My Fight / Your Fight by Ronda Rousey Page B

cooling machine, pumping ice-cold water through a brace wrapped around my knee. The beeping of the monitors. I looked down at my leg in the large black brace, and once again, tears started to pour down my cheeks.
    â€œIt only gets better from here,” the nurse said.
    After the surgery, my doctor told me the most important thing I could do for my recovery was to do all of the physical therapy and not to do anything stupid as far as trying to get back out on the mat sooner.
    I started physical therapy later that week, and my physical therapist assured me he would do everything he could to get me back out competing and as good as new. “Everything” involved a lot of range-of-motion exercises and minor stretches. The “workouts” were a far cry from the training sessions I was used to, but at the beginning left me tired and sore. My coach, Trace, told me it wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt that way. And I told myself I’d be back, that this was just a temporary setback. But it was my mom who saved me.
    For the first few days after I came home from the hospital, I sat on the couch and iced my leg, kept it elevated, and generally wallowed—watching Animal Planet and playing Pokémon games. Then a week after the surgery my mom came into the living and told me, “That’s enough.”
    â€œI just had knee surgery,” I said defensively.
    â€œIt’s been a week,” she said. “Time to get over feeling sorry for yourself.”
    â€œDidn’t you hear the doctor?” I snapped. “I’m not supposed to overdo it with my knee.”
    â€œYeah, well, what about your other leg?” she asked, rhetorically. “Do some leg lifts. What about your abs? Last time I checked sit-ups didn’t involve knees. Do some curls. Those involve arms, which last time I checked are not knees.”
    Two weeks later, she took me to Hayastan, a club in Hollywood where I regularly trained, to workout. My friend Manny Gamburyan unlocked the club for us. The dojo smelled like sweaty Armenians and Axe body spray. As I lowered myself to the blue and seafoam green mats, they felt firm and familiar. All of the anxiety that had been plaguing me since the day I hurt my knee faded.
    I’m back, bitches , I thought to myself.
    Every day I would limp to the car and into the club. Mom would have me practice pins, chokes, and armbars (a submission move where you dislocate your opponent’s elbow) with Manny. Gradually my limp improved, as did my matwork.
    The pain started to fade as well, but there were many nights where I woke up to a throbbing pain in my knee. I took two aspirin, limped downstairs to the kitchen to get a bag of ice, limped back upstairs, and climbed into bed, trying to push the pain out of my head long enough to fall back to sleep. A few hours later, I woke up again, the pain back and a puddle in my bed where ice had melted and leaked out of the bag.
    Before my injury, I had built up a reputation as a standup fighter. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do matwork, but if you’re really good at throwing people you can win right away, so you don’t end up grappling. I spent the whole year doing matwork. I did thousands of armbars.
    Six months after having my ACL repaired, I made my senior international level debut and finished second at the US Open. I was seconds away from winning the match, having gotten Sarah Clark in a pin, but Clark escaped and ultimately beat me on points. However, I was the top American finisher in my division. I had beat Grace Jividen, the No. 1 woman in my division, by ippon. The next weekend I won the Rendez-Vous (the Canadian Open). The pair of performances catapulted me to the No. 1 spot in the country in the women’s sixty-three-kilo division.
    That entire year changed me. Even more significant than the perfection of my armbar was the shift in how I thought about my skills, my body, and myself. I knew that I could