by Ronda Rousey
“Hey, kiddo, how was your flight?” she asked as I slid into the passenger seat.
“Good. Long, but good,” I said.
As we pulled out of the terminal, it felt different this time around.
I was tired of the fighting and the anger and the hurt, and I missed her.
When I went to Canada, I felt like it was me versus everybody else, and I was going to prove them all wrong. I was going to win completely on my own. It was me versus the whole fucking world. I had taken a risk and I had survived. Now, I felt like I could do anything.
EVERYTHING IS AS EASY AS A DECISION
One of the few ex-boyfriends I had who was not a total douche bag told me this story. It changed my life.
Say you’re sitting in a cubicle and you hate your job. It’s terrible. Everyone around you is an asshole. Your boss is a dick. All of your work is just mind-numbingly soul-sucking. But in five minutes you are about to leave for your first vacation you’ve had in five years. You’re going to be gone for two weeks at this beautiful Bora Bora seaside bungalow. It’s literally the most lavish thing you’ve ever done in your entire life.
How would you feel? You would feel great.
Now imagine that you are in Bora Bora. You’re on this beautiful beach with amazing people, and you’ve had so much fun. In five minutes, you’re going to have to put down the piña colada with the little umbrella in it. You have to say goodbye to these people. You will go back to your terrible job and won’t take another vacation for another five years.
How would you feel? You would feel terrible.
Now, think about it. You’re sitting in the cubicle at the job that you hate and you feel awesome. And you’re sitting on the beach with a drink in your hand and you feel terrible. How you feel is entirely in your mind. Your mind has nothing to do with your environment. It has nothing to do with anyone around you. It is entirely your decision.
Making a change in your life is as easy as making a decision and acting on it. That’s it.
Shortly after I got back to L.A., I decided at the last minute to compete in the USJA Winter Championships. I didn’t even bother cutting weight. The morning of the tournament, I stepped on the scale. Seventy-three kilos came the reading. I had expected to blow past sixty-three kilos, but I had exceeded the weight limit for seventy kilos, the division above mine. I competed at seventy-eight kilos, a division thirty-three pounds heavier than my typical division. I won anyway.
Little Jimmy just happened to be at the tournament as well. I hadn’t seen him since before I had left for the tournament in Germany where Big Jim had kicked me out.
“Ronda,” he said, giving me a big hug. “You looked great out there.”
“Thanks,” I said, caught slightly off guard.
“It’s been a while.”
Yeah, maybe because you guys kicked me out, I thought. But as much as I wanted to be angry, I was tired of being mad at everyone.
“You’ve been doing really great,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been following your wins.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Things are really different back at the club,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got a lot of good people training out there. We’ve got a house where all of the athletes are living. It’s going really well. We would love to have you come back out and train with us.”
A smile crossed my face. Sure it wasn’t the groveling, tearful, we-made-a-huge-mistake apology I had played out in my head, but having Jimmy ask me to come back was pretty damn gratifying. I felt vindicated that I went out on my own and did better than I ever did with them.
“That would be cool,” I said.
But I was also hesitant to return to Massachusetts.
My whole day revolved around eating or, more accurately, not eating. I was constantly thinking: what is the most I can eat and not gain weight? Often, the answer was “nothing.” I tried everything to suppress my appetite: water, black coffee, sucking on ice. And the highlight of my day was what I ate. It wasn’t that I had discipline issues or self-control issues or that I was a weak person. It was that I was so dissatisfied with my life that the best part of my day was what I ate. Things were looking up, but life wasn’t completely better.
I had been battling bulimia since living at Big Jim’s two years ago. I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time or called it by its name, but I was struggling with the eating disorder.
When I moved up to competing in the senior division as a sixteen-year-old, I fought at sixty-three kilograms (138.9 pounds). Four years later, I was still fighting in the same weight class despite having grown from five-three to five-seven. But all I saw was the scale tipping ever heavier.
It got to the point where my actual weight was around 160 pounds, and I needed to cut twenty-two pounds ahead of competition. The toll of trying to take off that much weight that you don’t have to lose was getting to me mentally and physically.
No matter how hard I trained, it was getting harder and harder to make weight. The idea of eating and then just throwing it all up is an unfortunately common approach to cutting and maintaining weight, especially among lighter-weight fighters and wrestlers.
My approach to making weight was a combination of deprivation and purging. Ahead of tournaments, I would go as long as a week without eating an actual meal. I was constantly tired, not only physically exhausted but sleepy. Thinking of eating consumed me. Other times, I ate, then forced myself to throw up. Even with these extreme measures, I struggled to make sixty-three kilograms.
I had been hiding this secret ever since I had left Big Jim’s. I went through phases where I would try not to throw up, but eventually, it seemed like the easiest approach. I was just so hungry, and I backslid right into it again.
But this time around, it had been different. After I moved back home, I started seeing a guy named Bob. (His name wasn’t really Bob, but my mom calls all of her daughter’s boyfriends Bob. The only way a guy gets called by his real name is to marry into the family. “Why waste time learning his name if he’s not going to be sticking around?” she says.)
