Agoge: Fear, Risk, Desire

Today's Training:

I woke up at 5:30AM to walk my dog and wake up before meeting Jory at the Dog Pound around 7:15AM for a workout.

(It was a long one...I'll try to recreate it as best as I can)

Warmup: 5 minutes of jump rope, a lot of track-type exercises, medicine ball passes, bear crawls, 1-legged squats, back bends

Powerlifting: Front Squats, Clean and Press (split squat stance), Push Press into Overhead Squat

Plyometrics: Lunge jumps, scissor jumps, bounding (1-legged), duck walks

I know I'm missing quite a lot, but it was the most I can recall

10AM: Clinch and Half Step Sparring. I need to work more on clinch!

2-3PM: I went to Matt's MMA 101 class on campus. It was nice to go over the details of some of the jiu jitsu moves again

4PM: Met my friend Brooke at Gold's and started teaching her the basics of boxing

6:30PM: Back to the Dog Pound for some light bag work

When I got home, a quick workout Ross Enamait style:

4 Rounds as fast as possible of:

10 Burpees

10 Pullups

10 Squats

10 Pushups

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And now, my section of thought for the day: (be warned, its a long one!)

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden turns to his passengers in a car and asks them, "What do you want to do before you die?" As Tyler lets go of the wheel and the car veers off the freeway, two men are able to immediately answer.

"Build a house."

"Paint a self portrait."

Jack, the fourth man in the vehicle, yells in bewilderment and fear for Tyler to turn the wheel and steer back onto the road.

Tyler ignores him and says, "You have to know the answer to this question! If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?"

"I don’t know, I wouldn’t feel anything good about my life, is that what you want to hear me say? Fine. Come on!"

It's at that moment that Jack has an epiphany and begins to see what Tyler has been talking about.

This relates to all of us. Why did you get out of bed this morning? What is your passion in life?

The word passion is derived from the Latin verb patoir meaning "to suffer and endure." Eventually the word came to mean not only suffering in itself, but also the thing that sustains a person who suffers; what enables them to keep going.

My passion is fighting. To quote fight club again, "how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"

I was introduced to boxing by pure accident. One night I was training for a bodybuilding show at my college gym and a man walked up to me and started a conversation. He asked if I had ever considered boxing. I shrugged it off, never thinking I'd show up. Well, obviously I did and it changed my life. Gordon Marino is one of my mentors and has changed by outlook in life. Though I have yet to fight for him in a boxing match, he has been "in my corner" throughout all the hardships and down times. He spent countless hours working mitts with me late at night or inviting me over to his house or out to lunch to talk things through. One of the most incredible people I have met in my life.

*Check out his blog here:

http://www.ringsideboxingshow.com/GordonMarinoBLOG.html*

To those who think MMA and boxing are violent and senseless, I will try to change your mind by quoting from one of Coach Marino's articles that appeared in the New York Times:

"The deeper you get into the fights, the more you may discover about things that would seem at first blush to have nothing to do with boxing. Lessons in spacing and leverage, or in holding part of oneself in reserve even when hotly engaged, are lessons not only in how one boxer reckons with another but also in how one person reckons with another. The fights teach many such lessons -- about virtues and limits of craft, about the need to impart meaning to hard facts by enfolding them in stories and spectacle, about getting hurt and getting old, about distance and intimacy, and especially about education itself: Boxing conducts an endless workshop in the teaching and learning of knowledge with consequences."

"According to Aristotle, courage is a mean between fearlessness and excessive fearfulness. The capacity to tolerate fear is essential to leading a moral life, but it is hard to learn how to keep your moral compass under pressure when you are cosseted from every fear. Boxing gives people practice in being afraid. There are, of course, plenty of brave thugs. Physical courage by no means guarantees the imagination that standing up for a principle might entail. However, in a tight moral spot I would be more inclined to trust someone who has felt like he or she was going under than someone who has experienced danger only vicariously, on the couch watching videos."

Before I started boxing, I was a timid kid who played into all of society's expectations. Training and fighting taught me to embrace fear...it is the excitement of life! You take a risk and sure, it could end poorly.

Like me moving out to Montana. I always get the "what brought you to Montana?" question.

For simplicity sake I usually come up with some reason or another. The truth? After experiencing freedom in Costa Rica, I wanted to start over somewhere new. Random, perhaps. Its thrilling! If I wake up in a different place, in a different time...am I a different person?

Was I afraid to move?! Hell yes! And I had a 3 day drive to ponder "what ifs" in my mind. But I convinced myself this was what I wanted. After all, you create your own reality. I believe it was Milton who wrote, "The mind is a powerful thing, it can make a heaven out of hell, and a hell out of heaven."

Before I had a place to live, I found a place to train. I had heard of the Dog Pound six years ago when I visited Missoula for all of 24 hours or so. I vividly remember walking in the first day and meeting Matt Powers, the head coach. The Dog Pound is inside a warehouse by a Budweiser distributor. First impression? Awesome. Looks like my kind of place.

For those of you who know me better, I've always talked about the idea of finding a place to call home. I always said, if you make that "home" within yourself then you are never lost. Over the past six months I've lived here (seems like so much more!) the people at the Dog Pound have become my family. Matt is also a mentor; he cares about his fighters beyond their statistical performance. For my first boxing fight in Montana, what made me the happiest was not that I won; rather, it was that I had a coach who genuinely cared about me in my corner.

A person to whom I've admitted some of my fears, weaknesses, and insecurities. Oh...and finally, someone I could tell one of my dreams that I've kept secret for so long.

I want to be a pro MMA fighter. He didn't smirk or tell me it was impossible.

He lets me train with the guys and pushes me to improve (but also encourages me to balance the physical with the social/mental aspects of life as I tend to get tunnel vision and obsessed once I have a goal in mind)

(view looking up as I climbed the Carleton Water Tower in 2009)

So I have friends right now who graduated from Carleton with me...who are more "successful" by the societal standard of job security or whatnot. But sometimes I wonder. If they were in that car with Tyler, could they answer the question? What do you want to BE? I've asked a few, and the most common answer is "I don't know."

A large part of my happiness stems from the fact that I know what I want. Perhaps I don't quite know how to connect the dots between where I am now and my end goal, but there isn't supposed to be a set path anyhow. Many gave me the quizzical "you're crazy" look when I told them I was moving to Montana. Well, so far I can say it was one of the best decisions I've made. I'm happy here. I have "family" (family is not denoted by blood ties) in Illinois, Minnesota, Costa Rica, and now in Missoula.