Live With No Regrets

There are moments in life that take our breath away, good and bad.  I’ve had more than my share over the last couple weeks, and sometimes it’s hard to take it all in.  I feel small and fragile in one moment, and I’m an unstoppable force the next.  People come and go from your life and they all change you, from the sweet woman who came through my line at work and suggested a new way to cook spaghetti squash, to the friends I have had for my whole life and continue to love me for me.

I remember a man I knew from the gym.  He was a little older, overweight, he drove a cab and he wanted to fight.  He was there every day, even if he had to take the bus.  He was losing weight and improving, humble and willing to learn from anyone.  Time and politics moved us to different gyms.   The fight community is small and we would still run into each other from time to time and it was always awesome to see how he was growing.

There’s no gentle way to say that he was shot and killed weeks before his first fight.  He had worked years toward this goal, and never got there.  As tragic as this story seems, I think the real tragedy would have been if he had given up.  From experience, I bet he woke up that morning thinking about his fight, a few butterflies in his stomach and a little smile.  I bet there wasn’t any regret for the time he’d put in at the gym.  Truly pursuing one’s passion is a victory in itself.

I struggle and I sacrifice, but I don’t suffer.  I sweat, I bleed, and I cry, but I am blessed because I know what I want.  Working toward that is never work in vain, even if I never get there.  I will not have regret in my final moments, because I gave it everything I could.

Rest in peace Blackie, your spirit lives in my heart and continues to inspire me. May we all wake up on our last morning holding our dreams, or at least reaching for them.

www.KatieCasimir.com

Soul Food

When I was a kid, come hell or high water, I was to be home by 5:30pm to make sure the table was set for dinner at 6:00pm.  My family would pray and we would eat together.  We would share our day’s events, sing, and make jokes about my dad’s Volunteer Fire Department Pager Test that went off every night at around 6:00.  There was no T.V., the dishes were out of sight, we just enjoyed an always amazing home cooked meal, and each other.  Later in my life I discovered not only how rare this is anymore, but how valuable it is to take a meal with our loved ones.

I had dinner last night with my team.  We haven’t been together for around a year and a half, and it was a family reunion of sorts.  There are new babies, new chapters in our lives, new goals, and a new appreciation for each other.  We made abstract plans and spoke about philosophy.  We laughed.  Everyone stayed later than we intended and it was wonderful. 

There is something about sharing food and company that changes when you remove the food… then it is a meeting or a training session.  What would Thanksgiving Dinner be without food?  How long would your whole family sit at the same table and talk?  If you’re playing a game the game would be a distraction, food is an addition to the conversation somehow.  Food is an expression of culture.  My family has its own traditional foods that most people have never heard of (jello salad with cheddar cheese…YUM!), and I don’t even know where the tradition started.  My mom makes the best gravy EVER and I’ve learned enough to pull off a close second.  Good company and the building of traditions brings us together and solidifies an experience that feeds the soul, not just the body.

I’ve been training for over a year without this kind of love and support, without a coach who is willing to change his whole program for training that day because he knows the look on my face means we need to start with some hard conditioning.  I don’t know if it is the meal that brings the closeness, or the closeness that makes us want the intimacy of the meal, but I know it’s important, and I know I’m happy to have my training family together again.

www.KatieCasimir.com

Confessions of a Control Freak

I went to a psychic once.  I was a little skeptical, until the first thing she said to me was “Oooh, you’re a control freak, Baby.”  Yes, yes I am.  It was pointed out to me today that the desire/ability/whatever to keep control is absolutely necessary as a martial artist.

I step on my scale every morning around 3:30 am.  Sometimes I know I’m not going to like what I see (especially after a night of Chinese Food), but it’s a part of keeping control over my weight.  One sodium-loaded dinner out can mean 4 lbs. of water weight, enough to scare me into eating clean for the rest of the week…  I have a strict diet that requires crazy self-control.   I don’t eat dairy and I rarely eat meat.  I drink water instead of the juice that’s in the ‘fridge for my nephew, I often cook separate meals for my carnivorous family, and I will be abstaining from the cheesecake I have for my husband’s birthday tonight.  It’s a choice, but it’s not really… I’m driven by my goals and a little cheat here and a little cheat there add up to a lot of cheating.  It’s a matter of controlling myself.

As a hot-tempered child, controlling my emotions is a challenge I’ve been working on my whole life.  In a fight, a lack of control over anything is something very dangerous.  If I get angry while sparring I will have an asthma attack.  When I’m calm I can work harder and longer without a problem.