One day I collapsed onto the couch beside Bob, starving and exhausted. We had never addressed my issues with eating, but he saw what was happening. He asked why I didn’t stop dieting.
“It’s not that easy,” I said defensively.
“It’s as easy as making up your mind and making a decision not to,” he replied.
Then he told me the Bora Bora allegory and it was like a switch flipped on in my brain. I decided in that moment that I needed to stop forcing myself to throw up. The decision was the best possible move for my health, but when it came to cutting weight, things got worse. Without purging, my weight became even more unmanageable. But I was convinced I could make it work.
In January 2007, I returned to the Pedros. I moved into the athlete house and actually felt like I fit in. I was older and the group of athletes training in Massachusetts were more dedicated to the sport than Jason’s crew. Everyone welcomed me, and Big Jim, whom I had only exchanged very brief hellos with when we crossed paths at tournaments, seemed glad to have me back in his own Big Jim way. There were seven of us living in the house, six of us doing judo—four guys and two girls—plus one of Mikey Pedro’s friends. I had my own room, with an actual bed. I was moving up in the world.
One of my housemates, Rick Hawn, was working at Home Depot as part of a program where the company hired aspiring Olympians. I signed up and got myself a Home Depot job as well.
Bob and I were giving the long-distance thing a try. I had left my family on good terms. For the first time in a long time, everything was going great. I was happy.
At the end of January, I headed to Europe for another round of tournaments on the European circuit.
The first tournament was the British Open.
Weigh-ins at European circuit tournaments were chaos. Unlike at the Olympics or the world championship, where only one or two divisions fight a day, at other elite tournaments, everyone in every division fights on
the same day. That means dozens of hungry girls from every division, wanting to weigh in at once. And there is no decorum. I was standing in an open room, filled with girls covering themselves with nothing but their passports. The athletes were waiting around, some preparing their post-weigh-in drinks and food, everyone just waiting for the weigh-in to officially start.
The female official in charge announced them open.
Every naked chick in the room ran toward the scale. It was just titties and passports everywhere.
The officials started grabbing passports out of the sea of athletes who were waving them in the air and began calling the names of their owners. Girls were pushing up against each other. Caught in the fray, I eventually pushed myself to the front.
I used to be really shy about being naked in public, but in situations like that, you lose any self-consciousness real quick. When you starve for a week, you’re dehydrated as fuck, and the only thing standing between you and a bottle of water is a bunch of naked bitches, you will rub titties with any country in the world in order to get on the scale first.
I made weight, then chugged a bunch of water and Gatorade. The cold fluids gave me the chills, and later on I was still shivering under a blanket at the venue with my teammate Justin Flores.
Justin ran a couple of sprints up and down the mat, trying to get warm. Suddenly, he turned and ran through a side door leading outside.
“What happened to you?” I asked when he returned.
“I puked everywhere,” he said. “But I feel a little better. What about you?”
Throwing up after a weigh-in is common, as athletes who have been fasting for days eat or drink too much too quickly. But I never threw up after weigh-ins.
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” I told him, my body still shaking.
“Well, you look like shit,” he said with a grin.
I felt like shit. But the officials were calling my name, so I pushed everything else aside. I won my first three matches. There was supposed to be a break before the semifinals. Thank God, I thought. I just need a little time to recover. But when I looked at the schedule, I saw that one semifinal had moved up before the break: mine. “Motherfuckers!”
My next opponent was reigning European champion Sarah Clark from Great Britain. It was no secret that cutting weight was killing me and that making weight for this tournament had been especially rough. The British Open tournament organizers saw an opportunity to give their girl an edge.
Halfway through the semifinal match, we tumbled to the mat. I landed on my stomach and Clark landed on top of me. I felt like someone had jumped on my stomach. Before I could even clinch my jaw, I threw up on the mat. I was afraid that I’d be disqualified, which is what happens if you puke on the mat. But I was lying facedown in my own vomit with my arms crossed, and I managed to wipe it up before anyone saw.
The match came down to golden score (sudden death), when I pulled out the win. I walked off the mat, and Justin reached out to give me a hug.
“I had no idea you were so amazing,” he said as he pulled me toward him.
He wrinkled his nose, adding, “And you smell like vomit.”
“Yeah, I threw up,” I said, sheepishly.
I won my next match and the tournament, but I couldn’t enjoy the win because I was already dreading making weight at the Belgian Open the following week.
Over the next several days, I ran the equivalent of several marathons while wearing plastic sweats, which increase sweating. I starved and dehydrated myself. I sat in the sauna watching flames jump off the heated rocks. I ran out of the sauna to escape the fire, only to learn it was a heatstroke-induced hallucination.
I made weight in Belgium, but didn’t even place in the tournament. My body was breaking down, but I refused to cave.
