I haven’t started jiu jitsu yet. I haven’t signed up, haven’t walked into a gym, haven’t been submitted by a teenager. That’s not a confession — it’s the reason this site exists now rather than in six months.
The plan is to go from here to competing. This is the log, starting from before day one.
Where I’m actually starting from
Not from nothing, but not from anything especially useful either. I train Muay Thai, and I do general fitness work around it — the gym, running, and getting outdoors when I can. So I’m fit, I’m used to being hit, and I’m comfortable with the particular kind of tiredness that comes from a hard round.
None of which, I suspect, is going to help very much.
Striking and grappling seem to have almost nothing in common except the room they happen in. Muay Thai has taught me to stay on my feet, keep my distance, and hurt someone from range. Jiu jitsu appears to be about the exact opposite of all three. My honest expectation is that a decent chunk of what I’ve built up over the last few years becomes irrelevant the moment someone closes the distance and takes me to the floor.
Why write it from here
Because this is the part that disappears. Once you’re any good at something you lose access to what it felt like to be baffled by it, and every account of learning gets written from the far side, where the early confusion has been tidied into a neat story about progress.
I’d rather have the actual record. What I thought was going to be hard versus what actually was. What I expected to matter and didn’t. The stuff that seems obvious now and won’t in a year, and the stuff that seems obvious now and turns out to be completely wrong.
I build software for a living, and it’s the one real thing the two have in common: you can’t cram it, you show up consistently, you get incrementally less bad, and the improvement is invisible day to day and obvious over months.
The plan, such as it is
Sign up. Start training. Keep the Muay Thai going for as long as that’s realistic. Get to a first competition, and find out what any of it is worth when the person opposite wants exactly what I want and nobody resets the position when it gets awkward.
I don’t have a date. I don’t have a gym picked. Working that out is the first thing that goes in here.
What to expect
Session notes, once there are sessions. Things that aren’t working. Whatever the first competition turns out to be like — including, quite possibly, losing in the first round and having to write that up honestly.
No posting schedule promised. But there’ll be a second post, which is the hard part.