Flowing with the Go (15 page)

It was Christmas, and I had been training at Jiu-Jitsu for a little over a year. One of my gifts from Chuck was a Jiu-Jitsu skills book with this inscription: “E, after seeing the pictures in Chapter 4, I have decided to hire a private detective. C”

The title of that chapter: “The Mount.”

It was Chuck's birthday, and we were meeting some of his friends at a bar to celebrate. I arrived late because I'd been training. So I rushed into the bar to get my party on, and someone asked, “How was your practice?”

I impulsively replied, “Great! I had the best roll with Owen.”

Silence. Eyes shifted to Chuck. “You okay with this?”

Chuck just shrugged. “Happens all the time.”

31
Hello Worlds

I
gave up coaching. I committed to improving my breathing. I continued to work toward emotional stability. But to what end? In the back of my head, I had wanted to train for Pan Ams that March, but the whole ordeal with the doctor saying I should have surgery had crushed my confidence, and I didn't feel ready. But something kept nagging me like a tiny sliver—you can't see it, but it keeps poking you. The next big tournament was the World Championships in June. It's a huge tournament in southern California. That would give me five months to train. I felt that if I committed to it, I could be ready to compete in June. I knew that if I made my intentions public, I would follow through. I needed something bigger than just me to hold myself accountable to my goal.

I don't have a history of letting a lot of people know what I am doing. Maybe it's because I wonder why anyone would care. Maybe it's because I think it's none of their business. Maybe it's because if I don't follow through, then I won't be letting people down. I let myself down all the time, but I never let other people down. When my friend was training for her first marathon, she asked me to train with her. The deal was that when she called I would meet her, rain or shine, whatever hour, and I always did. She needed me to make herself train, she said. Years later, I decided to run a marathon, but I didn't tell anyone—except my immediate family because I had to be gone for several hours at a time. After it was over and word got out, my friend asked me why I didn't ask her to train with me. I assured her it wasn't personal, that I hadn't asked anyone to train with me. I knew I would run the marathon no matter what—I had promised my sister-in-law that I would, it was her idea (she's an ultra-marathoner)—but what if I didn't want to follow a training plan, if I ran slowly, or if I wanted to stop in the middle? Who really cared if I was training to run a marathon anyway? But I couldn't train for a Jiu-Jitsu tournament by myself. I needed help, lots of help.

First, I had to ask Coach if he would support me in going to Worlds. Before a tournament of any size, Coach will announce that anyone interested in competing should talk to him, and attend the competition-team classes, and ramp up the number of training days. Well, I had already been working out with the competition team for over a year because I liked the challenging workouts, and I was already training three days a week. But I had never asked to compete in a tournament. There were times when I had competed locally, and those were times when Brick basically told me that I was going to do it, so I did. It hadn't been an intentional and personal decision on my part.

I put off asking Coach for a couple of practices, telling myself it was bad timing, Coach was busy . . . whatever I could do to stall. I knew I was being childish, but I felt like I was a little kid asking for permission to borrow the car when I didn't have my license.

When I finally asked Coach after a practice, my knee caps were shaking and I had to force myself to make direct eye contact:
If you
don't look confident, he's never going to say yes.
There were parts of me that didn't think he would say yes, and I would be crushed, and there were parts of me that hoped he wouldn't say yes, and I would be relieved. Conflicted? You bet. I realized quickly that I would be more crushed than relieved when he didn't answer me right away. It was a pause of a couple of seconds, but it was plenty long enough for me to mentally recite a litany of reasons why I shouldn't go and how could I have possibly thought I deserved to travel with a team of people that I held in such high esteem. And then he said, “Sure. I'll support you in that.” Gulp.

I'm pretty sure my knee caps were still quivering when I got home, and my stomach was all a jumble at the decision I had just made, but I walked into the living room, where everyone was watching television, and announced, “Tonight I made a commitment to be in a big tournament in June, and I'm going to be training really hard, and I'm going to need your support because this is something I really want to do.” The heads all nodded as if I'd just announced I wanted to repaint the kitchen. Still, it was important to make this public so I could not back out.

One thing I can be counted on to do is follow through. I may be mediocre, but I am diligent. I may be late, but I will always show up. I may struggle, but I will always work hard. In the end, I knew this tournament would be about my integrity and the quality of my preparation. What I didn't know was that the lessons I would learn on this five-month journey-within-a-journey would change my life.