It’s no wonder this need for control has manifested itself in every aspect of my life.  If I make a “frivolous” decision, like Chinese Food, it’s still relatively calculated.  I think “I don’t feel like cooking.  It’s been about a month since I’ve eaten out.  There will be plenty of vegetarian and dairy free options, and it will be nice to have a date with my husband.”  I’m aware that I will be a little sluggish in the morning, but I’ll be up and ready to work before 4 am.  There may or may not be an extra cup of coffee involved…

Sometimes I just need a moment of reflection to understand the rest of the world, which has fewer consequences for minor lapses in self-control…

www.KatieCasimir.com

Ode to Cauliflower Ear

To those outside my sport, I don’t expect you to understand much of what I tell you here, but read on and take a small peek into one of the nuances of fight culture…

Andre Durand Digital Gallery

I recently read an article about an Ancient Roman statue of a pugilist. (He is referred to as a boxer, but I have a feeling he was more like an MMA fighter… check the gloves.)  One of the most fascinating things about this statue is the presence of cauliflower ear.  It was particularly striking to me because my first thought when seeing the picture was “Beautiful!”  That’s a far cry from the thought I had when I first saw the ears of the grappling coach at my first gym, which was “EWWW!”

Cauliflower ear is gross.  Not only does it look gross, it’s basically blood and other fluid that separate the cartilage and then gets hard.  Gross.  It hurts like hell for weeks after you get it, then it just gets hard and you kind of forget it’s there.  Yep, I too have a bit of a thick spot in my left ear.  You don’t notice until I point it out, but it was enough to scare me in to wearing ear protection (the only and most inconvenient prevention).  I must admit that I’m a little proud of the fact that it’s there, it puts me in a club with a lot of elite wrestlers and martial artists.

I think it’s something like neck rings of the Kayan women or the binding of feet in Imperial China, it’s a standard of beauty that is lost on most people outside the culture.  Mine came along by accident, but I had a training partner tell me he’d been trying to get some cauliflower ear since he began wrestling at 6 years old.  Yes, people (usually fighters and wrestlers) TRY to get this deformity.

Having “puffy ears” tells the world you are a fighter.  Everybody has UFC and TapouT gear now, but this is a symbol of hard training, someone who had had significant pain and deformity and never gave up.  It can be drained with little damage if treated soon enough, most repeat cases just let it go… again, I know from experience.  I think that’s why it’s so beautiful to me.  It represents the fighter, the pain and triumph, the moments I experience in the gym that change my life, the camaraderie that fighters share, and mostly the courage it takes to make that step into the cage.  I share all of that with the statue too, it is beautiful.

I know it doesn’t quite sit well with most of the population, and my perspective may not please the medical community.  The same can be said for most pugilistic activity too, but we wear it proudly.

www.KatieCasimir.com

Permission to Quit

I don’t know how to quit.  I don’t even know what that is, quitting.  I’ve trained through some pretty serious injuries, finished a teaching credential I didn’t plan to use, and worked to save relationships that weren’t worth saving, because I’m not a quitter.  Sounds kinda dumb when we say it out loud though…

Our whole lives we are taught not to quit, to finish what we start and honor our commitments.  There is merit in those behaviors, but there is a time and a place for them.  There is also a time to quit.  I read somewhere that people who are not bound by this code of honor are happier and more successful, and I’m starting to see why.  Think of all the things we’ve been told since childhood and have accepted as truth:

“If you quit now, you will always be a quitter!”  My husband quit Gi Jiu Jitsu after receiving his purple belt.  He went on to become one of the top lightweight MMA fighters in Europe before fighting on one of the biggest stages in the United States in the WEC.  That doesn’t sound like someone who’s labeled a “Quitter for Life,” it sounds like someone who followed a new and different dream.  He has recently taken up the Gi again and is finding he enjoys it, I don’t see a downside here.

“If it’s worth starting it’s worth finishing!”  Says the debt I’m still paying off for a degree I’m not using.  Just putting one foot in front of the other, high school, college, career, was not my path, but I took it and I stuck with it.  The classes I enjoyed the most weren’t the classes in my major (Horticulture), they were History, Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature.  I don’t want any of those things for my career either, but they were a lot more fun.  When I discovered fighting, yoga and nutrition were my true passions, I was too blinded by my commitment to make a change.  I have no regrets, but I do see a downside here.

“If you quit, you’ll let your whole team down!”  This week I learned that by not quitting, I was letting my team down.  I suffered an injury at work and was trying my hardest to be a “team player” by not going to the doctor, not filing a claim, and continuing to work.  My boss gently pointed out that if I wasn’t working at full capacity I was hindering the operations of the store.  I didn’t look at it like that, I felt a great relief when he have me permission to go get the rest I needed. 

And so, I too give permission to quit!  With the following exceptions:

1) Parenting, if you have children you better be in for life.

2) Because it’s hard.  Most things worth having don’t come easy, don’t be lazy.

3) Because you failed.  Fix it and go try again.

4) Because someone else wanted you to quit.  You can only give to others when you are satisfied with your own situation.  

I’ve had several well-meaning people ask how much longer I plan on fighting.  The answer has been the same since the day I walked into SLO Kickboxing.  I will fight until it’s not fun anymore, and I will continue to learn and grow as a martial artist for the rest of my life... unless I decide not to.

www.KatieCasimir.com