Knowing You Suck is a Form of Progress

Dust Mop Jiu Jitsu: The Combat Base: Part Three

Great Falls Brazilian Jiu Jitsu-Great Falls, Montanna

 

-On devastating losses, licking your wounds and searching for proof that you suck…and how cool my wife is

This is the Eleventh article about my journey in Jiu Jitsu. If you want to know more about what this project is, you can read more about it in the first article here.

It’s also the third of 7 articles about my time as a member of Combat Fitness MMA. While I was there, I would learn to push myself beyond harder than I ever had. 

My wife Rachel is the most fascinating person I know. Her life and childhood have been beyond unusual. But since she has that midwest Nebraska modesty, she’ll never tell you the following facts:

 

• Her parents received grants from National Geographic when she was in elementary school which meant that she was homeschooled while looking for rare birds in New Zealand and Australia 
• She went to high school in a public school that allowed her to do her biology classes in a zoo
• She’s been to more national parks than anyone I know
• She’s more than comfortable operating as a ranch hand

Neither of her parents grew up in Nebraska. Her father was born in Chicago but moved to Great Falls, Montana as a child because his father had dreams of starting a farm. His father also, apparently, had dreams of leaving his wife and children leaving them to be raised by their mother. She kept that farm going and now it’s something of a summer home for everyone.

Great Falls is not a well-known place save for a weirdly well visited bar that has a mermaid tank behind the bottles. Other than that, it’s mostly big skies, flowing rivers and unbearable pollen counts.

My first time going there was at the beginning of one of the darkest periods for my jiu jitsu that I can remember. 

In the last article, I wrote about trying my first local competition. It served as a wake up call to start training more seriously and I worked hard for my first real tournament. I had two brackets and lost them both badly. I got submitted by everyone and I couldn’t have been more dejected. What was worse was, I was leaving Combat Fitness to work in Boston for the summer. I had three months to consider my shame. 

But before Boston, I was on my way to Great Falls to spend a week with Rachel’s family. I looked up the only place that was nearby for a training session which is how I found Great Falls BJJ. A few years down the line, it would become a lifeline for me for the first COVID summer. By then I would have a much different self concept. But walking in there the first day, I had one thought on my mind: How much I sucked at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

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The first real competition I went to was in Plattsburgh, New York. Plattsburgh is across the lake from Burlington, Vermont and just south of Quebec. Most American grapplers  have never heard of the place but I guarantee that you would know if you like strangling people and you happen to speak Quebecois. 

In a knee-jerk reaction to the UFC, the provincial Quebec government forced all of the different Martial Arts organizations to unionize in an attempt to crack down on prize fighting. It might be bizarre to think about the fact that Tri-Star gym, the home of Georges St. Pierre, has some of the most elite training in the world. But if you want to compete in a tournament, you have to leave the Province lest you break the law. 

So this middle of nowhere tournament in upstate New York was filled with Quebeckers looking to make the day count. If you’re European, maybe this wouldn’t phase you too much. But you get a weird olympic vibe competing in a place where the coaches of the other grapplers are shouting in a foreign language. 

That wouldn’t matter for my first bracket. I got demolished by two Americans in the gi division. I had never felt adrenaline like that ever before. I don’t honestly remember what happened but I remember not being able to breathe by the end of my second match and being called over to the no-gi section as soon as it was over. Aaron was there to coach me. Aside from him, the only other guy I knew there was Tyler Haylee from St. Albans who came to Combat every once in a while. 

Tyler was a stand up guy. The kind of person who would offer you encouragement even if you’re having the most shit day of your life, of course after he chokes you across your own jaw. He’s short and tough and I considered him an inspiration for a small stocky like me.

My no-gi bracket went even worse than the first ones. I remember Aaron suggesting that I not even do my final match. “Let’s just get out of here,” he said. Even though I knew I wasn’t going to win anything, a part of me knew that if I didn’t finish my bracket, it would be worse than losing. Sucking would be way less shameful than knowing I walked away a coward.

I don’t remember what happened in my last match. But the feeling afterward was horrible. Aaron and Tyler and I got beer and pizza afterward and I felt like I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t think of a single thing I did right that day and I had all this self-doubt creeping all over me. I felt like I was coming to grips with the fact that I was completely untalented in this sport. And I was about to leave Burlington for the summer with just my thoughts of how much I sucked to keep me going. 

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Great Falls BJJ is at the mall. I had never been into a BJJ place that’s actually in a structure like that. But why not? It’s actually a good setting for the place.

There were mats that were black with pictures of submissions around the place. I wouldn’t get to see an actual class because it was just going to be an open mat. My self doubt and the world’s strongest pollen were still in my head and I felt like I could barely breathe. I remember taking the back of a big Montanan who seemed unamused as he shook me off just by nodding his head. 

The instructor, Preston Bludworth, was really nice. He was a freshly promoted brown belt. I told him I was White Belt and that I had been training for 2 years. I remember feeling kind of sheepish about that. But he told me he had been a White Belt for 7 years before getting promoted. “I’ve been to gyms where I wear my purple belt and everyone thinks I’m a god because I’m submitting everybody. But it’s not that I’m that good, it’s because they think I’ve been training for less time than I have!”

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I’ve been trying to make sense of this phase of BJJ. A lot of folks that I’be rolled with have mentioned how important it is to have a “dark night of the soul” for your game. A time when you think that this entire project has been a foolish waste of time. Many people I’ve talked to seem to think it’s a badge of honor to go through that because it proves you’re mentally tough enough to get through.

Maybe.

There’s another perspective that I heard recently on the perfect named “I Suck at Jiu Jitsu” podcast. In a recent episode, he basically described this phase as progress in and of itself. 

He described four phases of BJJ that actually can be applied to almost everything. I actually learned it previously from my high school history teacher, Mark Rosenberg. Those phases are the following:

Unconscious Incompetence: Not knowing how much you suck

Conscious Incompetence: Knowing how much you suck

Conscious competence: Learning you don’t suck so much, at least for some things

Unconscious incompetence: Doing so well that you forget about everything and you just feel the progress.

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Before the tournament in Plattsburgh, I was unconsciously incompetent. I didn’t realize how big the holes in my game were. But the losses taught me some pretty important lessons of what was missing in my game. That conscious phase is essential for progress. It IS progress. But entering into that phase is harder than any difficult round of sparring. It’s not over after five minutes. It can last months or even years. 

A few days ago I competed and took silver. I lost one match and I won the other. I’m proud of my win but I’m a lot more focused on the one I lost. Not in a way that puts me into phase one, but in a way where I’m able to see the lesson that it’s there to teach me. But I’m only able to do that because of how I felt after my first real tournament. 

But at the time I went to Great Falls BJJ, the funk I was in would last for months. Throughout the summer I would continue to train at Boston BJJ but it was only at the crazy early morning classes. Those guys are the hard core black belts that only helped hammer in the thought that I was just not cut out for that sport.

Nobody was putting these thoughts in my head. I was the only one looking for proof that I sucked. Lo and behold, I found it.

This wasn’t the lowest point. That comes in the next article when I quit Jiu Jitsu.

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If you ever want me to visit yours and write about what it’s like to learn from you, feel free to reach out at [email protected]. You can also follow me @DustMop_JiuJitsu If you want to read my articles as soon as they’re published be sure to subscribe on my blog site!