The night before my first competition, I couldn't sleep.

ADCC India Nationals, in Delhi, back in May. I'd been training for five months, my nerves were shot, and my heart was doing things it had never done in a board meeting. I happened to be reading Dune at the time, so I lay there and chanted the litany to myself, the way Paul does. Fear is the mind-killer. It sounds ridiculous written down. It worked.

Before the fight, Debo, who'd come with me as my head coach, asked me a simple question. "What's your objective here?" I said, "Don't get tapped." That was it. Not win. Not medal. Just don't get tapped.

I lost on points. My opponent took my back and sank in a rear naked choke, and I decided right there that I was not tapping to this. I could hear the other corner yelling, "Choke him, choke him, choke him!" I held on. About a minute and a half in, I could feel him give up on it - he was up on points, no reason to burn out his arms. He let go. I lost the match, and I walked off the mat having done exactly what I set out to do.

And then I had the best day. I made friends with my opponent. I made friends with the guy in his corner, Sanjay Nambiar, who's turning into one of the best grapplers coming out of India. I spent the rest of the day watching other people fight, taking pictures, cornering friends, cheering. I've never had that much fun losing something.

That day lit a fire. I went into a proper training camp - strength and conditioning, yoga, jiu-jitsu, nutrition, all the dots and all the T's. I trained every single day, and when I wasn't training, I was resting so I could train the next day. My whole life was dedicated to it.

This month I went back to Delhi for my second competition, Strangle. This time the objective was simple too. Do better than the first one.

I won my first fight.

I can't even describe the thrill. I called my coach Nihaal straight away. "Bro, I won!" And he said, "Yeah, it's okay. Calm down. You have another fight in fifteen minutes." I said, "What? I can't do this." He said, "Calm down, take a breath, and go for it." So I did, and I lost the second fight.

Here's the strange thing. I remember that loss clearly. The win, I barely remember at all - it went by in a blur of adrenaline. I think that says a little about the mind, and how much more we learn from the fights that don't go our way.

When the year started, my misogi - my one impossible thing - was to compete once. I competed twice. I lost, I won, I lost again, and I came home each time feeling more alive than I have in years. It doesn't really matter who wins or loses. It's the moment where you're giving it your all. That's all that matters.

The thing that's really stuck with me, though, isn't either competition. It's the people on the mats who've been doing this far longer than me, some of them by decades, still rolling, tapping people half their age with a kind of lazy precision. They've swapped strength for timing and speed for patience. That's what sold me on jiu-jitsu as a sport for life. It doesn't have a peak you fall off. It has a long, slow curve where what you lose gets traded for what you understand.

So the real opponent isn't whoever's across from me in Delhi. It's me, in twenty years. I've started thinking about recovery, mobility and sleep the way I used to think about infrastructure - the boring parts that decide whether the exciting parts still work later.

I don't know exactly what next year looks like. Whatever it is, I'm not giving this up for it.

See you at seventy.