Slippery future

The future sometimes moves farther away.

I started doing Gracie Jiu-Jitsu back in the fall of 2011, at the spry age of 55. Back then, there wasn’t really much of a path for advancement for students who lived far away from the centre.

You could be a White Belt, or could earn a Blue Belt. With an incredible amount of work, you could also add a single swanky stripe onto your Blue, but that was as far as it went. It didn’t matter, as I was mostly just trying to absorb the curriculum that we had available at the time. It was fun.

Then, in 2014, the system for rank advancement in the outlying schools kicked in for real. Things became much like they were at the Gracie’s own school. We had access to all the colour belts; White, Blue, Purple, Brown, and Black. Each of those below Black Belt had 4 stripe levels. We were set.

To get any of the belts above Blue, a student had to have completed all 4 of the stripe levels on their current belt, be recommended for promotion by their instructor, and be evaluated by one of the Gracies or a Black Belt authorized by them.

The road was long, but there was a map.

Being as old as I was, Black seemed out of the question, and Brown almost as unlikely. Purple, however, seemed a real possibility.

I trained. Time passed.

My Blue Belt stripes came in due time, and in 2016 I went down to the Gracie Academy in Los Angeles to be evaluated for a Purple Belt. I passed.

I trained on, and more time went by.

Stripes were added, one....two...three...four....

Magically, I found myself on the doorstep for a Brown Belt.

By this time, I was training three days a week at my home school, and once a week in the city at another academy. Both instructors kept talking about upcoming promotion. The consensus seemed to be late in the summer, or in early fall.

Then I got hurt. I don’t even know what caused it. There seems to be a herniated disk in my neck. My thumb and a finger are usually numb, and there is often tingling in my right arm, and sometimes an ache. For some reason, a section of my central back seems to like going into spasm. I don’t think Jiu-Jitsu caused it, but it aggravated it really badly.

This is the kind of thing an old fart of 62 years shouldn’t mess with, and when the doctor said to give it at least 6 weeks of recovery time. I did nothing much at all physically for two months.

It is all still there, but it is much, much better.

I have returned to training, but do nothing that risks my neck. There is no rolling forward or back, or getting choked, or any sparring. I treat myself as very fragile, as one good yank could put me back to square one, or worse.

This all puts any thought of a Brown Belt evaluation on hold, perhaps permanently.

This is all most annoying. If it had happened after getting a Brown Belt, I would be able to collect Brown stripe ranks without difficulty. Maybe in the three or so years that would take, my neck would improve to the point where I could eventually go for Black.

As it is now, my rank is stalled.

In a way, it isn’t a surprise. Way back in 2014 when the process for promotion came into effect, my dream was to get to Purple before some injury sidelined me, and then to eventually collect the 4 Purple stripes. That’s exactly what I’ve achieved.

It’s just that I was so close to exceeding my expectations in a very stellar fashion.

So now I work on healing, and training as I can.

Maybe Brown can still happen, just pushed off some distance deeper into the future.

Can’t trust futures.