Five months was going to pass by fast. They would span the spring months that were always difficult for me. Would my commitment give me the focus to see myself through that time period without self-destructing? I knew I needed to get off to a strong start. I knew that I would have to commit to those final nutritional changes I was being stubborn about. At Lisa's bidding, I did cut back on my coffee. It wasn't so much a matter of caffeine as it was a hindrance to my digestion. The acidity of the coffee and the stress I was swallowing daily were keeping me from absorbing all the nutrients I needed. I was already eating pretty well, but I wasn't maximizing the nutrients my food had to offer. So, yes, I gave up coffee. And yes, I gave up drinking. For five months, I did not drink any alcohol. Previously I had not gone five days without drinking. When we were invited out to dinner, I would tell our hosts before I got there that I was in training and not drinking. That was so much easier than showing up and having to deal with that glass in front of me and the looks of astonishment. During that spring, our Foundation fundraiser was a wine tasting, and I did not imbibe even at that event. I didn't eat white flour or refined sugar. I had detoxified my body. For the first time, I was eating because food was my fuel, not my antidepressant.

And I worked hard in the gym. I went to class four or more days a week and often did two or three classes a day. In April, I added hills and sprints to improve my endurance. That is when Lisa made me drink the beet juice.

“Where's the literature to support this insult to my palate?” I had asked her.

Yes, there was a study done where they gave Olympic athletes two ounces of fresh beet juice before training, and they had improved stamina. Beet juice increases the oxygen-carrying capacity of the red blood cells. It is also high in antioxidants, can lower blood pressure, and cleanses the blood. Too bad it tastes like dirt even after you peel the beets. Honestly, I tried cutting it with fruit juice, soy milk, and adding ginger, but in the end I just went for the good old college “throw back.” Bypass the taste buds and down the hatch. I had made a commitment to be my best come June. My Jiu-Jitsu skills would have to stand on their own, but I knew I had control over the way I prepared my body. I did not want a lack of conditioning to contribute in any way to poor performance.

In a previous chapter, I mention the harness, which was introduced to me by Brick. The harness is a vest that straps you to rubber tubing, which your teammate holds to provide resistance as you run the length of the gym down and back for a prescribed period of time. My first harness session lasted for two minutes. Dang. Apparently the extra conditioning I was doing was not enough, because the harness was torture. My quads were burning, and my throat was squeezing up. I felt like I was coughing up alveoli for hours after I was done.

It sucked, but over time the harness became a measure of my cardio improvement. A week before Worlds, I was doing three or four sessions of three-minute rounds, and I would jog or swing kettle bells in between sessions. It was awesome. I felt great. I was able to smile even though it was always hard. And I felt an immeasurable sense of accomplishment when I was finished. For the last four long years, I felt that I couldn't finish anything, that I wasn't worth the time investment, that I would never heal, that my grief would forever weigh me down. If I could beat the harness, I could beat my grief. And I felt like I was winning that battle session by session.

32
Worlds Apart

O
n February 7, I competed in a small interschool tournament at Seattle Gracie. That became the official weigh-in from which I measured my weight loss. I was 207, and there were no women in my weight class, so I had to roll with a guy—talk about giving me a complex. In BJJ, the weight classes for women are not very select. I'm in a group that is 162 pounds and over. Even at 207, I was fairly well-proportioned—I get big all over, I guess. Many of the women I competed against were short and round. Although I was four pounds heavier than I was at FemSport three months after Carly died, I was much leaner.

All the magazines say, “It's not about the number,” but in reality it
is
about the number for some sports. And while it was not about the number in college volleyball, having your weight and body fat percentage posted in the locker room every Monday was enough to make you consider an eating disorder. I could not let weight loss be my goal for Worlds. And why would I? My weight class did not require that I cut weight.

But the weight did come off. I didn't even think about it, but the changes to my diet and the consistent interval training must have kicked my metabolism into a previously dormant gear. By the tournament time, I had lost almost twenty pounds. Twenty fewer pounds and beet juice? My endurance was great. I could move more quickly and more easily. I actually felt like an athlete again.

Kathleen continued to be my mental health coach. We talked about mental-endurance techniques I could use to make it through the dreaded month of April, and then carry on into June and the tournament. I told Kathleen about how nervous I would get before competition. I couldn't sleep because takedowns and sweeps would play over and over in my head. Other times, I would wake in the middle of the night, sweaty and choking my pillow. The day of the competition I wouldn't be able to eat because I feared I would throw up. I didn't want to take these antics with me to Worlds, so we created a mix of relaxation dialogue for my iPod.