Title: Pausing My Passion
By Bailey Harper
I’ve been meaning to write this blog for some time. It’s been a challenge to get the strength to open up and also feel physically/mentally capable of writing this. I finally feel I’ve made some progress, so I want to share my story.
I started out the new year by travelling to Portugal to compete at the European Jiu Jitsu Championship. Although I lost my first match, I was eager to get back to Winnipeg to begin training again. I was planning on working hard, revising my training schedule and refining my technique for future tournaments. When I got back home, I started to feel sluggish and unmotivated. This is where my health took an unexpected turn. Without getting too much into detail, I was born with a kidney that did not fully develop. I’ve experienced health issues throughout my life. However, over the last few years it has mostly been infections and nothing major. It turned out feeling sluggish was due to a kidney infection that I would soon learn about, however, the kidney infection caused a very scary and stressful condition that I’ve now been trying to monitor ever since. I am now scheduled for surgery in July, which may only be the first step to a resolution.
Coming home with extreme motivation and determination for it to get ripped away from me, has been a very challenging experience. It is also something that I haven’t had to deal with while being a jiu jitsu athlete. Though I was aware of my health issues, I’ve never had something that I’ve been passionate about and spend all of my waking hours living and breathing, until I began jiu jitsu 4 years ago. I love jiu jitsu and it has changed my life for all of the right reasons. Normally I wake up at 4:30AM to strength train. I then work a full-time job from 8-5 and head to jiu jitsu for 6:30PM. Of course, I’m not perfect every day, but because I love training and being the best version of myself, I do this as many days as I can.
Being in my current situation, I’ve dealt with a lot of extreme challenges. I am tired every day, I can’t strength train, and most of all, I cannot train jiu jitsu. I attempted to strength train and attend some classes, but it got to the point where I’d end up taking 4 days off because it caused so much discomfort and soreness in my kidney. This was devastating to me. I felt hopeless and sad because I felt like I was being held back from doing anything, even just waking up early. I started crying a lot. The first month of dealing with this was probably the most disheartening and sad I’ve felt in many years. I started thinking that I couldn’t make any progress, I was going to be held back from obtaining goals that I had, and I also was not seeing all of the people I love everyday. At the time, I did not have any appointments scheduled along with reoccurring infections, so it did not help the situation. I felt lost.
After 4ish weeks, since I had no idea when I would be seeing a specialist, I began to sit at home and think how could I benefit from this time being off. I started thinking of ways to stay active like asking to assist with the kids classes twice a week, and putting together a schedule to study jiu jitsu techniques and modules. This started to put a bit of light back into me. I have still been trying to incorporate some activity back into my life like walking and yoga, but it’s so limited because I feel so tired and crappy each day. This is still a challenge for me, but I’m also being a lot more compassionate towards myself. I am being gentle and reminding myself that my body needs the rest. I have found new hobbies like building puzzles, completing fun puzzle books and watching new tv series and movies. This also keeps my mind busy! I have a surgery scheduled in the coming months which has given me some hope that I will be training by the first week of August.
I am so grateful for all of the love and support I have from my family, friends and companies like Hardcore Candy. Having them listen to me, support me and love me during this downtime has significantly impacted my mental health in such a positive way. I’ve realized just because I am taking time off to recover and heal, does not mean that all of the people and things I love won’t be there when I get back to the grind. The reason they’ll still be there is because they are here right now! Checking in frequently, planning coffee dates and just overall being there to support me.
As I continue on this journey, with no official recovery confirmation in sight, I’ve learned so much since this all started in February. All of this is going to make me a stronger and more resilient athlete. I cannot wait to get back to my training routine and overcome these challenges. One day at a day, one appointment at a time. At some point, I will be back and more mentally prepared than ever.