Fight day

I made weight yesterday officially at 134.6 lbs, and went to bed at about 141. My opponent weighed in at the limit of 136.0 lbs, and presumably went to bed probably a little heavier than me.

I've talked about how difficult this road is, and how much I've given of myself to be here. But I am also extraordinarily lucky to be able to dedicate this much time, energy, and money in the pursuit of my passion.

I am grateful to training partners in Vancouver, Las Vegas, Hong Kong and beyond, who have sparred with me, held pads for me, worked techniques with me, or even just had some words of advice or encouragement.

I'm calm, I'm ready, and I feel great. It is these moments that I love.

Audio interview with me ahead of Saturday's fight

I did a 30-minute interview with Battlefield Fight League's marketing guy, Jamak Golshani, ahead of my fight this Saturday. Check it out here!

Info on buying tickets to watch live, or purchasing the pay-per-view, are available here.

And speaking of podcasts, I'll be the lead host of the 2+2 PokerCast tomorrow for the first time ever. In fact it'll be the first time in the history of the show that neither Mike Johnson nor Adam Schwartz will be sitting in the big chair. I'll be joined by Mazin "MSauce" Khoury in the studios, and that show will be out late Tuesday evening.

Less is (sometimes) more; ruminations on the minimum effective dose

I normally drink 4-5 cups of coffee a day and also a few cups of green tea. This probably comes out to around 600-800 mg/day, which is probably too much, especially for someone who only weighs 64kg.

If I drink zero cups of coffee, I feel pretty lousy. Headaches, withdrawal symptoms and the like. Once every few months I will do a caffeine reset and try to go 3-4 days without any caffeine, but I am pretty unhappy while doing it.

Yet if I drink just one cup of coffee, I feel surprisingly decent. Today I've had one cup, went to the gym, and here I am writing a blog post, and generally behaving like a normal human being.

The health/exercise benefits of caffeine are well documented. Caffeine, in a reasonable dose, is a very good thing for the body.

But the curve is U-shaped (like it is for many things we ingest). The effects of too much caffeine is also well-documented. Man, I love me some caffeine, but I don't want to destroy my nervous system either.

Each cup makes me feel a little better, but there are diminishing returns. Meanwhile, the dosage that is beneficial for me increases rapidly and falls sharply.

So my general thought for this low-caffeine morning is that you should always try to find the minimum effective dose. Know what you need as a baseline. Often you should push yourself past the minimum. If you've just got to study for the big exam, you're running a marathon or you're going to spar 10 hard rounds, then you can caffeinate as much as you think you need. But on other days, try to find the minimum.

To know how much is too much of a good thing, you also need to know its opposite -- not enough of a good thing.

Why Fight? Part 2: The Reward

If you ask any fighter -- indeed, any athlete in any sport -- they'll mention the importance of the mental aspect of the game. Follow the game plan. Be confident, but not cocky. Respect your opponent's strengths, but don't fear them. Be mentally tough.

Training as a competitive athlete must necessarily involve going farther than the brain wants to go. Many people are tremendously self-motivated individuals who will work until exhaustion daily. Others need to be pushed by coaches and training partners, to be broken down by them, so they can be rebuilt stronger.

In my previous entry, I talked about the difficulty, toil, and investment a fighter makes in his training camp. Surely if someone voluntarily goes through something so hellish, there must be a powerful reward on the other side.

Rewards of the fight game

Why do people participate in dangerous sports? There are a variety of reasons, but this article touches on the subject. Summarizing:

• Extreme sports release dopamine, which triggers the reward system by making the person feel good. This creates an addiction to the feeling, and by association, the sport.
• Extreme sports are transformative, and those who participate in them may exhibit a higher capacity for humility and courage.
• Those who participate in extreme sports understand intellectually that these things are dangerous, but that fear is something to be overcome, not avoided.

Fighters will often say that the fight is the reward for the brutality of the training camp. That like sex, months of discomfort are traded for minutes of enjoyment (except the causal direction is reversed).

As someone who has stepped through the cage door four times, it's hard to dispute this idea. Putting all that training to use in a live combative situation, in front of a screaming audience, is a great feeling. While Mexican or Thai boxers fight to escape poverty, fighting in most of Western society is a first-world luxury. If you do it, you do it for the love of the game.

I try not to think of the fight as the reward, and take a somewhat more zen approach of the reward the journey rather than the destination. I have written before about the value of being uncomfortable, and doing things that are hard, simply because they are hard. 

But don't get me wrong. Fighting and competing is fun. This will be my fifth MMA fight. I've also had an amateur boxing match, two kickboxing matches, and probably about 20 grappling competitions. (Grappling is a fight sport where it is reasonable to be a dabbler, since getting tapped out is orders of magnitudes less bad than getting knocked out.)

