My legs are heavy.

My lungs are burning.

I don’t know if my ankle is supposed to shift the way it does.

“We’re almost done,” I tell myself, as I look around the room. Everyone is thinking the same thing. I look for an easy roll – they’re tough to find.

When you’re three weeks out of the biggest weekend in jiu-jitsu history at one of the best gyms in the world, there aren’t really a ton of easy rounds.

We have athletes from England, Germany, Australia, Japan, China, Canada, Russia, and probably more countries that I can’t think of right now.

The room is ridiculous. So is the training. I feel more like a face in the crowd every day in the best way – like there’s nothing for me to worry about except getting better.

We’re two weeks out of ADCC.

This week, we’re talking about chaos.

Get Caught Up On Chris' ADCC Prep Blog

• I'm Competing at ADCC. Here's My Training Routine and Thoughts On The Event
• ADCC Prep Week 2: The Grim Reality of Trying to Be Your Best
• ADCC Prep Week 3: The Mental Game of Grappling
• ADCC Prep Week 4: "The Deload Week"
• ADCC Prep Week 5: The Home Stretch

You can only control so much.

Last week, I talked about the home stretch.

One of the main things that I am focusing on for these last few weeks of training is control, efficiency, and tightness.

But the problem is that you can control only so much in fighting. Combat sports inherently have a lot of variables and chaos. Things happen.

I’ve dealt with injuries throughout my ADCC prep, overtraining, plateaus, and the feeling that I’m wasting my time training this hard. On a day-to-day basis, it’s tough to see progress, especially when your training partners are all at a world-class level and are also making progress.

I can’t really control all of the variables. At the end of the day, combat sports inherently contain a bit of chaos.

Sometimes my body doesn’t feel as good as it does on other days. Sometimes, I am dead tired.

I can manage my health (this ADCC camp I’ve learned a lot about this) and I can choose my partners wisely, but at the end of the day, there is inherent chaos in what we do.

Each week, we finish the training week with a competition simulation. It is essentially a practice of throwing yourself into the chaos of a 2-day competition.

We simulate the two-day event with two hard, long rounds each day to end practice. The last round of the two-day simulation is like 30 minutes.

These are the days I want to skip. It’s getting near my max level of “chaos allotted.”

On life in the chaos.

I moved my whole life to Texas to train Jiu-Jitsu.

I didn’t have a job when I moved here. Besides a few of the guys at the gym, I didn’t know anyone. I left everything behind – my friends, my family, my entire network, my old gym, and the city that I called home (Chicago) for more than 20 years.

I left all of it because I wanted to chase the dream of competing in ADCC. I didn’t really know if I was going to be able to do it, but I knew that I needed to give everything I could to try.

That was literally the only pull that was strong enough to get me away from Chicago.

My life has changed a lot since I moved. I have done different gigs writing online to support myself, I’ve traveled a lot, and I’ve competed and improved a lot in jiu-jitsu. I’m a different grappler and human now than I was when I moved here. You can’t help but change when you put yourself out there as much as I have in the last year.

And it’s because of that journey that I feel like I can’t really justify taking it easy on myself before something like ADCC. I have to push because I literally came here for one reason: to push myself to see what I was capable of.

So that chaos that you have in Jiu-Jitsu – that thing that I kind of fear – is the thing that I have had to learn to get excited by. It’s something that I have had to learn to get comfortable with.

It’s kind of like how we tell white belts to “get comfortable being uncomfortable,” except I took it really far. To be honest, I’ve pretty much taken it as far as I am willing to.

I took it so far that I don’t even like hearing that sentence anymore. It’s kind of obnoxious to me at this point. I’ve been “uncomfortable” for a year now, and it’s made me smarter, stronger, faster, and best of all, I finally learned how to do a legit duck under.

But it’s also tough. This sport is tough. That’s the truth that everyone dances around when they throw up their post-training pictures or their little highlight reels. It’s hard.

But it’s also the coolest thing I could ever imagine myself doing.

Closing Thoughts

My good friend Keith Krikorian was featured in an article last week that I really enjoyed, and there was one key quote from him that stood out and I think is a great way for us to close this article:

“I thought you had to only care about jiu-jitsu to be good at jiu-jitsu. I just don’t know if that’s true, not anymore.”

I’ve talked a bit about my experience with moving to train – literally putting Jiu-Jitsu at the center of my life. I think that it’s really important, in the midst of that obsession and hard work, to remain grounded. To remain grateful.

When getting for a competition – especially one as big as ADCC – it’s essential to remember this is something to get to do. I’m grateful to be healthy, and most of all to have the ability to push myself to try to do well in the biggest tournament in the sport.

At that’s all I’ve got for this week.

Next week is the last week of camp, and I can’t wait to be done.

Stay tuned next week as I’ve got one more article for y’all.

Read more from Chris at TheGrapplersDiary.Substack.com 

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