Coach Kirstin

I had so many half thoughts on this leading up to the fight that I could never really decide what to write or put together a cohesive thought on it. But I keep getting questions on it. And I still don't know how to answer them. The simple answer. Nothing changed. I still prepped the same way. I had my same coaches there every step of the way. I still panicked about the exact same things at the same times. My diet was the same. The only real difference was I slept more. Lesson learned of previous training cycles is sleep is as important as mat time. Oh and I got paid. But it's not like it was a windfall and I quit my job. I was still balancing my full time job during the day and my part time job of training. But I gave most of the money back to the gym in the form of equipment. So at the end of the day, I'm just another person at the gym.

Four score and...actually it was only 7 weeks ago I had my last fight. Seems like an eternity because so much has transpired. In that 7 weeks I have been healing an injury I received before the training cycle started but it got worse after the fight. I had to cut my training down to almost nothing while my body healed after the fight. Good or bad I made the conscious decision to train and fight through it. There is a brief period after a fight where I am on cloud 9 but shortly after there is a bit of blues. There is so much leading up to a fight. Everything I do is revolving around that and when it's over, there is a huge hole in my life. For the first time in a while, I don't have a fight dictating what's next, I have to decide what's next. That's part of what makes it easy to go right into another cycle, it fills that missing void. I have always tried to attack my weaknesses if there wasn't a fight coming up. But due to my injuries, I couldn't fill that...

I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been a rough week. I am on my first flight going from Montana to Iowa with my grandfather for his family reunion. I came to Montana to visit my family. Part of that included going through several of the boxes of memorabilia that my grandmother had kept with my grandfather. I knew there was a lot of photos but was unsure what else. I knew this was a big event for my grandfather because we talked about it almost every other day in the weeks leading up to my visit. Initially I chalked our repeated conversations up to his dementia and diabetes related memory problems. But as the visit got closer I began to realize there was a lot of anxiety around those boxes. Almost as soon as I got there he wanted to start going through the boxes. And that's when I realized, I was having my own fair share of anxiety about these boxes. But I wasn't ready. I managed to postpone him a day. The next day I went back after a restless nights sleep to start goin...