Lessons from the Sand Pit (Part I)
Pain was the first lesson I ever learned through martial arts.
I was seven years old, somewhere in West Africa that had no business having a certified Jeet Kune Do school, but there it was. I'd fallen in love with the movement, the pzaz of it all. The way Bruce Lee moved made me want to move like that too and that was enough.
One afternoon, our professor had to leave early. "Work on your kata," he said, and disappeared. The moment the door closed behind him, the dojo transformed into a gladiatorial arena. Every man for himself. Kids mimicking Bruce Lee's sounds, those high-pitched waatahs and primal screams as they threw kicks at whoever stood closest. It was bat-shit crazy, the kind of chaos that burns itself into memory with perfect clarity.
I don't remember the boy's name who kicked me. I just remember the impact.
Solar plexus. Direct hit.
Time didn't slow down the way it does in movies. Instead, everything compressed. One second I was standing, the next my body had hijacked all decision-making from my seven-year-old brain and initiated a pure survival protocol: run.
I ran gasping for air that wouldn't come. My lungs were locked and I'd lost the key. Then my legs, those traitorous things, gave out entirely. I hit the ground and started crawling. There was a sand pit nearby where we did long jumps. That became my destination, though I couldn't have told you why. Maybe I thought the softness would help. Maybe I wasn't thinking at all.
I crawled and mopped in that sand, unable to form words, unable to form thoughts beyond the animal understanding that something was wrong. In my child's logic, I decided that if I was going to die, I should at least try to reach my cousin. She was thirty yards away doing jump rope with her friends. It felt like 3,000 yards. I never made it.
I passed out.
When I woke up, my best friend was standing over me, frantically panicking, convinced I was dead. For the next thirty minutes, I experienced what I can only describe as hell. A burning sensation that you cannot cool, cannot soothe, cannot negotiate with. The only remedy is time. You simply have to let it pass. You have to become a passenger in your own suffering and wait for time to be your healer.
Even now, with all the pain I've endured since, there hasn't been considerable pain that comes close to that moment. In a sense, your first will forever top any that follows.
Here's the strange part: I went back.
What did that seven-year-old learn about himself? That his body could betray him completely, shut down all systems, leave him crawling and gasping and blacking out in a sand pit. And that he could wake up from that, stand up, and walk back into the place where it happened.
I didn't have language for it then, but I'd learned that pain has an end. And that I could survive reaching it.
Kyokushin became my bread and butter.
When taken seriously...and I mean seriously, this discipline will systematically destroy both your body and mind in order to rebuild them into something else entirely. A metamorphosis, but one that requires you to die a little first.
The kata demands perfection. Not the casual perfection of "pretty good" or "close enough," but the relentless, obsessive perfection of repeating the same movement thousands of times until it becomes involuntary. Until your body remembers it better than your mind does. Each stance must be exact and grounded. Each strike must travel the precise path with swiftness. You craft it continuously, the way a blacksmith returns to the blade again and again, hammering out imperfections that only he can see.
But kata is just the beginning.
Body conditioning, makiwara training, AKA striking posts and pads until your knuckles crack and bleed and then calcify into something harder than they were...that's where Kyokushin earns its reputation. You strike until the flesh disappears. I don't mean metaphorically. I mean you develop so much scar tissue, such thick calluses, that the nerve endings dull. I was so obsessed that in college, I took on the role of being everyone's alarm clock. I would strike a 3-layered cardboard tapped on my dorm's cemented wall from 6am to 7am. The Pain becomes something you can regulate, dial up or down like a volume knob.
I remember one training session, three hours deep into conditioning work. We were doing uchi-komi: repetitive striking drills against heavy bags. Two hundred punches, then two hundred kicks, cycling through combinations until your muscles turned to liquid fire. At some point, maybe one hundred and twenty minutes in, I tasted blood in my mouth. I hadn't been hit. This was just my body's way of saying we've exceeded specifications.
During cardio finishers like burpees, mountain climbers, sprawls and quick-fire spars, the world around me would narrow to the sound of my own heartbeat thundering in my ears. Not the gentle lub-dub you hear when things are quiet, but the desperate BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of a heart trying to keep you alive despite your best efforts to destroy yourself.
This training requires continuous return. You can't do it once and call yourself conditioned. You have to touch that edge repeatedly. The edge where you're not sure you can continue, where your body is voting to quit and your mind has to overrule it, until that edge becomes familiar territory. Until you live there.
And then something shifts.
