A white belt writes about the pursuit of jiu-jitsu

From very early in life we are conditioned to pursue victory. Our parents and other adults in our lives encouraged us to do our best, give 100 percent and win. Some are more relentless in their pursuit of excellence and go on to achieve incredible results.

For most of the rest of us, these early lessons in life provide the foundation for us to pursue a career and have a fulfilling life.

While we should always strive to put forth our best effort, for the beginning jiu-jitsu student, winning isn't everything. We've all been there. The techniques of the evening have been presented and drilled. It's time to roll with your classmates to try out what you've learned. We want to win our matches. In the beginning we try to use strength, size and pure will to submit our training partner. We've overlooked that, while still a white belt like us, this student has been training months longer than we have. We're missing a valuable opportunity to learn more and improve our skills.

Many of our more experienced colored belt classmates say, "If you aren't losing, you aren't learning." As a beginner we want to show progress and feel some sense of accomplishment. We wrongly believe that this can only be achieved by winning our matches while rolling during open mat sessions.

In every loss there is a lesson. Every arm bar reminds us not to extend our limbs. Every take down reminds us to be alert and maintain our posture.

Recently I've been training with a club apart from my home school and am confronted not only with more experienced training partners, but with different personalities and approaches. As a nearly 40-year-old newcomer to jiu-jitsu, I often seek out training partners of a similar age and experience level. At the club I'm visiting, there is such a partner. He's a little larger and a little more athletic than I am and has been training a little longer.

The first several weeks of class, we would roll and he would quickly submit me several times in a row. No matter what new technique I might have learned or what I tried to do, he continued to submit me. I analyzed each of his submissions. I discovered some of my own vulnerabilities. Primarily, he would pull guard. He would then quickly sweep me and initiate a choke. To defeat his game, I had to learn to initiate the contact and attempt a take down. This put him on the defensive. By making him change his game, I created opportunities of my own. Still, I was unable to capitalize and he would adjust and find a new way to submit me.

Finally, after weeks of being virtually helpless against this larger, stronger, more experienced training partner, I was able to achieve the mount and apply the baseball choke I had learned only a day before at my home school.

It's important to explain that I see this minor victory as more than this simple defeat of an opponent. This submission was not about being better than my training partner. This moment was truly about being better on that day than I had been the day before.

Knowing the choke would have been useless, without being able to take the mount. Of course the rest of the evening, my training partner submitted me again and again with the same baseball choke he had learned while losing to me.