Look at us. We train in a dojo with no coach. We come out to train ourselves.

And sometimes it feels unfair. Sometimes it feels like everybody else has it all. Everybody else is training with the coaches that know everything. Everybody else has something that we don’t.

But what if I told you that everyone is doing the same shit. That Azerbaijan runs the same drills that we do. That the Americans feel the same doubts that we feel. That the Ukrainians make the same mistakes we do.

We’ve fought in the same rings as everybody else. We’ve trained the same skills. We’ve done the same Antonio Oliva Seba seminars, watched the same Brose drills, and idolized the same Aghayev matches.

I feel frustrated that for so long, we’ve gone into tournaments feeling like the underdogs. We go in with the mindset that maybe some other people out there have gone the extra mile that we never knew about.

But it’s not like that. We’ve shown up. We’ve done the trainings in our basements. We’ve done the extra hour at the gym. We’ve pushed through our exhaustion. We’ve worried our nights away. We’ve dreamt through our days. We’ve put in the hours. We’ve put in the sweat. We’ve put in the work.

So when we get into the ring and see our opponent in front of us, we know. Nobody can take away how bad we’ve wanted to be here. Nobody can take away how much we’ve put in.

We’ve gone to the dojo. We’ve struggled with ourselves. We’ve fought to fix our form, our techniques, our tactics, our emotions, our feelings. We’ve overcome our own weaknesses. We’ve set our own goals and we’ve pushed ourselves through. We made so much happen for ourselves.

So after all that, we can’t ever forget: in every match, there are only two fighters in the ring. We choose which one we’re really fighting.

And we deserve to be here.

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