A Quiet Word

A QUIET WORD ———————————————— Setting it down because she asked me to. Saoirse Fallon, sat across from me at the back of Donlon's, the gym I work out of when I'm in Dublin between camps. We are the only two in the building. It is past ten. The tournament starts in three days. She came in as I was finishing on the heavy bag and she said, can I have a minute, Bríd. I said yes. She got herself a glass of water from the cooler. She sat. She did not start. I waited. I have learned to wait. The thing a younger fighter wants to ask you is rarely the thing they open with, and if you let them open with the easy thing they will get to the real thing in their own time. Saoirse needed eight minutes. I let her have eight minutes. What she eventually said was: how did you know. I asked her, how did I know what. She said: how did you know it was the work. The thing you were going to do. How did you know when you were my age. I sat with that for a moment. I want to record what I said because she may want to read it back later, and because I think it is the kind of question that gets asked once in a career, and I owe her the answer being accurate. What I said was this. ———————————————— I did not know when I was your age. I am thirty-eight years old and I am not certain I know now. What I knew, at twenty-four, was that I had walked away from the farm and I had not gone back, and that the not-going-back had been easier than I expected and that I should pay attention to that. I knew I was good at this. I knew I was good at it in a way that did not require me to think very hard about being good at it, which is a thing you should pay attention to, because most people in this work are good at it because they have decided to be, and the people who are good at it without deciding are a different category of fighter and you are one of them. I am one of them. Lacey Drummond, infuriatingly, is one of them. We are not common. The not-knowing was not a problem at twenty-four. The not-knowing becomes a problem later. It is becoming a problem for me now. I am telling you this not because I want sympathy — I do not — but because you should know, going in, that the question you are asking me does not have an answer at the end of a career. The career does not give you the answer. The career gives you the question, more clearly, more often, until you cannot pretend you have not heard it. That is the work. The work is the question. ———————————————— She asked me, then, about the body. She said: does it tell you when to stop. Does it tell you, plainly, when you have done enough. I told her: no. Mine has not. Mine has, on two occasions, told me it was tired enough that I should consider stopping, and I considered stopping, and I stopped for a while, and then I came back. The body is not a reliable source on this question. The body is a partner. It tells you what it is feeling and it expects you to factor that into your decisions. The decision is yours. The body does not make it for you. People say the body will tell you when to stop. They are wrong. The body will tell you it is in pain. You have to do the rest of the work yourself. I said: do not listen to anyone who tells you the body decides. They are people who have not yet had the conversation with their own. ———————————————— She asked me about the bracket. Specifically she asked me what I thought about Lacey. I told her the truth. I told her Lacey Drummond is the most dangerous fighter in the women's bracket and almost nobody understands why yet. I told her Lacey does not study, does not prepare, does not strategise, does not in fact know what tournament we are at most of the time, and that all of this is the wrong frame to read her through. The right frame is that Lacey has the one thing you cannot teach, which is the body that does not get tired in the way other bodies get tired. She is going to be the same fighter in her third match of the night that she was in her first. Nobody else in the bracket is. Including me. Including you. You are going to fight a Lacey who is fresher than you are, in a match where you have already given a fight to the bracket. That is what the format produces. I told her: do not try to outwork her. The Lacey who is across the cage from you is not the one you should be fighting. The one you should be fighting is the one who is going to be there in the second round, after you have spent forty per cent of yourself on her in the first. You should be conserving while she is conserving. She will conserve. She always does. She is not lazy. She is patient in a way she has not noticed she is being patient. Read her body, not her face. Her face will tell you nothing. Her body will tell you when she is about to commit, and you have approximately three seconds to do something about it. She wrote that down. I watched her write it down. I did not ask her to. ———————————————— The last thing she asked me was the one I have been thinking about ever since. She asked: what are you going to do after. After this tournament, she meant. Or after the next one. Or after, generally. She did not specify. Saoirse is twenty-four. The after is, for her, an academic question. She was asking it because I am the person at this gym whose answer would be honest. I told her the truth, which is that I do not know. I told her I have spent eighteen months trying to identify the next thing worth being good at and I have not yet found it. I told her I am not panicked about this. I am too old to be panicked. I am, however, paying attention. The day I stop being good at this work is the day the question stops being academic for me, and I would prefer to have an answer ready before then. I have not earned the answer yet. I am still earning it. I told her: ask me again in five years. By then I will either have found it or I will be doing this work even though I should not be, and either of those answers will be useful to you. She thanked me. She finished her water. She left her glass on the bench by the cooler and walked out, and I sat for another fifteen minutes with the lights off in the bag room because I needed to. ———————————————— I am writing this down because she may want it. I am also writing it down because some of it I needed to say out loud to somebody, and I would rather have said it to her than to nobody. Three days. Whatever happens, I will have done the work the work asks of me. That has always been enough. It is going to have to be enough this time too. — B.