My name is Stein Weinstein. Well, that's my fake name I use to write on this blog. I am an executive in the entertainment business. I work at a large entertainment company, doing the boring, completely non-glamorous things that most entertainment executives do. Otherwise, a pretty normal guy. I'm 34, married to a woman I love, live in a nice house and have a good life. If you looked at me, you wouldn't think there was anything different about me than any number of other guys my age.
This blog is about my training in mixed martial arts; how I started, why I kept going, what it's been like, and everything that comes with an average guy training in MMA with some of the best fighters in the world. I started this blog because I met Jeff and Erin Tyler at Legends MMA (where I do most of my training), and we were talking one day and they thought my story would make a cool blog, yada yada yada, here I am. Even though I keep my identity anonymous (my boss still thinks the interwebs are a collection of tubes connecting anarchists and striking WGA writers), everything else I write here is true. The people and places I name are all real; I don't use pseudonyms or try to hide anything else (unless I specifically indicate so).
Even though I train in MMA, I don't consider myself a fighter. I am not doing this for a living, and I don't ever see myself stepping into a cage to fight an opponent. I think I could fairly be described as an MMA dilettante. A dilettante is defined as, "Someone who is interested in an art as a spectator, not as a serious practitioner. Most often used to mean a dabbler, someone with a broad but shallow attachment to the field." I call myself this not disrespectfully, but to clearly differentiate me from the guys who dedicate their lives to martial arts. I go to the gym an hour or two a day, five times a week. That might seem like a lot to someone who sits at home and does nothing, but when compared to the guys I train with, it's nothing. A slow day for them is two hours of training; most days are four to six hours of training, on top of several hours of teaching people like me. They push themselves in ways most people cannot imagine, past limits into areas that most people don't even know they have. I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to train with these men, but I would never compare myself to them. They are professionals in the truest sense; I just dabble in their art.
I'm not really sure what I want to accomplish with this blog: I think I decided to write it because I have fallen in love with MMA, and I want to show other people who used to be like me and think that MMA is just mindless brawling that it is actually an amazing and complicated sport. That, and even though I am in the entertainment business, my particular job is about as boring and uncreative as one can be. This is pretty much my only expressive outlet.
My name is Jeff and to put it simply, I'm trying to give this fighting thing a shot. I started training a few years ago, standup at first, then got into BJJ and MMA. Then about a year and a half back my obsession really blew up. I was dreaming of fighting every night, drilling grappling moves in my head instead of normal day dreaming and starting to wonder how I would do in a sanctioned bout. Fuck an amateur fight though. I mean, yeah, I'll do them. But the end goal has to be a professional fight-- a few of them. I don't have any grand expectations. I'm not expecting to go out and get the UFC's welterweight belt. But there is no reason to doubt that I can do well in this sport, and I have all the motivation I need to find out.
Nearly a year ago, not long after I set my sights on competing, I injured my shoulder in training. I tore my labrum, fractured some bone, and did enough cartilage damage to keep me out of the ring for a long while. It was only recently that I was finally able to see a surgeon who could work on me. This blog will jump off from there, and as I go through the recovery process I'll be playing some catchup to fill in some details in my story. Becoming a professional fighter is not as simple as just signing up at your local cage fight, so I hope that here I will be able to accurately portray the emotional and physical trials I go through. It should be fun.
(I swear to god I wanted to end this with "so read along to find out if I become The Ultimate Fighter," but I figure a bunch of people wouldn't get the joke.)
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