We are continuing the theme of letting go and retirement, and what it means to give up something that has so much meaning, significance and identity wrapped up in it. This week we have Kendall, a former professional fighter who is part of our Island Endurance (Victoria, BC) training group. It’s a heartfelt piece, so please give it a read. And thank you to Kendall for sharing this story with us.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to retire from something that has shaped such a huge part of your life and been an integral part of your identity. Particularly for me, that was martial arts and, more specifically, Muay Thai.
For over a decade, I spent my time building my life around fighting. I moved to Thailand, trained twice a day every day, fought professionally, won a WBC Muay Thai International Title, and eventually challenged for a World Title. I fought amateur MMA, and had done plenty of jiu jitsu competitions, in hopes of becoming the most well-rounded martial artist I could be, and living the life I dreamed about. For a long time, almost everything in my life revolved around the sport. Where I lived, how I trained, how I spent my time, what I was working toward. Everything was about optimizing my training, fighting, and overall being as a martial artist. Being a fighter became so tied up with my identity that I don’t think I fully understood where the sport ended and I began.
I came to a point in my life where I had to decide whether I was going to keep pursuing it. What’s strange is that it wasn’t as though I was being forced out of continuing that dream. It was as though that dream had changed. A difficult pill to swallow, especially with the martial art’s mentality of training hard, being tough, and never quitting. I was at a point in my career where my body wasn’t failing me (although repetitive mental and physical burnout should have provoked me to train smarter), I wasn’t too old, there were still fights I could have taken and goals I could have chased. In many ways, that made the decision more difficult.
If something gets taken away from you, there’s a clear reason to stop. Choosing to stop while you can still keep going is different. There is always the voice asking whether you’re quitting too early, whether you’re weak-willed, or that you could have done more. After spending years building and enveloping your entire world around this pursuit, is walking away just giving up?
For me, the biggest thing I couldn’t ignore anymore was my brain.
Combat sports ask you to accept a very daunting trade. You train your body to become stronger, fitter, and more capable, while at the same time accepting that repeated blows to the head are part of the sport. I loved being fit, strong, and able, but when I was training and fighting full-time, it was only then that I realized how truly unhealthy being an athlete can be.
For years, I accepted the trade without thinking too deeply about it. Eventually, I couldn’t anymore. At some point, another fight or another title stopped feeling more important than having a healthy brain in the years ahead. That answer sounds so simple when it’s written down, but getting to this point was the most difficult.
There is a lot about fighting that I miss, and probably always will. I miss having something so clear to work toward. I miss fight camps, and the intensity of training when everything in your life has one purpose. I miss the nerves before a fight and the feeling afterward when you know you put your entire being and effort into something so unbelievably difficult. I honestly even miss parts of the suffering.
I think what I struggled with the most, more than anything, was the structure around the sport, the identity I had created for myself, and losing the person I thought I was supposed to be.
There was a period of time where I didn’t really know what I was training for anymore. I felt lost. I knew I didn’t want to fight, and I had no idea what I could do to make myself feel whole again.
I then found running. Not because I was looking for something to replace Muay Thai and combat sports, because I don’t think anything could. But I wanted to get into something that had that same self-made discipline that made me truly fall in love with martial arts. You and you alone is what gets you to where you want to be, and it’s tough. You have to find that drive and will to suffer within you, and I found that with running.
I started entering in races, caring about pace and distance, getting faster and enduring longer lengths. I started looking at training differently — long runs, intervals, trails, recovery, race plans. Slowly then did I start to notice that I felt a bit more whole. I had something to work toward again.
Running gives me a lot of things that I loved about fighting without pretending to be the same thing. There’s still discomfort, and that slightly unreasonable part of me that enjoys seeing how much I can push myself. Still races, numbers, and goals to chase. I’m thankful, though, that the relationship with running feels different. When fighting, there was always an element of proving something — to myself, to other people, and to this imaginary version of myself that I thought I had to live up to. Running definitely feels quieter. Most of the time, I’m just competing with a clock, a distance, or the person I was, running the same distance a few months ago. I could have easily had an unhealthy relationship with running, and I’m thankful for the year-long journey I had deciding on retirement from combat sports, as tough and heart-breaking as it was.
I really think this is what I needed. I wasn’t done being competitive, I was just done paying that particular price for it.
I still love combat sports. I’m proud of where I got to in the sport, and I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. It’s made me become who I am today, shaped me in ways I don’t think anything else could, and given me experiences I never would have had otherwise. It taught me discipline, resilience, and how much discomfort I’m capable of handling.
It also taught me something I didn’t expect, that sometimes being tough isn’t about continuing. Sometimes it’s about knowing when something has given you everything it was supposed to give you.
I don’t exactly know where running will take me, and maybe that’s part of what I like about it. There are races I want to do and so many places I want to travel to do those races.
For the first time in over a decade, I’m not trying to become the fighter I thought I was supposed to be. I’m just curious and excited for what comes next.
