While some element of sacrifice is necessary to achieve your goals -- especially within the sport of jiu-jitsu -- there are some that are more difficult to accept than others.

Some costs simply don't outweigh the benefits. For brown belt Melissa Davis, who writes exclusively for FloGrappling, the choice to compete at the highest level means choosing between motherhood and a dream realized.

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Trade-offs are a fact of life. You want a degree. You go to school, and you work. You want to lose weight; you suffer through a diet. You want to learn a new language; you struggle through the painful studying and slow acquisition and practice. Discomfort is almost always the cost for greatness. There are trade-offs in everything we do.

I've never had any trouble trading off hard work for accomplishments -- I worked a full-time job through my undergrad, got my PhD while training jiu-jitsu five times a week, doing lab research, and volunteering in multiple science outreach programs. I rarely slept an eight-hour night.

All through my 20s and early 30s I thought I had it figured out. I knew about trade-offs and could make the right ones and get ahead in my chosen areas. I did what needed to be done to get where I wanted to go, and life seemed open and limitless. I had no idea that harder, more complicated choices and challenges were just around the corner.

Fast forward to now. The burden carried by many female athletes is coming into focus: You can't use your body to train if you are using it to grow a human. I'm about 10 years past the starting age for classification as a "mother of advanced age."


Three-time ADCC champ and five-time IBJJF World champ Kyra Gracie retired from jiu-jitsu competition to start a family. Photo: Instagram @kyragracie

There is no shortage of people telling me that I should freeze my eggs, that I ought to have kids now, that my clock is ticking. No lack of scoffs at my jiu-jitsu dreams of adult titles as a 38-year-old professional with a full-time job. And when I quit my promising academic career as a successful neuroscience researcher to work from home for a nutrition company, I cannot count the head shakes and concerned looks I received from family, friends, former colleagues.

That's not really the issue though; I've always been a little different. Let's be real, most women in BJJ are outliers on some level. It's not a traditionally feminine thing to roll around ruining your hair and hands, sweating on and choking your friends. Most of us are the grown-up version of the girls who didn't care so much for princess outfits as we did for climbing trees and mud fights. Being different is not the problem at all.

It's the clock: the diminishing choices that come with time, something you don't realize when you are younger. You won't always have the choice. I won't always be able to compete at a high level. I won't always be able to have children. Life is speeding towards the end of both of those options simultaneously.

Now my trade-offs are more terrifying and worse; they are not only mine. If I leave high-level competition too early, before l feel like I have pushed myself to the best and most successful possible me on the mat, before I have a couple more bucket-list podiums, will I lament and resent my significant other and our future children? If I stay and push this all the way and get all the things I dream about and have been punishing my body and for, will I lose the chance at children and lose my significant other's chance as well? Will he resent me? Or worse, what if I push this as far as I can and it's not far enough and I lose both?

As a blue and purple belt, a loss just meant going back to the drawing board: learn more, train more, look forward to the next one. These days each tournament that passes is another lost year in what I now see as a limited time frame.

It took some time, but I am at peace with my choice to keep pushing for now. I have a mortgage and a career; I can't and don't want to change that. I'll never be able to train full time and that's OK.

Sometimes I wish I had found jiu-jitsu earlier. Sometimes I wish I had pursued it harder before finishing my degrees and wanting to start a family. But most of the time now, I am just thankful that I found it.

You can't escape trade-offs, and sometimes you cannot even control them. But life is a beautiful, painful, wonderful thing, and I'd rather live it hard, taste it fully, and lose and suffer than hide and stay safe.

Jiu-jitsu taught me that discomfort leads to growth, and I'll do my best to honor that lesson until the day I die.

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