Athletic Expertise Archives

Sink Swim or Fight?

The ground is my ocean, I’m the shark, and most people don’t know how to swim. ~Carlos Machado

It’s been almost ten years since I began training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and today it hit me. I need to decide to get better or I need to quit.

I get into physical things–no matter what they are–in the spirit of Steve Prefontaine. At first it may be curiosity, or frugality (I do a lot of my own remodeling at home), but the sustaining interest is powered by Pre: to see who has the most guts.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is first about guts. Stepping on the mat places you in a world where few enter and fewer and fewer stay. That is not even considering the levels of success any one may achieve.

In my experience, my learning curves are steeper than some. Over time they regress to the norm as they should. Depending on the domain, they may stay ahead of those around me. I know this about myself and, admittedly, I allow it to prevent me from working hard–norm calibrated rather than criterion calibrated. As a musician I could stay pretty consistently ahead of the curve when in a new situation without any effort.

That is a confession not braggadocio.

It is shameful to think that spending time practicing could have produced a variety of outcomes, some with life changing potential. I did not act.

While an undergrad it became known that I played the french horn though it was not my major instrument. The orchestra director offered to secure an instrument and I requested weekly lessons in exchange for my participation. A golden opportunity to study with a well known musician and to perform both repertoire and some contemporary music. My teacher told me I had a beautiful tone and excellent pitch. I rarely practiced. Made plenty of mistakes in rehearsals. It did not last but I look back and wonder what could have been different if I took hold of that opportunity wholeheartedly.

I am reminded of an Old Testament passage where the prophet Elisha tells the King of Israel to strike the ground with an arrow.

18 And he said, “Take the arrows,” and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground with them.” And he struck three times and stopped. 19 Then the man of God was angry with him and said, “You should have struck five or six times; then you would have struck down Syria until you had made an end of it, but now you will strike down Syria only three times.” (2 Ki 13.18-19)

That being said, I can always say that I could have done more. And further, I am not including all of the other life factors that may have had a genuine influence on how committed I was to the work. AND I was a kid–that was a lifetime ago.

Bringing me back to my practice of Jiu Jitsu and my attempt to maintain an reflective awareness of my practice. When I began studying Jiu Jitsu, I was good. Or, at least, that is what I was told by others. I was able to get to class three or more times each week and was not in tremendous shape. I watched videos and read books about Jiu Jitsu. I was in. Deep.

Jump ahead. Craniotomy. Complete grad school. Have a daughter. Buy a house, work on house, move, keep working on house. Have a son. Shoulder repair. Change jobs. That last few years have not had me on the mats very much at all. Schedules have been rough. Recovery from a recent surgery was slower than expected. I have been on the mats twice since getting the OK from the doctor.

What was most clear today is that everyone has improved. My skills that were competitive a few years ago are not as competitive as they were. Attribute some of that to rust and being a little gunshy with the shoulder, fine. I was constantly scrambling and defending. Out of breath. HOT.

Granted, I managed to get in a full class and three or four sparring matches afterwards. All tough matches for me–I like to train with people who are better than me and I do not mind “losing” at all. I say “losing” because we all know that it means very little to tap or reset a sparring match. Some folks still keep track. I do. A little.

I am tired and sore. Worse than that is that I know what I need to do to improve and have to decide if I am willing to start doing it.

Supporting Creativity Pt. 1

Several years ago I was in a beautiful position. As the chair of a small fine arts department in an urban independent school I was able to push, pull, advocate, and influence. The faculty around me were supportive. The administration was trusting. Our budget was enough and our facility gave us room to grow.

Times like these you learn to live. Again and again we would consider our methods and how well we served the students, the mission of the school, the faculty, and one another. We were open and looking for ways to make everything meaningful and memorable for our students. One gaping hole in our curriculum was dance.

Now everyone knows that there are standards for dance and that they are never fulfilled for many reasons. If you can imagine that, historically, arts programs are the first to be cut you can trust me that dance may not be an area that even gets onto the schedule. How could we make this work? Another challenge is that the certification process for K12 dance is essentially a technical certification–categorized with shop classes and the like. Earning the certification is one thing, maintaining it is nearly impossible. For this reason, many dancers and dance educators do not even bother. As an independent school, this was no real concern but this meant, from a practical standpoint, that there is no significant pool of dance educators to draw from in the same way that you may be able to tap into student teachers or practicum students in other content areas.

