Writer Sam Sheridan explores The Fighter’s Mind

Consider this a public service announcement: Sam Sheridan has a new book out called The Fighter’s Mind. It’s a sequel of sorts to A Fighters Heart, a “must read” about fighting that saw the Harvard grad study traditional Muay Thai in Thailand (he even had a couple of fights) and MMA with Pat Miletich.

The Fighter’s Mind obviously is about the psychology of fighting and he’s interviewed the likes of Greg Jackson, Randy Couture and Mark DelleGrotte.  I haven’t had a chance to pick it up yet (I’ll have it by the weekend and will give you a review as soon as I’m done), but in the meantime, I thought I’d point you in the direction of this better-than-decent interview with the fighter-writer over on Cage Potato. Here’s an excerpt:

I was surprised to find chapters on ultra-marathons and chess in this book. Do you think their inclusion made it a different and better book than it would have been otherwise?

Absolutely. I think it would have gotten maybe a little boring and repetitious if it had just been trainers. These guys that are kind of on the edge of the fighting world, even though Josh Waitzkin’s now a brown belt and competes in Jiu Jitsu and is looking to win Mundials in 2012 or whatever, he’s in it now, he comes from the chess world and from the Tai Chi world.

To me, variety is the spice of life and I think coming at this problem from different angles is more effective than just getting different trainers in there. It’s funny, I read somebody wrote about the book on Amazon, “Oh he’s doing filler with these guys,” and to me these things were as interesting as anything; because I don’t know anything about ultra-marathons, I don’t know anything about the chess world. It was so interesting to see the parallels. Everybody you talk to, every single person you talk to about Jiu Jitsu will compare it to chess. I mean, it’s so boring. Or, MMA is physical chess, you’ve heard it a million times. But is it really? Let’s ask this guy who’s competed at the highest level in chess and is a serious competitor in Jiu Jitsu, are they alike? And there are some similarities but there are also a lot of differences. I think people use chess as a cop-out to mean something is complicated. It’s not checkers, its chess. But what chess actually is, and what Jiu Jitsu actually is, mentally, there are some corollaries and you can learn from each but I think it’s important to sort of understand those.

And the ultra-marathon guy, I just got interested in this because it is sort of surreal. All the long-distance runners I’ve ever met swear up and down that it’s mental. One of the first guys I ever met that did triathlons, and I think I mention it in the book, he ran a half marathon and then two months later he ran a marathon in the same time as his half marathon just because he realized he could go faster. I said, “You’re crazy.” And he said, “No, you just don’t know because you don’t know about the push. You don’t know how hard you can make yourself work.” Of course there is a direct corollary to fighting and mental toughness and conditioning.

I think Greg Jackson had the most interesting and the most directly eye-opening thing to say about mental toughness and teaching mental toughness and training mental toughness. About pushing that line where you might break, back further and further away so that your opponent can never take you there. That was really interesting to me.