Confidence

Confidence is another positive product of the grueling fight camp. Again there is a paradox at play here. Throughout training camp, the fighter often suffers crises of confidence. As he gets beat up in sparring, he can often question his own skill, and his confidence may wane. He may become self-defeating. I have thought to myself many times, "I suck at this. Why am I doing it?"

And yet other days, the fighter is supremely confident. On those days where things feel good and the fighter feels sharp, he feels nearly invincible, ready to take on the world. Today, as I'm writing this, it is how I feel. I feel supremely confident that on May 30, I will enter the Battlefield cage at the River Rock Hotel and Casino and put a beating on Blake Sigvaldason of Terrace B.C.'s Dungeon Fight Team Ali Wasuk out of Clinch MMA in Port Coquitlam, B.C. I feel like no other outcome is possible. Whether or not this is a rational response is another question -- I know nothing of the man other than watching a few fights he had well over a year ago. I don't know how strong he is, how athletic he is, how developed his skills have become. I have never put hands on the man, nor has he put hands on me. Yet right now, as my fingers touch this keyboard, I believe fully that there is no way he is ready to compete against me in that cage.

This stems from the incredible commitment required of a competitive fighter, which I touched on in Part 1. The fighter thinks, "I am spending so much time and energy on this fight. I am doing everything right. I am working with great coaches and training partners."

There is a tremendous optimism bias when one goes through a hard training camp. The thought is simple: "There's no way that this guy has put in what I've put into the fight. There is no way he is this obsessed with winning. Therefore, I will win."

Camaraderie and the Team

Finally, it is worth mentioning the team aspect of fighting. There are very few rōnin left in combat sports; even the most gifted fighters are now part of a team, training under a competent trainer. The relationship a fighter develops with his coaches and training partners is fraught with contradiction. The MMA coach borders on sadism, often pushing the fighter far beyond where he wants to go, throwing exhausted fighters into the shark tank to spar against completely fresh opponents. But the great coach does not simply break the fighter down; he builds his fighter back up.

The training partners beat up their teammate as hard as possible, though ideally without injuring him. The training partners are simultaneously your best friends and your worst nightmares in the gym. Because of them, you are battered, bruised, and often injured. But without them, you cannot succeed at the sport. The beatings that teammates give one another foster a tremendous sense of camaraderie and brotherhood (and sometimes sisterhood; I use non-neutral pronouns out of convenience, not disrespect). No one knows what a fighter goes through better than another fighter, and so fighters are surprisingly empathetic creatures -- at least when it comes to fighting. The punches to the face are always followed by fist bumps, hugs, and pats on the back.

Personal conclusions

It's my hope that this brief series answers some questions about the precarious balance between the costs and benefits of fighting as a passion, or vocation.

Fighting is not safe, and it is not healthy. It costs money, but even more so, overwhelming amounts of time. It is mentally draining. It has the potential to put valued relationships on rocky ground.

On the other hand, it also fosters and creates new relationships. Competition keeps me optimizing my own human performance. Training camps have taught me humility and perseverance.

Sixteen days until my dopamine receptors get their fix.

Why fight? Part 1: The Investment

People I know from the poker world, or from regular society -- or from any place other than the inside of an MMA gym, really -- often think I'm crazy for being willing to get in a cage and endanger myself by fighting another man until one man quits or is rendered helpless against the assault of the other.

The truth is, however, that fighting itself is not the crazy thing.

The crazy thing is what fighters do in order to fight.

For the last five weeks (and the next two), I have faithfully shown up the at the gym to take my daily beating. I have done this voluntarily and in full control of my own faculties. I do this without being bound to any contract, and without any financial incentive.

For these weeks I have felt exhausted throughout most of the day. I have woken up many mornings feeling like I have been hit by a car. I'm a morning person and yet I am often forced to train past 10pm, eat dinner around 11 and fall asleep well after midnight. But since I seem to have developed the lark chronotype, I have trouble sleeping past 5am.

Though I haven't tested them, I am sure my cortisol is elevated and my testosterone is lowered. In health terms, those are bad things -- they lead to increase in fat, decrease in muscle, decrease in sex drive, insulin resistance, cravings, bone loss, and illness.

Indeed, being a competitive athlete is not nearly as healthy as most people think that it is. Of course, it is better than being sedentary. But too far in the other extreme can be unhealthy as well. Being a serious competitive athlete means doing a lot of things that trade health in favour of performance. The athlete trains hard and risks injury and overtraining. All athletes train while injured; the only difference between athletes is how injured is too injured, necessitating a missed practice or competition. Virtually every serious athlete practices and competes through minor injuries, and many (most?) compete through more serious injuries. A typical training camp always involves a handful of small injuries. No one ever enters a fight at 100%.

