My Fight / Your Fight

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Authors: Ronda Rousey
wrong thing: They focus on the result, not the process. The process is the sacrifice; it is all the hard parts—the sweat, the pain, the tears, the losses. You make the sacrifices anyway. You learn to enjoy them, or at least embrace them. In the end, it is the sacrifices that must fulfill you.
    I didn’t want to move away from my family at sixteen. And I certainly didn’t want to move away to some little town along the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border to live with people I didn’t know. But I wanted to win the Olympics one day. I wanted to be the world champion. I wanted to be the best judoka in the world. And I was willing to do whatever it took.
    My mom, Big Jim, and Jimmy decided it would be best if I stayed with Little Jimmy and his family.
    â€œRonda’s going to be like your new big sister,” Jimmy’s wife, Marie, said to their three young kids the day I arrived at their house.
    I slept on a futon in their home office, which should have been a warning that the arrangement wouldn’t last. At first I ate too much food. So my mom paid Jimmy more money for more food, but the situation got worse, not better. The closet where I was keeping all of my things was deemed too disorganized. I left too much water on the floor after I showered. I forgot to put dishes in the sink. I tried my absolute hardest, but it felt like the harder I tried, the more I messed up. I called my mom crying every day.
    The final straw came three weeks later when the son of a family friend of the Pedros asked Jimmy if he could stay at their house for a week while he came to train at the club. The guy, Dick IttyBitty (possibly not his real name), was in his early twenties, and we had met at a camp in Chicago just before I moved to Massachusetts. My mom didn’t like the idea of a twenty-something guy staying at the same house as me. Big Jim also thought it was a bad idea. Still Little Jimmy and Marie were debating whether to let him stay when Marie sent my mom an email asking what she would do.
    My mom typed up her reply: You asked me what I would do. I would never allow it in a million years. It’s a terrible fucking idea . Then my mom hit Send.
    The next night Jimmy, with Marie standing beside him, told me, “It’s just not working out.”
    I stared at them both, speechless and embarrassed. I was a sixteen-year-old kid who just wanted to do judo. I was heartbroken. I had finally found my place, my coach, and now, it was being ripped away from me. I made another tearful phone call to my mom.
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” my mom said. “We’ll figure something out.”
    Big Jim ended up taking me in. Mom offered to pay for my living expenses, just like she had paid Jimmy, but he refused to accept any money. Big Jim lived in a small house on a lake in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire, right outside the greater Boston area. Living at Big Jim’s was boring as hell. But more than that, it was lonely.
    Big Jim knows more about coaching judo than possibly anyone else in the country, but he’s not exactly the social type and we didn’t have much to say to one another anyway. He was a several-times divorced New England fireman who liked to smoke cigars (or cig-ahs as he called them). He had a permanent tobacco stain in his white mustache. I was a girl who read science fiction and drew pictures in a sketchpad.
    The days at Big Jim’s blurred into one another. The eight months I spent there in 2004 were marked by boredom, soreness, silence, and hunger.
    To compete in the sixty-three-kilogram weight division I had to weigh no more than sixty-three kilos before each tournament.
    Virtually no athlete competes in a division that is actually their weight. Most athletes walk around considerably heavier than competition weight in daily life. In the UFC, I fight at 135 pounds—and for about four hours a year, I weigh 135 pounds. My actual weight is closer to 150. I can make

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