You become, for lack of a better word, superhuman. Not in the Marvel sense, but in the human sense: more than you thought a human could be. Pain stops being an emergency signal and becomes just information. Your body learns it won't die from exhaustion, from strikes, from pushing past what felt like limits. And once your body learns that, it stops trying to protect you from those things. The governor comes off.
You stop giving up.
I realized I'd changed during a sparring session when I took a kick to the face and of course I felt it. The pain was there, significant and real. But I didn't crumble. I didn't even stop moving. In fact, it went like this: I saw a white light and kept pushing forward with a smile on my face in a matter of chronometers. Some part of me registered "kick to the face, will hurt worse in a moment" and just... kept fighting. My sparring partner saw it in my eyes: the shot that should have finished the exchange hadn't even slowed me down.
He tapped his gloves together in respect, but I could see the question behind his eyes: What the hell is he smiling at?
Kyokushin. That's what it does to me.
BJJ brought a different type of test.
In striking, you can create distance. You can move, evade, reset. But in grappling, someone has you. Their weight is on you, their limbs are controlling yours, their sweat is blinding your eyes, and there's no space between their intention to submit you and your body's response to it.
I remember being caught in an omoplata during an open mat session. For those unfamiliar, it's a shoulder lock where your opponent uses their legs to isolate your arm while controlling your posture (basic version). Done correctly, it's inescapable...a mechanical certainty. Your shoulder will dislocate before the position breaks.
I was caught. Completely. The position was locked in, the opponent was savoring the experience, and I could feel the pressure building in my shoulder joint, that sickening sensation of something being pulled in a direction it wasn't meant to go.
This is where panic usually lives. Your brain screams TAP TAP TAP because it knows what comes next. But underneath the panic, I could feel something else: all those hours on the Kyokushin floor, all those moments of being convinced I couldn't continue but continuing anyway. A voice that said, Not yet. There's still time.
I didn't force anything. Forcing against a locked submission just makes it worse. Instead, I waited for the micro-moment, the split second when my opponent adjusted his grip and shifted his weight. The moment I felt it, I moved and suddenly I had the perfect space to pull my arm free of his thighs.
The escape took maybe 10 seconds. But those 10 seconds contained every lesson I'd learned about staying calm when your body wants to panic, about believing you have options when the situation says you don't.
My coach saw it and just nodded. "Good."
But here's what he didn't see: the curiosity. At that moment when I was caught, some part of me wanted to know how long I could stay there. How much pressure could I tolerate before tapping? Where exactly was my limit?
This is what Kyokushin has taught me, not just resilience, but curiosity about my own limits. The desire to find out how far I could take it before breaking. That curiosity is dangerous. It's also what separates people who train from people who transform.
I found myself escaping from rear naked chokes by staying calm long enough to find the hand position error. From armbars by rotating into them instead of away. From mount positions that felt like being buried alive. Each escape reinforced the same lesson: belief in your skills isn't abstract. It manifests as physical calm. As patience under pressure. As the willingness to wait for your moment instead of forcing it.
If you can breathe you will survive.
That resilience forged in Kyokushin and refined in BJJ, started showing up everywhere else. The unknown stopped being nerve-wracking because nothing could match the pressure of someone trying to choke you unconscious. Difficult conversations became manageable because I'd learned to stay present when every instinct said to flee. Best of them all, the day-to-day experience of founding a startup turned into an RPG game with regulated stressors.
Failure in regular life hurt less because I'd developed the capacity to take damage and keep moving.
But I hadn't truly understood any of it yet.
That would require losing.
I still train. Different now, but still training.
I carry that seven-year-old with me, the one crawling through sand, gasping for air he couldn't find, convinced he might die in a jump pit thirty yards from his cousin. He learned that pain ends. That the body can break down completely and still get back up.
Kyokushin forged something in me that remains: the capacity to endure past the point where endurance seems impossible. The understanding that limits are negotiable, that discomfort is just sensation, that the mind gives up long before the body actually must.
I've learned that winning and losing aren't opposites. They're just different angles of the same truth: you're always incomplete. Always becoming. The moment you think you've arrived, you've stopped learning.
Martial arts hasn't made me complete. It's shown me I never will be. And somehow, that's the gift.
The point was never the medal or the record or the validation. The point was showing up for the version of yourself you're becoming. The point was learning to take damage and keep moving. The point was discovering that your limits are further than you think, but closer than you'd hoped, and both things can be true simultaneously.
Pain was the first lesson. Being incomplete is the last one. And in between is everything that makes you who you are.