FourOuncesToFreedom.com - May 16, 2008
Missing Pieces
-Winston Churchill
Sorry for the hiatus. It's not that I didn't have anything to write about lately. I have. I just didn't admire what I was going to write.
My shoulder has not healed as it should have. It's not the end of the world-- the majority of professional athletes get their jobs done while nursing one injury or another. If you don't have a bum body part on you somewhere, you're probably not fighting hard enough. None-the-less, it's taken a mental toll on me which has in turn grown to depress my entire training attitude. My motivation and intensity feels like it's running at quarter capacity.
A couple weeks ago I was training with some kid-- no one special--I should be able to beat him in the cage thirteen times out of ten. But I wasn't. I was barely holding my own. Now I took a lot of time off from training and I've gone easy on certain upper body exercises to ease my shoulder into things, but that had nothing to do with this. My head wasn't there. More importantly, neither was my heart. In retrospect I was working just hard enough to keep from getting torn apart, but at the time it just felt like this nobody was tooling me and there was nothing I could do to change it.
Instead of throwing that switch in my head, turning on the juice and realizing my full potential, I let my emotions drag me down. I fought worse. He worked me to the point that I was reconsidering whether I could ever be a fighter. I only fell farther down the spiral.
At the end of our session we were doing sit-ups where he would be in my guard and I would use my core to come up-- my elbows to his chest. I couldn't finish the set. I was struggling to get my back of the ground. It felt like I didn't have the physical strength but the fact is I was missing the mental fortitude. My body was shaking and I was barely prying my shoulders up from the mat. This kid reaches down to help me, coaches me like he's the superior one. "Come on, you've got this, just five more." I shook him off and tried to sit up once more.
Nothing.
Then this mother fucker, this piece of shit nobody, reaches down again to help me and again coaches me along. This kid, who has never fought a day in his life, whose day job is modeling, is showing me up and trying to coach me like I'm some fucking scrub. I lost it. Stood up and walked out of the gym without saying a word to him or my trainer.
I've been in the gym since, but not the usual pace of a couple sessions a day. I've been showing up every couple days, putting in my hour and heading out. I feel like whatever skills I had, whatever I've learned over the years, has been stripped away. I've lost my spark and my smile, and that's the most important part of all this. I mean, if I can't crack a smile while wearing four ounce gloves, why am I choosing to fight?
I've got to get my head right, I'm just not sure how.
Anyway, again, sorry for the hiatus and if that model kid is reading this, sorry to you too. It wasn't you, it was me.
Posted by Jeff at 1:45 PM