Grant Wexley BJJ

Nine of us in the back row of the 2016 team photo. Two on TRT, one on his second shoulder procedure, three retired, two "just drill." One left.

There's a team photo on our gym wall from 2016. Nine of us in the back row. Last week a white belt asked me who they all were, and I had to do the count out loud, and my voice did something strange around number six. I'm 55. Here's the back row, left to right, present day. Paulo: moved to Florida, status unknown, which is its own kind of ending. Derek: two procedures on the same shoulder, comes by at Christmas. Sam and Watts: both on prescribed testosterone from one of those clinics that's opened next to every Chipotle in America — and to be fair, both look great, and both will tell you about it at length. Kenny: quit outright in 2022, sold his gis on Facebook Marketplace, which is how I found out. Ray and Big John: "just drilling now," which every one of us knows is the departure lounge. Miguel: golf, fully converted, evangelical about it. And me. Ninth man. Still in Tuesday and Thursday rounds, at intensity, at 55. I'm not built different. That's the part I need you to hear, because it's the part I'd want to hear. Sam was a better athlete than me. Kenny was tougher. What happened to that back row wasn't a toughness sort. It was a menu problem: every man in that photo eventually got handed the same two options. Option one, outsource your chemistry to a clinic for the rest of your life. Option two, accept the decline gracefully — drill, golf, "listen to your body." Some picked one, some picked two, one picked Florida. Nobody offered any of us option three, because option three isn't sold anywhere they were looking. Both real options treat symptoms — energy, mood, pain, the feelings layer. The thing actually ending careers in that photo was structural. Tendon. The cords that run a grip are thousands of collagen strands, they fray a little every hard round, and the cell responsible for laying in new ones — the fibroblast; nobody in forty years had ever said the word to me — down-shifts hard past 35. The tissue itself rebuilds at a crawl, months where muscle takes weeks. So every man in the row was slowly spending a bank account nothing on earth was depositing into. Testosterone doesn't deposit into it. Rest doesn't. The drawer full of turmeric and collagen and glucosamine doesn't — wrong targets, all three, and I owned all three. What appears to supply the cell is moringa. Single ingredient, at a real dose — the blends kill it. Mine is Tap-Less by Satori: 800mg moringa oleifera, two capsules, label's one line long. They post the honest clock right up front — two months where you feel nothing, because that's the speed the tissue moves, stiffness eases somewhere around week nine, and you judge the whole thing at ninety days. I gave it the ninety. That was twenty months ago. The gym took a new team photo in March. I'm in the back row again. Every other man in the new back row is under 35. The white belt who asked about the old photo is standing next to me in it, and he doesn't know it yet, but in fifteen years someone's going to point at him and do the count. I'd like his count to go different. That's the whole reason I wrote this. If you're in somebody's back row right now: there's a third option. Try it for a quarter. If it's not for you, the clinic and the golf course will still be there — those two doors never close. But at least walk past them once knowing there were three. Nobody paid me. I'm just the ninth guy. The breakdown — the cords, the cell, the ninety days — is here. — Gene, 55