Sometimes realising you’ve pushed past your boundaries can be a surreal experience. One morning in January I found myself running round a suburb of Paris to make weight for my match in the IBJJF European Championships. I felt like part of me was watching from a distance saying, “Is this what we’re doing now? OK that’s pretty cool.”
I started Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu just over a year ago aged 39. I was introduced to the idea by a friend who has been practicing for many years. He decided I would love BJJ and mentioned it casually from time to time for a couple of years until I thought I might as well try out a free session and see what the deal was. The atmosphere in my academy was instantly receptive, inclusive and really friendly. After initially feeling awkward in the borrowed uniform, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I left my very first session thinking, if I had discovered this 25 years ago I would have been a much happier teenager. As a beginner I was encouraged by the fact that my natural strength gave me an advantage, or at least an encouraging starting point. I very quickly learned that you don’t want to win on strength, and there is skill in holding back with smaller or weaker partners in order to focus on technique. It’s a skill which is extremely hard to learn, for me at least, like so many of the skills of Jiu-Jitsu. I have never been a natural at learning choreography, I’m not great at planning five moves ahead, and I haven’t always had heaps of faith in my ability to get better at things which don’t come easily. In fact I don’t know when I’ve ever put this much work into something I don’t feel like I’m automatically good at.
Years ago when my kids were little they started a weekly Capoeira class. The community was great and I tried the adults’ class a few times, but I found I was intimidated by working in pairs. I was worried every time that my partner would have a bad session because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I feared I wasn’t making progress quickly enough. I couldn’t escape the feeling of
embarrassment. BJJ felt different to me from the start because of the atmosphere of mutual
learning and teaching. There was a feeling of camaraderie and inclusivity which made me feel it was OK to keep going even if I wasn’t an elite athlete, even if I wasn’t making progress particularly quickly and wasn’t going to win any Jiu-Jitsu competitions. I started to believe that any progress is good progress. Everyone is a student. You will never stop learning this, and even when your physical limitations begin to change with age, there is always progress you can make in learning technique, practising fluency, and developing your Jiu-Jitsu mindset.
It wasn’t long after I started that I went from thinking of myself as someone who “wasn’t going to
win any competitions” to wondering what it would be like to compete, to checking the divisions to
see what age and weight bracket I would be in. I decided to lose a few kilos to compete in the
“heavy” category rather than “super heavy” which for women is an open weight class. Just in case I
felt like it. I had started on a twice-weekly membership for only four months as I was very doubtful I could keep up the time commitment as a single mum with three kids and a full-time job, but within three weeks I swapped to the unlimited membership, committed to training three times a week and made a decision to give it everything I had for a year and just see what would happen. For me that meant never questioning whether I felt like training or had the time for it - just going and doing it and respecting that fact that I had already made that decision for myself. I didn’t think of this as a mental toughness exercise – it felt like the opposite in fact, I was just removing a daily decision. But in fact it was a confidence-building technique which empowered me to keep training, so a positive cycle was formed.
Having BJJ to train for made me take my strength and fitness training more seriously, too. In fact in a weird way it gave me permission to do this. It was like I had wanted to train more, to be fitter and stronger and achieve more. But until I had Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu there was no specific reason to do this. So it felt selfish and unnecessary to spend the time doing more than just keeping myself basically fit and healthy. Once I had made the decision to compete – or rather, once the decision had sneakily made itself – I had to train to honour this goal, to keep this promise I had made to myself. As my fitness increased so did my stamina for all the normal stuff I had to juggle in life, meaning that I gained extra capacity to fit things in and keep on going.
Competing at the Euros was something I still hadn’t dreamed of at this point, and there were a lot of setbacks and barriers to overcome, but I could feel a big change in how I was living my life. I was
excited and terrified to see how competing would feel and how I would cope with the pressures it
brought.