Week 3: Made-for-TV Dramatics

Also, a very hard run and ratatouille pasta

I’m training to compete in the New Jersey Fall International Open IBJJF Championship! If you’d like to hear about how it’s going — the good and the bad — I’d love to have you follow along. This is week 3/33.

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nothing to do with fighting, just some nice tulips

Does anyone else on the planet remember the absolutely unhinged show, Fight Quest, on The Discovery Channel? It was on air for just one year, and I don’t even remember how I watched it — maybe online, maybe on TV, however an 12-year-old would be able to watch in 2008 — and I was obsessed.

It’s two dudes who travel the world, pick a new martial art, and then train five days (only FIVE DAYS which is absurd) before competing. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu episode is hilarious for all of its made-for-TV dramatics that crack me up on revisit (Pulling a car on the beach with just your neck? What’re we doing here guys). The bit I remembered from watching as a kid is when one of the dudes goes, “It sucks to lose to a girl 😐 But that’s jiu-jitsu 🙂”

How I’ve Been Training

• Sunday: 7.5-mile hilly long run

• Monday: Vinyasa yoga class

• Tuesday: 3-mile easy run + Cycle class

• Wednesday: Vinyasa yoga class

• Thursday: 3.5-mile tempo run

• Friday: Pilates Rise class

sometimes runs are easy and sometimes runs are hard and this one was hard for no particular reason

I was feeling low-energy this week, so I swapped BJJ for yoga on Wednesday. I know this is because I’m tapering for this half-marathon so I’m not too worried about it. Excited to get this race out of the way in a couple weeks so I have more stamina for jiu-jitsu.

I’m not a naturally competitive person, so the aggression of rolling (this week’s BJJ vocab word! 🤓) is something that genuinely takes a lot of focus and effort for me to be mentally present for.

Rolling, or sparring, is what makes BJJ such a fun sport to learn. In a lot of martial arts that are striking-based — like Muay Thai, karate, and taekwondo, for example — you can’t simulate a live match with your training partner because of, you know, blunt force head trauma. This is where all of the positional training and dramatic punching through wooden boards (the things jiu-jitsu folks make fun of lol) come into play.

But jiu-jitsu being grappling- and submission-based means that how you train in class in live rounds of rolling is how you’ll compete, of course, with precautions and etiquette. There’s a mutual respect and trust you need to establish very quickly with a lot of people which is why academy culture is so important to suss out from the start.

At my current gym, in an hour-long class, the first 20 to 30 minutes are instruction. And the rest is all rolling, in five-minute rounds, swapping partners each time. Which is fun! And also exhausting. I’ll leave class, and be like, wow, I feel like I got beat up today, and that’s because well, yes, I have.

What I’ve Been Eating

Celebrated a friend’s birthday over berry pancakes for brunch. Made a giant açaí bowl with lots of fruit, nuts and seeds. Stole like five Buncha Crunch from

Greg Gottfried

during Warfare (check out his newsletter on the movie on Aerial Shot).

ratatouille pasta, plate of many good things from cookbook club

Pizza from Sal & Carmine. Made some ratatouille pasta my brother and I ate while watching Doctor Strange. Dry popcorn, no drink, during The Wedding Banquet. Ice Cream Cake ice cream from Van Leeuwen. Mediocre cafeteria pasta salad.

Saturday was “Italian” day at cooking class so we made fresh pasta, mushroom risotto, ragu bolognese, a bitter greens salad, and a rabbit braise (Happy Easter). It was also cookbook club in the evening, so I rushed from class, grabbed bubble tea from Gong Cha during a speedy grocery run, assembled garlic bread, and showed up a despicable 40 minutes late to dinner.

What I’ve Been Reading

Nothing new — working my way through my stack of food memoirs!

What I’ve Been Writing

For Best Food Blog — readers of Antarathon get a free month with this link — I wrote about Hot Date! by Rawaan Alkhatib, the cookbook we ate our way through for cookbook club.

Also, not my byline, but I want to shout out this essay we published on BFB by cultural critic Soleil Ho and how they anticipate Trump’s tariffs to impact restaurant and dining culture:

Why risk volatility through experimentation when you can just serve the same crowd-pleasers as everyone else? The Waffle Houses of the nation don’t need to worry about the price of coconut milk… what I can sense is that in the near-term, American food’s going to get more conservative, blander, and much less diverse.