When UFC 318 headliner Dustin Poirier taught me something about life that still helps me today

One of the things in the interview with many fighters is that they keep hearing the same things. Best training camp of my life. Iron sharpen iron. My opponent has never fought someone like me. You know how to do it.

This feels particularly strange when one of them – in this case on Saturday in New Orleans completes his career at UFC 318 in New Orleans – tells them somewhat unexpectedly or insightful or even strangely poetically.

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You can see that I spent about a week in the American Top Team Fitness in Coconut Creek, Florida for about a week. The place was a real shark tank made of elite fighter. They went in and see Robbie Lawler, who had just won the UFC title in the world weight and strapped the gloves for a medium session. Thiago Alves and Hector Lombard could be saved in the cage. Against the wall, the former strikeforce champ “King” Mo Lawal Takedowns would shoot a rotating line -up of light heavyweights.

Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal were two of the less known names in the squad of the gym and they were basically the best friends. That was a different time.

Here I found Poirier training for his first fight with Conor McGregor. The 2014 McGregor was not yet a full -fledged superstar, but you could feel that he was on the way. Poirier had won three times in a row and thought that if he could beat McGregor, he could steal part of the Irish stard and may soon be in a title fight. This made up the work that I saw from him in the gym this week, which can only be described as fanatic.

At the end of a particularly long and brutal sparring meeting – all of this against teammates from his weight class – I tried to ask Poirier what was going on in his head. Here he was a 25-year-old man who had left the only house he had ever known in Lafayette, Louisiana, to come to Südflorida. He didn't know anyone there. His family was hundreds of miles away. And here he was against Monster every day and hoped that it would pay off in the end.

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He was in the training camp for two months when I talked to him and he had a few more weeks ahead of him. The blue spots on his face had hardly time to heal before he added more. Somewhere in his ribs there was something that he was not enthusiastic about, but had to try to work around. He was exhausted and literally hungry because he was due to his previous diet. It all sounded pretty miserable to be honest. How did he get through?

His answer was simple, but directly. The training camp always seems impossible, he said: “If you try to live every day at the same time.” If you think about the tremendousness of the task and the victim, let yourself be thought about how long it takes, and then it will feel unbearable. But you don't have to live every day at once. The only day you have to live is today. Say it differently, the only day you receive To live today.

“I remember not to take it for granted,” he said. “I don't have to do anything. This is a gift, man.”

Something about the way he said, I noticed that it even made him see different. He stood with sweat and dried blood in his nose, his chest still lifted with big, tired breaths. A moment before, everyone had appeared like a man who suffered and sacrificed in the hope of a future reward. But the way he spoke about it now made him look very lively. He was intensively busy with the work that he found meaningfully, and there was a satisfaction.

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In the end, I thought a lot about it in various places. Years later I even put it in a poem (originally published here, but this is the free version when you are curious) that was part of a series about Fight Sports. It stayed with me because it felt like something I had to hear. For those of us who are naturally inclined to pessimism, it is a real value to be reminded that your life is not just enduring or confused. It is not something you have to do. It is something you can do – and not even that long.

It later noticed that this was the type of camp knowledge in the middle image that I would probably only get from someone like Poirier who had to work harder and suffer more in order to give themselves a good chance in this sport. He was never one of the people who only appeared on television with obvious and extraordinary gifts one day. He was a school leaver from the poor side of Lafayette, who became a professional athlete through mere desire and effort and pure old stubbornness.

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This explains its permanent popularity so much when he now comes until the end of his fighting career. Poirier never became the best lightweight in the world. This first fight against McGregor, which he hoped, could bring him to a title shot in the spring weight? Even after all the blood and victims, he was eliminated in the first round.

But the fact that he continued to improve, continued to have ways to claw again and to claw again, and spoke to people. It also helped that he seemed a really good guy to fight before he had a platform in the UFC in the UFC, auctioned his own equipment to support his local food bench.

Poirier has always been one of these fighters who reminded us that people are not only watching this sport for Knockouts and Triumph – they are watching the human drama and inspiration. People saw him rising and falling and climbed again, and it meant something. If at all, it meant more because he had to work for everything. He was not born for sporting success. He had to find a way to make it for himself.

I think that is part of what gave him such a valuable feeling of perspective. It was there when he was 25 years old and on the way up, but also now that he is 36 years old and is ready to call it a career with Max Holloway after the fight on Saturday. The fans feel connected and do not invest because he is the best, but because he meant something both as a person and as a fighter.

Poirier earned the respect that he will wear in and out of the cage on Saturday. And that never goes without saying.