adicted2aaHappy New Years to all those who bonk!
I have an incredibly self indulgent announcement about this upcoming year. This will be my last year doing buhurt at anything near a competitive level. After this I won’t do any more melee at all and if I do fight again it will only be in small super low key dueling events. This is it. 10 years down and 1 last one to go.
It’s a little weird announcing “retiring” from a hobby, what amounts to a rec league sport. In the past people have mostly just drifted away either saying nothing or saying they’d be back(and usually never seen again). So I feel the need to justify my lapse into narcissism as if I’m not always acting desperate for attention. At one point I was “kinda a big deal” in the sport, at least in ‘Murican steel fighting. Now, not so much, but still not entirely irrelevant. Further with two of the bigger names announcing “retirement” recently, Jaye Brooks one of the sports founders here and Daniel Krug, founder of Dominus and probably the most well known name currently, it seems to be the thing. True both of them have armored up since hanging up the helmet but the pattern is still there.
More important than all that though is that for the past 10 years I’ve done most of my emotional and intellectual processing about the sport via this blog or videos. And there’s alot of processing I still have to do because I’m very conflicted about this. I’m still physically able to hang near the top of the sport. I feel like I’m just now starting to mentally convert to the current meta. There are more opportunities than ever and the sport feels like its about ready for another exponential jump in growth. What a time to step away.
My brain might not be able to take the damage though. I’ve had a minimum of 4 concussions since starting. And an unknown number as a kid when I had a habit of getting head injuries. That might not mean much. But it might mean I’m on the verge of permanent reduced mental functioning. It might mean I’m already past that point. My first concussion I didn’t stop fighting when it happened and the next day I forgot how to read for 5 minutes. I pulled out my phone to text someone and none of the letters made any sort of sense to me. I might as well have been looking at chinese. I knew the shapes should have meaning, that they should resemble patterns that in turn would form sounds and meaning in my head. Instead they just looked funny and I desperately tried to remember how they fit together. I had never been more scared than I was standing there wondering what was happening to me. I still don’t think I’ve felt more helpless since. I never want to feel that again.
How to avoid that? I’m not sure. I personally feel like my spelling and verbal recall(the ability to remember a word for a concept or the name of a person) is significantly worse and has never recovered since that incident. Is that related to my TBI’s or just to aging? No way to tell at this point. We just don’t know alot about how TBI’s affect people long term. There’s some evidence that CTE is actually the most scary thing which is seemingly caused by total volume of small hits and not related to large hits at all. And based on that competing, particularly in melee might not be dangerous at all in the sense of long term brain health. On the other hand it’s pretty well known that the more concussions you get, the easier is to get them. And there are definitely cases of people suffering brain fog or worse for years after a bad hit. I’ve watched enough friends brains turn mushy over the course of their time fighting to have a reasonable fear.
This sport does not taking brain health seriously but its probably not surprising considering neither do any professional fight sports and even the large team impact sports are just now starting too. During the diagnosis for my last concussion at Golden Ring last year the doctor asked me how many I’ve had in the past. When I told her how many I also made it clear that I couldn’t be sure if there weren’t more. She, and the onlookers, looked shocked which in turn surprised me. At almost every event I’ve been too since I started paying attention 7 years ago I’ve seen at least one case that seemed to be a clear concussion and usually the fighter would try to fight after. I can’t be certain of course, I’m not a doctor nor did I have time to sit down and evaluate most of the cases closely. So take it with a grain of salt for sure but if you don’t believe average one undiagnosed concussion per event a year, well I’m starting a buhurt crypto coin that you should definitely invest in.
Recently I became aware of studies that show a link between the likelihood of and subsequent intensity of concussion and the internal temperature of the brain. The hotter your head, the worse impacts are for you. There’s alot of talk about how good our helmets are at preventing the transfer of force based on Newtonian physics I frankly cannot follow. However I’ve never heard anyone talk about how the fact they are basically ovens cooking our brains affect it. And rarely heard discussion about how the nature of long events sitting in armor all day makes remaining hydrated significantly harder than in other physical sports. Cause the less water in your body also translates to more and worse head injuries from the same impacts.
End of the day, while I’m only 38 or something, without too many major injuries, I think the risk of continuing is too great. I want to be able to quit on my terms not because I’ve been forced too and before I start sounding like Nate Diaz or Chuck Liddel, both so punch drunk its hard to tell if they are slurring because of alcohol or if it’s just their normal speech. I’ve had a good run, done some majorly cool things, and while I will miss this and likely regret it ever time I see fights, I would regret losing whats left of my faculties even more.
So with all that out of the way, what will this year hold for me? Will I put petal to the metal, go full grindset mentality in an attempt to go out at the top of the game? Well, that was the plan until a few months ago. This past year has done more to dissolution me with the sport than the other 9 combined, which considering all the bullshit, drama, and setbacks I’ve been through is pretty impressive. Not in a good way though.
