I recently attended a Brazilian jiu-jitsu event. No, not a competition that left me with a fractured rib. An endurance event. 100 five minues rounds, broken down into four blocks of 25 rounds with 1 minute rest between, and three short seminars between each 25 round block.

That was the plan. And the reality wasn’t too far off. I skipped the seminars to get some R&R between the 25 round blocks (though I of course watched ’em) but I did manage 95/96 rounds. 2 were dropped because I miscalculated the start time of the next block and re-entered the area late. The other 2/3 everyone missed because of a promotion to black belt. I had planned to do 25 rounds in the gi, then 25 no-gi and so on, but the attendees were overwhelmingly intent on no-gi. This made for almost 8 hours of grappling in a single day.

It went well and it was a tonne of fun, and I’ve since been toiling over what I learned from my participation. I think it’s a meta-realisation about one’s capacity, about how the extent of our skills and character are revealed.

In Brazilian jiu-jitsu sparring sessions, it’s quite common to see people nope-ing out of a round or two. This makes sense when one is coming off the back of a regular day, an hour of technical training, and a few intense sparring rounds. Often, the narrative is that that person can’t do another round. That narrative is always nonsense. And it’s nonsense because of an aspect of human nature amplified by a particular attribute of Brazilian jiu-jitsu: what’s left is always more than nothing.

On the human nature aspect: Primo Levi has this beautiful stance that I talked about in the afterword of Ss. I’ll quote it fully:

No one can know how long and what torments his soul can resist before crumpling or breaking. Every human being has reserves of strength whose measure he does not know; they may be large, small, or nonexistent, but the only means of assessing them is severe adversity. Even without invoking the extreme case of the Sonderkommandos [the inmates responsible for removing corpses from the gas chambers post annihilation], we survivors commonly find that when we talk about our experience our listeners say, ‘In your place, I wouldn’t have lasted a day.’ This statement has no precise meaning; you are never in someone else’s place. Each individual is an object so complex that it is useless to try to predict behaviour, especially in extreme situations; we cannot even predict our own behaviour.

There’s arguments for and against classifying rounds, sessions or events of Brazilian jiu-jitsu as “severe adversity”, yet it’s undeniable that Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a grappling with adversity itself. It quite literally gets one near-death.

So let’s imagine someone “exhausted” and unwilling to contemplate participation in one more second of grappling. Let’s imagine they’re compelled to get on the mat and roll. When they do, they discover there’s something left and they can still persist. Human nature kicks in.

Our bodies and our character are cunning. They always leave us with something left to give. Just like the Zeno’s paradox where one must cover half the distance to go all the way, we can always get halfway to our next destination. And then we can get halfway to the next required point, and so on—until we hit biological constraints and die, of course; some physical laws are immutable. One can always give half of what’s what left because what’s left is always more than nothing.

This happened to me during the BJJ100 event. Rounds 80-90 I felt I was toast. My jiu-jitsu was getting sloppy and I had minimal intensity to give. But I matched up with the right person in a few remaining rounds and we had legit, technical, high energy rolls surprising for the tail end of half-thousand minute grappling event. They say the style makes the fight; sometimes an other is a perfect catalyst for the self. What’s left is always more than nothing.

Now, Brazilian jiu-jitsu itself acts as a multiplier to this aspect of human nature. Unlike other combat arts, such as striking, standup disciplines like wrestling or judo, or holistic practices like MMA, Brazilian jiu-jitsu self-limits the rate at which it draws down on one’s performance capacity. Because one is on the ground most of the time, because one doesn’t have to exert or absorb high force, because one can modulate the intensity of performance moment-to-moment, it’s possible to sustainably train high volumes of high intensity over time.

For humans generally, and for humans doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu especially, there’s always something left.