My love-hate relationship with BJJ

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is a martial art, combat sport system that focuses on grappling and especially ground fighting. BJJ promotes the concept that a smaller, weaker person can successfully defend against a bigger, stronger, heavier assailant by using proper technique, leverage, and most notably, taking the fight to the ground, and then applying joint-locks and chokeholds to defeat the opponent. (source: Wikipedia)

I'm small. I wanna know how to defend myself against a bigger, stronger person. And I get to learn how to choke someone? (Elliot's future boyfriend better watch out.) I'm in!

I wouldn't say that I'm obsessed with BJJ but it's constantly on my mind. Any little free time that I have, I'm usually on YouTube looking at techniques. During the day my mind would wander about the last time I trained and what I could've done better.  "Maybe I should've gone for the lasso guard instead of spider guard" or "I'll try the toreando pass instead of the double under next time." All of these visual scenarios, interrupting my typical work day. It's quite distracting.

Then there are the physical injuries that have piled up in my short BJJ career. First, I strained my left hip flexor, probably due to its sudden heavy workload. As the professor says, "It's all about the hips. If you can't move your hips, you won't be good at BJJ." That put me out for 4 weeks. Then a few months later, I strained my right hip flexor. Dammit. Out for two weeks. Then I sustained bruised ribs when a girl (not the 200+ lbs guys I roll with) crushed my side. Out for another couple weeks. Then I got the dreaded cauliflower ear that you typically see with grapplers and MMA fighters. At least I look like a badass (though I'm far from it). And my latest injury happened a couple days ago. A relatively new student I was rolling with had an arm lock on me and as I was tapping (he needed to let go immediately but probably didn't feel it since he's so gung-ho about "winning"), he cranked the submission and I heard my elbow crack/pop twice. My elbow is now fucked. Sigh.

Surprisingly all of these mishaps haven't deterred me from quitting. I'm actually bummed out if I can't go train. There's a saying, "A black belt is a white belt who never quit." Hopefully down the road, I'll get that black belt. Osssss!

My gnarly ear.