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It should have been an easy question to answer, but for some reason it wasn’t. It should have been doubly easy to answer, because I had asked the question. I had asked the question of myself. I had asked myself if I wanted to be better. Did I want to be a better fighter? It was a tougher question than it should have been. I was already considered to be a decent fighter, at least decent enough. I had trained with a few teams and had a lot of fights. I was kind of a r

Here we are again. Once more, I’m fighting to defend my stupid lapel from being wrapped around me like some kind of Christmas present. He’s found a way to wind it under then over my leg and is using it as a rudder to control my movements. He’s been experimenting with some of that Worm Guard stuff, and he’s starting to find success. He’s using my lapel like a tether. The material of my own gi has become an exercise in frustration. He’s a better grappler than me and the

In my years as a fighter, I won a lot of fights in the first round. I also lost a lot of fights in the first round. Often, the reason I lost fights in the first round had to do with how badly I wanted to win fights in the first round. I didn’t know how to allow the fight set its own pace. I always wanted to be in charge of how fast—or how slowly—the fight progressed. I’ve always struggled with patience. My first few amateur fights were…let’s just say…very amateur. I w

It could have been the biggest win of my entire career. It was supposed to be the biggest win of my career. I trained for weeks to make myself ready for it to be the biggest win of my career. My coaches and my team made extra effort to prepare me for the biggest win of my career. It was an intense training camp. On the night of weigh-ins, I learned from one of my opponent’s coaches that he, also, had been training for the biggest fight of his career. They had much re

When I started coaching it was mostly by accident. I was still fighting. I had my own coaches. They were amazing. My MMA coach was something of a legend in the area—he was that good. I never took for granted the fact that he considered me as one of his own. His academy was about an hour away from my home gym, and I considered it worth the drive to see him a couple times a week. The academy where I was training (not the one where my MMA coach taught) lost its regular c

I’ve never been much for video games. It’s not that I hate them. I’m bad at them. I’m terrible at 1st-Person Shooter stuff and even worse at platformers. I like to play at my own speed and enjoy a story while I do—it’s also nice when I’m not competing against some invisible 12-year old kid who keeps killing my character. If I do play video games, I gravitate toward Role-Playing. I like turn-based stuff that moves slowly and allows me to build a character or two. I lik

Recently, very recently, I found myself in another tough match. That seems to happen a lot these days. Everyone I face is tough. Nobody is giving anything away. I’d been caught unexpectedly with an early butterfly sweep. I’d been a little off-balance after trying to land a takedown and he hit the reversal without hesitation. I managed to fight myself back from the bottom, and he slipped back into his butterfly guard. Obviously, he had confidence in the position. He’d

I was exhausted, but it was the good kind of exhausted. The match had been a hard-fought battle at a grueling, non-stop pace. That’s the way every one of my matches had played out today—not one of them had been easy. But that’s the way I like it. It made me feel like I’d gotten my money’s worth. I was stepping off the mats to make room for the next pair of competitors when I found myself standing next to my most recent opponent’s coach. He’s an old friend who I’ve know

Fear is a loaded word. It means a lot of things, most of which I would fail to explain even to myself. Fear might mean a fear of failure or a fear of spiders—those are not the same. It might mean a fear of embarrassment or a fear of physical injury. Those aren’t the same thing, either. Fear can be respect, terror, reverence, or dread. Not too long ago I attended a week of training. The instructor was once considered to be legendary in his field. To be honest, it was

The other day I was getting ready for work. My routine is pretty simple in the mornings, so I tend not to think much while I move about the house. I opened my safe and reached inside to grab a few of the things I usually wear on my belt throughout the workday. It was early, and I might not have been fully awake yet, but I realized that I had rotated my shoulder and body to a weird angle so that I could grab my badge. I noticed the strange way I had twisted myself—cuttin

I don’t know that I know how to become who I’m designed to be, but pop-psychology keeps telling me that I’m supposed to go find myself. I guess that implies that I’m lost. After all, why would I need to find myself if I knew where I was? There are times when I feel like I’ve come close to tasting my purpose—to that place where I momentarily experienced the joy of being what I was meant to be. There are many times when I’ve definitely felt like I’m far away from that place

It’s hard for me to trust peace, especially when if find it inside of me. I’m skeptical and suspicious that the temporary calm is only a construct of my fractured mind—maybe a forced respite that my brain concocted out of necessity. My inner machinations are so oriented toward the anxious tendencies inherent in being me that even the most intense version of peace tends to be greeted with resistance before it can even take hold. I can’t help but feel that every peace is tem

I recently received a text message from one of my teammates. It simply read, “I’m sorry Joel.” There was nothing to be sorry about. I’d watched him fight. He’s young with a lot of drive and desire. I’ve worked with him a fair amount, trying to find a way to leverage my years of experience into something of value for the next generation. He’s been a pleasure to work with—a great work ethic and willing to listen. But that night things didn’t go his way. He fought a h

I felt like I had been working hard, but the referee didn’t agree. He stopped the match, separating my opponent and I, and issued warnings to both of us—for stalling. The match had started at a brisk pace, digging for underhooks and fighting for grips. He was a solid competitor and worked hard to obstruct my takedown attempts. When the ref stopped us to issue his warning, I concealed my annoyance. I felt like I had been working hard, but he felt differently. There’s no

I don’t know that my face would have ever been considered pretty, but it’s a whole lot less pretty than it could have been. My nose is visibly crooked, my ears look like chewed bubblegum, and a patchwork of scars lends some kind of character to my façade. I remember the origin of every one of those scars, and I can put a name and a place to them all. Every one comes with a memory. I remember standing on the apron of the ring with a couple other aspiring fighters while on

I don’t always know the difference between the surreal and the unreal. Maybe there is no difference. I’m not sure, and this was a moment where I was doubly unsure. I looked out over the group that had gathered at the end of our belt-testing session and found myself weighted by a heavy significance. It had been a large testing group, and my academy still holds standards and expectations, so everyone had worked hard. Before any one of these individuals could progress to t

At that moment I was a little bit impressed with my own insanity. I didn’t regret my decisions, but I was reveling in their consequences. I wouldn’t have it any other way. In a moment of impulsivity, I’d signed up to compete in this tournament. I do that kind of thing. My brain gets weird and I decide to get spontaneous. I clicked a couple online boxes and signed up for an upcoming tournament that several fighters from my team were scheduled to participate in. I was g

I was ready to be done torturing myself and had come to the end of a thing. Now my mind was trying to bring words to it. Fortunately, there was a good person on the other side of my conversation. I was fumbling and mumbling, which is especially frustrating to someone like me who sets so much store in the power of language. In trying to find the right words I was, instead, finding a lot of them. Most of them weren’t the right ones. Thankfully, he is a patient man and allo

I was recently sitting in a small room with a few people and speaking directly with a man that the years have taught me to admire and trust. We were having a deep conversation about life—my life—and challenges and difficulties and all of the things that those things include. After some very intent consideration on his part, he looked up and told me that I should look into the story of Gideon, because something about me brought the story of Gideon to his heart. I’ve read t

Most of my fighting career was spent travelling the Northwest with my friend Joey. We trained with—and against—each other almost every night. We travelled to gyms and academies all over, attended seminars, and competed in the same events. When I look back it’s not hard to identify that he was the training partner I spent the most time with, traded the most blows with, a shared the most blood with. He was there for my first fight (a disastrous endeavor) and still there thr