For the first two and a half years I trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I was training anywhere from 4-6 days a week. I simply couldn't get enough time on the mats. It seemed like I was learning so much, so fast, that when I had to take the occasional week off due to an injury, or life (attend a wedding, catch the flu, etc...), it was agony.

This was especially true in my first year, when I was still in the "honeymoon stage" with BJJ.

I distinctly remember the feeling when I got my arm popped the first time, how I was crushed that I would have to take a week off to let it heal. I was a white belt at the time, and I recall a very real sense of panic that my fellow white belts would continue learning and advancing while I was sitting on the couch, icing my elbow. Being the obsessed grappler that I was, I spent every moment watching YouTube instructional videos and trying to visualize the techniques. I was desperate not to fall too far behind.

Looking back on that now, it seems almost comical how upset I let myself become over losing just a week.

Until you enter that "long term" phase of your relationship with BJJ, it’s like a new romantic relationship. You spend almost every waking moment thinking about it, and you plan out almost all your free time around it, shifting other things which used to be priorities for you just to maximize the time you get to spend with your new love. A week apart is an almost unbearable absence in this stage...and a month seems like an ocean of time that will surely come with dire and costly consequences.

Being obsessed with your life on the mat is normal, but it comes with a price: When you do get injured, it can be extremely tough to deal with both mentally, and emotionally.

I was actually lucky: I did not receive my first truly major injury until I was a blue belt and had been training for about 2.5 years. I was able to get all the way through white belt (in my 30's no less) and into blue before I had to confront true and long lasting BJJ separation anxiety. Passing the major milestone of blue belt made it easier to face when I did have to finally take an extended break, but it was still extremely hard on me. I can only imagine how much harder it would have been if my injury had occurred just before blue.

I remember vividly, the moment when I finally accepted that I was going to have to stop training for an undetermined amount of time. I had come home from a fairly hard day of training and my lower back was absolutely screaming in agony. I stripped off my clothes to take a shower, and as I tried to bend down to turn on the space heater in my bathroom, an electric burst of pain raced through my back and down both my legs, causing me to crumple into a ball on the bathroom floor. Tears welled up in my eyes and I lied there on the bathroom floor, broken. All I could think about was how much I loved BJJ, how hard I had worked, and the tremendous transformation that I made as a person over the last few years of training. In that moment, the thought of losing BJJ in my life was a barbed and terrible pain in my chest...one that I had only ever felt in my life a few times before, during times of immense heartbreak and loss. I was absolutely terrified of a slow slide back into the unhealthy lifestyle I had before Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu came into my life.

As it happened, things got better. I did get up off the floor of my bathroom and finish that shower, and I even made dinner for my wife that night before she got home from work. I sucked it up and did what needed to be done: I emailed my professor and told him I would have to take an absence from training of an undetermined length, while I got X-rays and probably an MRI to determine what was wrong with my back.

One thing I have learned in my time on the mats, maybe the most valuable thing I have ever learned, is that life will beat you down and crush you. Staying calm and keeping your wits about you is the surest way to escape and improve your position.

Imaging revealed that I had a collapsed and protruding disc in my lower back and I would need about 6 months of intense rehab in order to have a chance at returning to the sport I love. It was painful, frustrating, and very expensive, and I was unable to train BJJ for that entire time. The first month or two, I found myself very depressed and angry, and when those feelings started to fade, I realized that I was moving through what are commonly called the "5 stages of grief".

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

I had managed to spend the time before I admitted I was injured, in Denial, refusing to admit how badly hurt I was. I moved swiftly to a combination of Anger and Depression. I hit bargaining soon after, as I started to have thoughts like "Maybe I could just drill and not roll" and "Maybe I could just not compete anymore"...but those thoughts were quickly dismissed, as I knew that neither of those solutions were going to really be enough for me. I wanted to get back what I had lost, and nothing short of a full recovery was going to make that awful feeling go away. As I did more and more rehab, lifting weights and building up my damaged core under the cruel tutelage of my new strength and conditioning coach, I began to move to Acceptance.

It took about four months to make my peace with the idea that I was going to be out long term, maybe even forever, and all I could do was work as hard as possible on my recovery and what will be, will be.

As I look back now on that time of being injured, of being in limbo, and not knowing what my future in BJJ would look like, I realize that my mindset before the injury had a lot to do with how hard it was for me to come to terms with getting hurt. I was looking at BJJ like a sprint, rather than a marathon. When I wasn't training, I was watching videos online. When I wasn't doing that, I was visualizing techniques in my head. I was drunk on that feeling of learning so much, so fast, and I had emotionally tied too many of my hopes and dreams onto BJJ. I had become a bit over-invested in just one thing...and when that thing was threatened and taken from me, it was like my whole self-identity was shattered.

I don't know if it would have been possible for me to look at BJJ any other way back then. Maybe I had to get hurt to learn this lesson. Maybe I needed to get hurt to get the right perspective of balance between my life and my life on the mats. There is no way to know for sure.

What I do know is this: If you are like the majority of people who train hard, you will catch a substantial injury at some point in your BJJ career that will force you off the mats for longer than you feel you can tolerate.

How you handle it, and what you do to mentally and emotionally handle the stress of potentially losing something you love so much, has just as much to do with how you view BJJ before you get hurt, as it does with how you deal with the injury and the recovery process itself.

If you haven't yet been hurt, I would like to humbly urge you to really let yourself imagine what it would be like to blow your ACL, or rupture a disc in your spine, or tear your rotator cuff. Imagine that you can't train, the pain keeps you from sleeping, and you are now just lying in bed every night, dreaming about not just when, but IF you will ever be able to train again. Do it now, take 5 minutes and really put yourself through that. I'll wait.

Its awful right? Is it easily one of the worst things you can imagine?

If it was as awful as I suspect, that is a cue to think about the fact that statistically you stand a substantially non-zero chance of getting hurt at some point, and you will have to take time off to heal. Most likely, it won't be permanent. I know quite a few people who have blown discs or torn their ACL/MCL/PCL or meniscus. I know people who have broken their radius and ulna. I know people who have broken their hands and feet....and all of these people made the grueling journey through recovery and continue to train.

The point is that if you set your mind now, to be ready for the inevitable challenge of injury, you can lessen the time it takes to get over the emotional side of the process and get started working at your recovery. Accept that you will get hurt, and accept that you can recover from damn near anything, and you can keep BJJ in your life if you want it bad enough.

BJJ is a lifetime art. Getting to your black belt is a marathon, not a sprint, and there will surely be at least one time when you get hurt and you have to confront the idea that you may never train again.

Accepting it now, and setting your mind to meet that challenge head on will give you a huge advantage.

As it says in the Hagakure:

"There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything."

― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, The Hagakure.

Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Gleeson

Photo courtesy of SplitShire