though it sometimes is).  He lets me vent my anger and emotion in His direction, invulnerable to being offended.  He waits patiently until my resistance is exhausted.

"Come, let us discuss this," says the LORD. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are as red as crimson, they will be like wool.”  (Isaiah 1:18) 

In my exhaustion, I think, I can finally hear God’s voice.  I can hear Him speaking in that strange silence.  Oddly, most of the time, it is in the strange silence that I finally realize that God has been speaking to me the whole time.  I guess I just had to energy to fight back enough not to hear Him.  But it is also in those moments that I realize that, while God was speaking and I wasn’t listening, I was still learning.  The journey toward the place where I could finally learn was never a destination, it was always a process.

If I go east, He is not there, and if I go west, I cannot perceive Him.  When He is at work to the north, I cannot see Him; when He turns south, I cannot find Him.  Yet He knows the way I have taken; when He has tested me, I will emerge as pure gold. (Job 23:8-10)