A blue belt twenty pounds lighter held you down for five minutes. You drove home wondering if jiu-jitsu was for you anymore.

You tapped a brown belt a week later. You drove home feeling like a new person.

Both rounds are outliers. They’re the exceptions in a long run of everyday rounds, and they stick out because they were extreme. The ordinary ones fade.

You don’t know what was going on with your partner. Maybe that blue belt slept well, ate a great lunch, and finally got a technique to click after months of working on it.

And that brown belt? Maybe he slept four hours. Maybe he was working on something new and let your submission attempt get too deep. Or maybe you played well.

A good round should be enjoyed. It builds confidence. Don’t let it make you cocky.

Your level is in the middle. Take your last twenty rounds, line them up from worst to best, and look at the one in the center. That’s you. The middle moves slowly, but it moves up. You can’t feel it from one class to the next, so the extremes get your attention.