The Super World Cup in Paris was the following week. It was the circuit’s biggest tournament. When I arrived in Paris a few days before, I hadn’t eaten an actual meal in a week. I hadn’t had more than a few sips of water in days. I stepped on the scale to see what I weighed. I was 66.6 kilograms. I stared at the number, devastated.
I went upstairs to turn on the hot water in my bathtub to try to sweat it out, and the whole hotel had run out of hot water because all the tournament athletes were there cutting weight.
I found a gym with a sauna and sat on the top level, as close to the heater as possible, my head against the wood-paneled wall. I could smell my hair burning, but I wasn’t sweating.
I gave up. I called Jimmy Pedro back at home.
“I can’t do it,” I said over and over. “I can’t make the weight.”
“No, you’re going to make weight,” he said. “You need to do this. Get back in there. You need to do it again.”
It was the only time in my entire career that I said I couldn’t make weight. I had never even admitted to the struggles I was going through in the process. I finally brought myself to have the courage to say something and got shot down.
Fuck it, I thought. There’s no way I can drop over three and a half kilos.
I ate all the snacks—fruit, trail mix, granola bars—that I had been saving for after the weigh-in. Then I went and met up with Bob, who had flown out to Europe to watch me compete. He was staying in a Parisian apartment, and had bought some groceries, and I made myself a cheese sandwich, skipping weigh-ins and the tournament. But I was already looking ahead and couldn’t even enjoy the meal. I was ashamed and embarrassed for failing, but I believed if I won the next tournament in Austria all would be forgiven.
I arrived in Linz in the afternoon. Linz had been host to the annual Austrian World Cup tournament for decades; my mom had competed here. I checked into the hotel. I had less than twenty-four hours to lose nearly ten pounds and be ready to compete.
In judo, you make all your own arrangements and travel alone with no coach, putting up the money yourself, as you circle the globe representing the United States. Sometimes, USA Judo would reimburse you months later, sometimes they wouldn’t. I booked my room at the hotel that had been the tournament hotel in years past.
I arrived in Linz and got to my hotel early. I pushed through the glass doors and surveyed the lobby for other team sweats, duffle bags featuring national flags, other athletes. The reception area was largely empty.
Great, maybe I can get an early check-in, I thought.
The desk clerk motioned me to the counter. “Hallo, welcome to Linz,” she said in a thick Austrian accent, pronouncing her w’s as v’s.
“Thank you,” I said. “I have a reservation for Rousey.”
She typed something into the computer.
“Yes, we have you staying with us for six days,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m here for the tournament,” I said.
“That’s nice,” she said in a tone that made it clear she had no idea what I was talking about.
Well, not everyone is a sports fan, I thought to myself.
She handed me my room key.
“Is there a shuttle?” I asked.
“A shuttle?” Now she looked confused.
“Yeah, usually, there’s like a shuttle to take you to the tournament.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.
“Um, OK, well, maybe there’s someone else you could ask.” Clearly there was some kind of language barrier. I had not eaten anything in nearly forty-eight hours and my patience was wearing thin.
“Of course,” she said with a smile. She turned to the other reception clerk. Their brief conversation in German ended when her coworker gave the internationally recognizable “I have no clue what you are talking about” shrug.
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist said to me. “I do not know about this tournament.”
I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something was not right.
She handed me my room key.
“We hope you enjoy your stay with us,” she said cheerfully while eyeing me like I was mentally unstable.
Up in my room, I dropped my
duffle on the floor, pulled out my laptop, and Googled: Austria World Cup. Nothing but soccer sites.
I typed in: Austria World Cup judo. I clicked on one of the pages, reading as it loaded. The tournament was being held in Vienna.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
I started bawling and called my mom.
Her voice was groggy. I had woken her up but even then her mind was a steel trap—she had just happened to read that there was no one competing for the United States in the division up from mine that weekend.
“Here is what you are going to do,” she said. “You are going to call up Valerie Gotay. [Valerie was at the tournament and competing in the women’s lightweight division.] You are going to tell Valerie to go to the coach’s meeting tonight and move you up to seventy kilos. Linz is not that far from Vienna. You are going to go to the airport in the morning and get a ticket. You will go to the tournament, and everything will be fine.”
“But they’ll all be bigger than me,” I said, still crying.
“Well, no, apparently, they’ll all be seventy kilos, which is what you are now,” my mom said.
I didn’t know what to say.
“You might feel like this is a terrible thing, but this isn’t the worst thing that could happen,” my mom continued. “You’ve been in the top ten at sixty-three kilos for years, so all these girls are training for you. Nobody at seventy kilos is expecting you. Just go out and fight. There are no expectations.”
Her logic was calming.
“And get something to eat because you’ve been trying to kill yourself making weight,” she added.
I got off the phone and ate the entire minibar. It was delicious.
Suddenly all the pressure disappeared. I had spent so much time feeling guilty, like I had let everyone down, like I had failed. Now, I realized that I had always had the option of making a change. It was just up to me to make that decision.
The next morning, I ate breakfast, flew to Vienna, and headed to the venue. I made weight and won the tournament. It was one of the best tournaments I ever fought.