Coach Kirstin

So I might the only person on the planet that doesn't like mango. And I was trying to broaden the types of fish we eat and I decided we needed to eat mahi mahi, we every damn recipe has mango in it...horay!  So I finally found something else and it was spicy.  I have tried it a few times and I had to tone it down a bit so I could handle it.  Chris loved it, I not so much.  Here is the colors of the spices that tells you how this is about to go down. The spices above are: 1 tsp sea salt 2 tsp garlic powder 2 tsp cumin 2 tsp paprika 2 tsp cayenne pepper The original recipe only used 3 pieces of mahi mahi but I have used up to 6 and had plenty of mixture.   You will need some olive oil to cook the fish in, I tried grape seed oil and it just got soaked up too fast by the fish.  Start off with the fish  dried off and the mixture all prepped. Then add some of the dry rub to each side Go ahead and do this for all of your fillets...

So I have a recent affair to confess to...my crockpot. It has made my life exponentially simpler. I come home and he has a hot meal prepared and waiting, what's not to love? Except every recipe I google is cook this and that and then put it in the crock pot....I'm using the crock pot so I can just dump it in an forget it, why would I want to cook anything before I put it in the crock pot. I get it, you can make some pretty amazing stuff. But lets think about my life...its planned out in 15 minute increments still and I'm not even fighting anymore, the prep work involved in that is not my style. Sooo I am working on a new section of my blog of no prep crock pot recipes. I am sure to have a few fails. So this was my first experiment. We were short on time and had a lot of chicken thighs in the freezer. So into the bottom of the crock pot went 6 chicken thighs On top of that I added: 2, 14 oz cans of diced tomatoes 6 oz can tomato paste 1/2 onion coarsely chopped ...

Maybe I'm lazy or just always short on time.  Either way I decided that it's easier to make a big batch of my breakfast for the week on Sunday's and the warm it up throughout the week.  It started when I started fighting.  I used to be really neurotic and I would measure out each portion in a pan cook it individually to ensure I got the same amount in each serving....time and life has gotten my neurosis to calm down a bit.  I now just cook in a bit batch.  I also have learned some ways to make save time and money.  I like to keep my veggies extra fresh, well dead of winter that is always possible so I use frozen, also saves me from having to chop all that up.  I just dump the bag in and voila!  I also use Trader Joe's Bacon Ends & Pieces.  Its about $2.99 here which is about $5 less than a package of bacon of the same size (1 lbs) since I just chop it anyhow, I don't need pretty strips of bacon for frying up with my eggs and laying on pla...

I love fighting.  It's a drug.  Everyone told me that but I couldn't fathom that until I experienced my first fight.  It was a loss but I was still hooked.   There is no other high like stepping in that cage.  That rush.    But in April I started getting headaches.  I didn't get hit hard.  I didn't get knocked out.  They just started.  I talked to my coaches and made a conscious decision to go through with my fight anyhow.  This wasn't just any fight.  This was my first pro fight.  This was 2 years of only fighting 4 times and countless fights that had fallen through.  Fallen through as I walked the steps of the ring with my gear on after waiting for two days.  I wasn't backing out.  I was taking this fight because I wanted to fight and I love fighting.  And I was tired of missing fights.   I kept it to only a handful of people, not even all my coaches knew.  I didn't take ...

For the last 3 months I have been on pretty significant restrictions from working out to heal an injury. Pretty much all I get to do is some stationary bike riding and a few exercises in low reps that don't cause my heart rate to go up much. Which is oh so exciting... I don't know how I ever used to go to a gym and do the bike, or elliptical or treadmill. I want to drive the stationary bike off a bridge to put myself out of misery after about 5 minutes in. I have tried not to complain too much because this injury was a result of a conscious decision that I made. Needless to say, without working out I have gained weight. Expected. What I didn't expect is the complete disappearance of my muscles! You can't even see my tricep unless I flex...!! But in reality I don't know what I am complaining about. Because all I have complained about for the better part of the last year is how giant my arms are, especially in photos (I'll save myself the embarrassment ...

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...