Our community frankly sucks. It always has, its not really a new thing. Its full of giant egos who focus far too much of their self worth on this tiny hobby leading to all sorts of dumb shenanigans in the pursuit of saving pride. Not to mention the weird amount of gold diggers who think somehow this will be the in to easy money. What’s become more and more apparent as the sport grew though is that there is absolutely no desire to deal with the baked in misogyny and transphobia that starting as the overlap between historical fetishism and combat sports provides.
I get it. Armored combat is not the place societal issues endemic throughout American culture will be solved. This is a hobby people use to escape the bullshit of the “real world.” Its not that we can’t solve the trans athlete debate or that we can’t manage to get woman’s events to be treated the same as men’s that really bothers me. It’s that for the most part people just want to wash their hands and not try. More than that though is how the whole community is willing to just ignore credible accusations of abuse with essentially a “I didn’t see it so it doesn’t effect me” attitude.Again, I don’t expect everything to be solved. I don’t expect organizations with limited resources to figure out the balance between protecting victims, protecting the community as a whole, and protecting people from specious rumors. That’s a hard problem. Again though, its seems like everyone is just ok with not even fucking trying.
And that’s heartbreaking to me. I don’t put much stock in the idea of knightly behavior and chivalry and I’m glad that’s not part of the sport. But there is a bit of irony to cowardice we all exhibit in these situations. I am not divorcing myself from the community when I say that. I have turned my head away as much as any other. Still, having to share space with people I personally believe are capable of atrocious acts and a whole community who would rather ignore the voices than try and figure out what if anything needs to be done to protect its members, makes the joy of the fight bitter sweet at best.
Out of respect for the AMCF I’m not making this a specific callout post as I don’t want any legal fallback to land on them while I’m member of the board. I also know that both AMCF and MCU have at least recognized there is a problem, even though it appears neither org has capable of acting on it. Again I acknowledge this reflect on me. I have not been able to make anything happen nor do I possess the courage to face all the consequences making this the highest priority would create. So perhaps the next year will see them proving me wrong forcing me to eat crow as the tackle the potential safety problems exhibited by failing to act on accusations of abuse. Or perhaps we will see that our refusal to try has cost one or more members of the community dearly. I genuinely hope the former happens and I do think it is unlikely the latter will happen, at least on the time table of a year.
I would be lying though if I let it seem like it was purely the toxicity inherent in the sport. It was also my performance. I did not have a great year. I lost all six high profile profights I had. I was eliminated early in the IMCF longsword. I failed to qualify for IMCF pole. I lost all my longsword fights at carnage. In melee I was unable to lead my team out of pools in germany and unable to grab a first or even second place at carnage. I am simply not able to keep up with the top. And thats cause I am unwilling to put in the work.
I have all sorts of excuses I could make. I spent 4 months injured. My local gyms schedule conflicted with my work and my attempts to maintain my relationships. Trying to focus on 4 multiple forms rather than specializing is always harder. My teams performance is not just on me. Etc etc. All of those are excuses though. I don’t put in the work I know I need. I don’t make the sacrifices I know are required. I don’t spend the time studying the game. And I’ve realized its cause I don’t want to.
Buhurt just isn’t as important to me as it was. I don’t know when it happened but sometime it just stopped being worth sacrificing the rest of my life. Despite that I’ve kept living in this half life where I try to keep up the same habits and push off things that would make my life better pretending I’m going to actually do it right. So I neither fully engage in other hobbies and interests nor do I do the necessary work to catch up to the elites of the sport. I put my social life on hold so that I can find time for the training and study and then put in 50% of the required work.
I know theoretically there is a way to balance having other interests and social life, actually dedicating oneself to a job and a career, and getting the requisite 15-20 hours of training and study. I’ve never found the ability though. And while its possible I could this year, I think I’d rather focus on everything I sacrificed and put on the back burner for the past decade. I know that plenty of people also enjoy the sport without goals of being the best, just enjoying the combat and camaraderie and that’s what I’m gonna try this year. Maybe I’ll find I’ve been doing it wrong the whole time.
I gave most of my life to this sport for the past 10 years. And while I do think I’m ever gonna leave it completely its time to chase other goals and find other joys. Ones that will last me longer before my body to deteriorate and I find myself desperate for ways to feel fulfilled without any practice at finding them.
So for the rest of this year most of my focus will be on this, my writing, and my first passion, table top RPGS. I might start streaming of making videos again too, but not ready to commit to that. For buhurt I have two competitive events left I’m committed too, Ice Dragon and Carnage, and after that, well we’ll see what happens. I’m mostly just going to be looking for convenient events or ones that maximize fun and minimize stress. I’ll probably start looking for marshalling and event running opportunities too. Put some more time into that side of the AMCF.
I’m not done with buhurt completely. I am fully convinced that without this sport I would have offed myself before I hit 30. Possibly melodramatic,but I’ve always been a bit extra. As this whole things serves as evidence of. I hope to continue to help it grow and maybe to help steer it a bit more in a positive direction. But this is it as far as fighting goes. I’m taking a victory lap even if I never made it to highest level. Thanks for the bonks guys, it’s been fun.
I’ll see you in the list, one last time.