A Fighters Blog #5

I sent in a quick post that I had one my fight but I wanted to go into a little more detail. First off it was absolutely amazing, the feeling after winning was one of the greatest feelings of my life. The day I was married and the day my children were born were amazing but this was different, those were more emotional and spiritual, this was something primal, a pure animalistic rush that in no way was to be confused with emotional, ha ha!

My biggest fear before the fight was how was I going to react once I got in the cage? Was I going to get what I call the nervous knees, like when I have to give a presentation, or speak in front of a large group. To my surprise I was incredibly calm, I felt confident and secure in my ability. I knew I had trained hard and had put the time in at the gym, so the fight should be easy by comparison.

The fight started out with both of us testing the distance, maybe a couple of punches exchanged (I haven't yet seen the fight) he was able to get in on a take down which I was able to sprawl and stuff for a moment but he eventually did get me down but I was able to pull guard and slip in a guillotine. He was able to slip out of the choke and posture up, I could hear Spencer yelling at me to wall walk so I started to position myself to stand up. He was trying to throw puches and I was able to take advatage adn trap an arm and get the sweep and reverse positions. Now I was in the mount and started working elbows and punches, once he rolled over and covered up it was over adn the referee stepped in to stop the action. Winner TKO in the first round!

A Fighters Blog #4

MMA and my first fight:

So I have been training in MMA for about 5 months now and am coming up on my first amateur fight on Oct. 3, and the major question I have been getting from people outside of the sport is "Why?”
Well its really very basic and also very complicated as well, for most guys they fight because it’s what they know, they have been fighting for all their lives in one fashion or another. For others it’s an attempt to assert their Alpha-Male status and prove some macho ideal that they have.
For me it really falls into the more complicated category, I don't have to fight; this isn't an avenue to a better life like some guys. I don't feel like I need to prove myself as a man to others either, for me it’s something entirely different, for me it’s mostly about fear and not giving up. I have spent the majority of my life being afraid of failure and quitting something if it became too difficult. Training and thus fighting is about overcoming that fear, to set a challenge in front of yourself and working your ass off to achieve it. It's really no different than someone setting a goal of running a marathon, (which I also want to do) it’s just viewed so much differently because of the violence factor; which leads to the other reasons of why MMA. When you are a former wrestler and football player who hates basketball and just doesn't get into softball there aren't really a lot of competitive ventures for you to explore, oh yeah there is running but that's just not physical enough. For someone like me there is no more pure athletic competition than 2 men facing off in competition whether it’s wrestling, lineman in the trenches or a cage fight. When you step into that ring, octagon, or mat you are all alone, you can't rely on anyone else like in team sports. Success and failure lies squarely on your shoulders, no one to blame but yourself if you aren't prepared and that is really the attraction of the sport. There is a mental aspect that doesn't translate if you have never trained for MMA (or been a wrestler) for casual fans and those outside the sport. You can't be mentally or physically weak and compete in this arena, and that goes back to the fear. If you can train for a cage fight, diet and sacrifice then other things in your life become much less daunting tasks.
But in the end the basic answer to "Why would you want to do this?" is simple "Because I can!"

Taken July 22, 2009 @ 260 lbs. Nearly 4 months and a total of 38 lbs lost.

A Fighters Blog #3

My first, and hopefully last, major health scare:

I was 30 years old and I kept having this persistent nagging pain in my chest. At first I just thought it was a lasting result of a car accident I had recently been in, but it just never went away. After consistent nagging by my wife I finally went to see my Doctor about my chest pains. After running some tests and checking my blood pressure he decided as a precautionary measure to do some blood work and have me take a stress test. Well let’s just say that I failed my blood work, badly. I was borderline diabetic, my triglycerides where 500 and my bad cholesterol was 250 plus. The good news from my stress test was my heart wasn't bad but it wasn't doing great and if I had kept on the same path I could have been in really bad shape at a very young age. I realized I was lucky that I had recognized the problem before it got out of control but like a lot of things we don't address problems until we can see them. I kept putting off working out and changing my diet, if it wasn't the work excuse it was the holiday season or whatever I could come up with to prolong the fact that I needed to change my life. The real eye opener was when we went on vacation to Florida. Now the idea of spending a week in Florida lounging by the pool, swimming and soaking up the sun in March for an Iowa boy sounds great but when you are embarrassed to take your shirt off in your own home exposing your love handles out in public is a completely different thing. It was then and there that I vowed to make the changes, to never have to feel that embarrassment about my body again, and the next year when we went on vacation I was going to be the "hard" body that I wished I had been. That's when I decided I was going to get back in the gym I had been paying for the last 3 years and make the changes I had been talking about for so many months. And that’s where I discovered something I had lost so many years earlier.