Having been a co-founder of a NYC dance company and having worked with professional dance companies in 5, 6, 7, or 8 past lives, I knew a little bit about the field. I knew that dancers had a few things in common. One of those things was a love of available space–often the more austere and forgotten the better–and a need for space. My company used to rehearse in a Julliard studio on odd weekends when classroom reserves were thin. We rehearsed in loft bedrooms with furniture stacked on end. We rehearsed in performance spaces like PS 2 in between performances of popular theatre programs, in church basements, and in performance venues–they thought we were performing but we ran it like a rehearsal.

The final frontier.

Our students needed opportunities to express themselves creatively.
Dancers needs space. We had space. I started searching. Alphabetically.

Miller Rothlein–then Miro Dance Theatre–was the first company who had a functioning web presence, a functioning phone number, and a functioning director who answered it. I told them what I had in mind. We have space and you have dance. We want to share. And that, as they say, was the beginning of something beautiful.

Years later, we reminisce on the amazing work they have done with our students.
It is nothing less than beautiful.

This year, at their annual fundraiser, two of their first students will be presenting a duet.
Seniors. Going where no man has gone before.

Please take the time to support

the seed, the soil, the water,

the care, the shoot, and the growth.

Click here to sustain creative expression

Becoming Nobody

Online chess. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It is a stretch to say that I like losing but I consider myself game. Gamey? Gamer. Willing. Much more willing to lose than not to play. Grow or at least have the experience. That will pave the way one pebble at a time.

So often you will hear in a conversation or read in a blog or social media outlet that someone considers themselves a “lifelong learner.” I wonder what they are learning? In my informal survey of these statements, it is typically a statement about one’s willingness to improve or change their current skills. Is that not what everyone does or is expected to do? Formally, I would enjoy gaining more information about genuine levels of objective growth and change rather than anecdotes about life-changing events and decisions that “really moved (institution X) forward.

As one who enjoys martial arts, I look at all areas of my life to reveal my training partner. It changes by day and by context but the function is the same. By working together, each one has the goal of improving their skill and they cannot do it alone. Regardless of your training partner, you can only have one competitor. Self. Choose how much practice takes place, quality of food, level of hydration, and intensity of work. Make the decision to be present. Aware.

Before I step onto the mats I determine my attitude and I am sure that it influences who obliges when I offer to pair up for a session of training. So many would love to say that “any given Sunday” I may win a match or lose a match; have an up day or a down day. That is not the case. My training session begins the night before when I decide to get a decent night’s sleep and moves forward with decisions throughout the day. There are not many decisions to be made. There is one. Then another one.

Me and Relson — Mugging for the camera with Relson Gracie

Watching the documentary “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” I heard David Shenk saying that there were 40,000 moves on a chess board after the first move. If you know anything about chess, you know that this is inaccurate. From both a mathematical standpoint as we as a meaningful standpoint, it is inaccurate. The only one with thousands of moves before them in a chess match is a fool.

Every decision made through the day determines an analog success or failure on the mat that evening. However you may score it. We all score it somehow. That is how we measure growth. I will not pretend to be one of the “all for fun” types. I will not claim to be a technician or analyst of the game but I know this–there are necessary and sufficient conditions in order to achieve growth and most of them depend on me.

Become nobody. Be humble. Serve. Give. Leave your ego at the door. I will take it one step further…maybe several steps. Those decisions that you make all week determine the type of training partner you will be for someone and reciprocally, they will then be for you. Rather than simply preparing yourself to respond and react, prepare yourself to be your best for someone else.

I’m a Loser, Baby (Soy un perdedor)

Watching the Metamoris Brazilian Jiu Jitsu submission-only challenge had me thinking about the acquisition of skill–okay, I think daily about the acquisition of skill–but also about how you carry, characterize, and implement skills that you have. Also, I have been revisiting some of my early research about the perception of Expertise in the eyes of those to whom it actually matters. You know, where the rubber meets the road.

Experts meet every day in battle on the chessboard, the mats, all over. There will be a loser–or at least a perceived loser–in each match. A game played to stalemate may be entered into the books as a draw but the players know who was controlling the pace, who was attacking and who was defending, and who was dominant throughout. What do you call an Expert who loses?

I remember when Mike Tyson lost.

You have to ask yourself: Who is a Black Belt in my field? Who checks all the boxes?
Does the loss matter and how pervasive and deceptive is your perception?

And my time is a piece of wax, fallin’ on a termite
That’s chokin’ on the splinters

Beck, Loser