Combat sports are worse than most in terms of training through injury, stress, and fatigue. Part of it is the inherently macho aspect of the sport itself. But some of it is simply the incentive/disincentive mechanism. The boxer, wrestler, or MMA fighter considers a day off of training to be a day that his opponent is gaining an advantage on him. And there are real consequences to being less trained than your opponent. The athlete who loses at a big swim meet or baseball game surely feels bad about his performance, and wishes he trained harder or better. The unprepared fighter, on the other hand, can find himself dominated, brutalized, and concussed. The soccer player misses out on a trophy. The fighter can end up in the hospital. This is not to put fighting on a pedestal or claim it is a more noble or tougher sport; it is just reality.

Thus overtraining and injury are too often ignored. It is a rare day that the fighter is seen outside the gym during fight camp. Fighting is not a sport for to dabble in. It's all-in, or fold.

And yet, injury is the most fearful part of a training camp. I know that every day I show up, I have a small percentage chance of suffering an injury which will prevent me from fighting on May 30. That percentage on any given day might be just 2-3%, but still with 8-10 sessions left, these odds might be as high as 1-0.97^10 = 26%, still nearly a 1-in-4 chance I won't get to fight.

That's scarily high! It is hard to express how much it means to get through each day without suffering a major injury. Although I know it's not true, I feel like the world would end if I didn't fight on May 30. This is why fighters fight hurt. A fight camp demands so much of the fighter emotionally, psychically, and financially. Fighters spend so much time getting psyched up about the fight. They endure the beatings in the gym knowing that when they leave, they are one day closer to the fight. They sell tickets to their family and friends. They have told everyone around about their fight. To not fight feels like a crushing defeat, far worse than stepping in the ring and coming up short.

When one has a fight lined up, one obsesses about the fight. The fight not only occupies one's thoughts all the time, it also dominates one's activities. I wake up in the morning and do mobility exercises, yoga-like movements that will lower my chances of getting injured, and make me more powerful. Many people are happy to get an hour a day to exercise. I spend at least an hour a day getting ready to exercise.

I run. I lift weights. I'm getting extra private lessons. I bought a Compex stimulator unit and use it daily. I plan all of my meals meticulously and carefully -- protein and fat in the morning, carbs at night. I schedule naps, because as mentioned I only get 5 hours of sleep a night. I watch fight footage and technique videos in my spare time. I stalk my opponent on Facebook and Twitter.

In truth, I become a very boring person while fight camp is going on. I am about fighting, and nothing else. There is very little that I do in any given day that is not related to my goal of winning my upcoming fight. (I do watch a lot of TV, and read a lot. That is because those are things I can do with minimal effort, either physical or mental. Most of my day, I am conserving energy.)

The time that I am not spending on the fight, I try to use to take care of personal relationships. I began writing this post on Mother's Day, and I did my best to make my mom feel special that day. My girlfriend has been tremendously supportive of me through this fight camp, putting up with both my moodiness and low energy levels, and so I do my best to take care of her in turn. But personal relationships are surely compromised through a fight camp. I see friends and family much less often than I would otherwise. In truth, I see a lot less of anyone other than my training partners and my physiotherapist.

Fighting is pretty much a financial net negative for anyone but the top 1% of pros. Fighters not in that 1% would make far more money working in a trade. I have spent money on this camp on physiotherapy, acupuncture, medical tests, private training, equipment, high-quality food, and supplements. I am very fortunate that I am not under financial pressure and that I get to pursue my passion fully. For me, the opportunity cost is more significant than the actual expenses. I have passed up on money-making opportunities (consulting jobs, poker, DFS) because of a lack of time and energy to spend on them.

This is what choosing to fight really is, beyond what you see in the cage on the night of the fight. It is angst and difficulty.

If that's the case, why does anyone do it? I'll talk more about that in my next post.

ICYMI: Tickets and PPV for my fight

Sorry about the blatant self-promotion, but it does seem there are those who missed the first announcement.

I'm still scheduled to fight on May 30 at the River Rock Casino in Richmond, BC. Training is going well, and I am working insanely hard. My opponent is Ali Wasuk (2-0) from Clinch MMA.

You can buy tickets online here.

Once you buy the tickets, I would appreciate if you forward your confirmation to jgolshani@yahoo.com and mention my name. This will allow me to get credit for selling the ticket and drawing another fan in the door.

The pay-per-view will be available here. I don't get anything for PPV buys, but feel free to tweet @BattlefieldFL and let them know you're buying it to watch me!

Thanks for your support!