May 27th, 2009 272 lbs. 26 pounds lost after 2 months.

A Fighters Blog #2

The day I realized I was severely out of shape.

Getting out of shape isn't something that happens over night, granted it doesn't take nearly as long as getting into shape but none the less it is a process. It’s usually not until you try to do something that once never seemed like a difficult process, say like walking up a flight of stairs, or running to your car when it’s raining. Something you have done before and doesn't seem like that big a deal till you realize your heart is pounding out of your chest and you can't breathe. For me it was playing out in the snow with my oldest son pulling him around in his sled he got for Christmas. I don't think I lasted more than 10 minutes before I realized that I couldn't keep it up for much longer or I was going to keel over. The worst part was the disappointment on his face when I told him Daddy couldn't play anymore. It’s bad enough to be fat and out of shape but when that causes you to sacrifice things like playing with your kids you come to the realization that you have hit an all time low. But just like many people who have allowed themselves to get to that point, even though you recognize that you are out of shape, fat, obese or whatever you want to call it, doing something about it is the hard part. Also just because you hit an all time low it doesn't mean you can't dig just a little deeper until you wake up and start doing something about it. And thus we find ourselves at 30 years old and experiencing something no one that age should be dealing with.

Taken April 29th, 2009 281 lbs. One month in and 20 lbs lost. The advantage to taking periodic photos is being able to to compare photos, sometimes you don't notice the little changes taking place.

A Fighters Blog #1

I had created a separate blog to chronicle my recent adventures in MMA as well as the journey that I had begun to lose weight, get in shape and start living the life that someone might want to read about, when I realized it was silly to manage two separate blogs. So I am just going to enter those entries under the Title of "A Fighters Blog". The following entries will be those I copied over, so here we go with the first entry.

In the begining:

I decided to start this blog as a diary of sorts to capture the journey I have been on for the last few months as I set out to get back in shape and start doing some of the things I always talked about doing but never did, but the story really started a lot longer ago. I had always been an athlete growing up I was always involved in a sport from 5 years old through the first 2 years of college. I was always a bigger guy, I played offensive line in football, but I was always in good if not great shape for someone my size, I was one of the few people I knew that could dunk a basketball and that was at 5'11 and 240 lbs. After I quit football in college I got into power lifting and body building and that is where my hunger and passion for working out was really ignited for the first time, I had always had to lift weights for sports but now I wanted to. After awhile I started getting interested in MMA and started taking classes with Pat Miletich, my goal was to compete in MMA fights and hopefully make a career at it. Well much like a lot of stories, one thing led to another and I quit working out, for me it was a combination of injuries, heartache from a love lost and the subsequent alcohol abuse. Over time I found my way back to the gym, but once again life got in the way and the obligations of work and a new family put my athletic adventures on the back burner. My weight and health over a period of 5 years spiraled out of control, the low points were the day I realized I was severely out of shape and when I had my first (and hopefully last) major health scare.

This is a photo I took on April 4th, 2009 1 week into my new workout weighing in at 289 lbs. At my highest I weighed 301 lbs back in Febuary. I look back at this photo and can't even believe I let myself get this out of shape.

I won my fight on Saturday, TKO in the first round. Felt great to get the first fight and win under my belt!

Caden just covered all his monster trucks with a blanket and informed me that they are sleeping. Where do they come up with this stuff?