The Long Walk

the hardest part of any fight

The hardest part of a fight is not the actual fight. By the time the first bell goes off you’re being hurtled forward by momentum, adrenaline. 3 rounds x 2 minutes, with 1 minute rest in between. It all goes by in a flash. All you have to do, I tell myself as I meet my opponent in the center of the ring, is be strong for 6 minutes.

The hardest part is the week before, the day before, the hours before. I feel wired with nerves and excitement. I feel supercharged. A part of me loves this feeling — unmistakably, terribly alive — and at the same time I have no place to channel this electricity until the fight begins. Because fight week is deload week. No hard sparring, no long grinding conditioning sessions. We focus on staying sharp and fresh and make sure there’s plenty of space for good recovery.

[Hands get wrapped with gauze and lots of tape]

On the day of the fight I will go through many different steps. I’ll weigh-in, I’ll see the ringside doctor for a quick check-up, I’ll eat something, my coach will wrap my hands, I’ll stretch and get warmed up, I’ll get my gloves from an official, I’ll get even more warmed up, and then it is almost time. The last step is the walk from the warm-up area to the ring.

For my first fight that walk was a long florescent lit hallway in a hotel in Atlanta. The walls were beige, the carpet a muted gold. The next was a much shorter walk from the back of an American Legion hall in Watertown, MA to the front. Maybe 20 or 30 steps. The next was a very long walk from the green room of a multilevel music venue in Boston, down a dark hall, down several flights of stairs, and out into the bright churn of the crowd. My last two fights were hosted by a Boston area gym. The gym is next door to a church, and they agreed to let the fighters use a common area to warm up. It was a big space, with white walls and white tables and folding chairs. My coach got me warmed up in the hallway that connected the church and the gym and so when it was time to walk it only took a few steps for us to leave one kind of world for another.

This was a tournament and I fought back-to-back days and on Sunday I could hear the service, the church music, through the walls.

I have walked out on my opponent’s turf, to the sound of people shouting her name. I have walked in the near-dark and in the too-bright light.

The walk is always long, no matter the literal distance. Once you start to walk you know that, without question, the fight is really happening. Time slows down and I just want to be through, to the other side. I want to run into the fire and confront whatever awaits. Often the anticipation is far more intense than the thing itself. I feel this sometimes with writing too, that the fear of starting or starting over or committing to a major revision is more ferocious than the actual work of it. Once I’m back in the world of the book, messing around with language, I’m like oh yeah, I know how to live here.

[an official checking my wraps before handing over my gloves. In the amateurs, the gloves are provided, either red or blue depending on your corner]

I was recently talking with a teammate who has his first fight coming up. We were going over some practicalities and logistics and then all of a sudden I was talking about that walk. How it is like no other feeling on this earth. How you move through a wall of nerve and noise and if you can just keep on walking until you make it to the ring—it is no small thing, to do only that. The walk is the fight before the fight. It’s your last chance to get right with yourself. If you let the doubt get louder with each step, if you start to pull away, to hesitate, that’ll undo you faster than any opponent. The walk is what I think of now whenever I come upon the iconic Rilke line “let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” The walk is the choice to open myself to that everythingness.

This week is fight week. Next week is fight week. I have a wave of walks on the horizon. New venues, new opponents, so many unknown dimensions. Already I feel the beauty and the terror. Already I feel the call and the challenge to “go to the limits of [my] longing” (Rilke, again). See you on the other side.

The Final Bell—

• Paul’s new novel, Etna, has been out for a few weeks & is already having such a beautiful life. You can read more about the book (and our beloved dog Oscar!) in the NYT.

• I’m really excited to be teaching in American Short Fiction’s MFA for All, a program I’ve admired from afar for a while now. You can register for an entire semester or for a single class (the classes from Lidia Yuknavitch and Mat Johnson look so good). I’m teaching a class on endings called “Stick the Landing.”