My Fight / Your Fight (16 page)

“Ronda felt that she had been wronged,” Carlos said. “Correctly or incorrectly, she believed that. She's very passionate about judo and very passionate about winning. In the moment, she was upset. This is what we want in judo: athletes who are passionate about the sport. She's young, and we're not going to do anything.”

With tears still streaming down my cheeks from my loss to the Cuban, I battled back in the repechage bracket, and in the bronze medal match I beat the Israeli girl whom I had lost the world championship to the year before, becoming the first American in history to get two junior world medals. No one from USA Judo said anything to me about punishment, and it was only after all the officials had congratulated me that I learned about the attempt to have me suspended.

I won the 2006 US Open in Miami a week later. From there, I headed across the Atlantic for the Swedish Open. I won the Swedish Open, which came with a much-needed 1,000 euros in prize money. The victory was empowering and I was still on a celebratory high when I made an impromptu decision to compete in the Finnish Open the following weekend and booked a ticket on the ferry.

I don't know what it was but that night, after I got back to my hotel room in Boras, I was overcome with a desire to go home. I was sitting in my hotel room, and the feeling swept over me.

It's time
, I thought. I felt like I had done enough. I wasn't going to be going home with my tail between my legs. I was proud of what I had accomplished on my own. I placed an international call home.

“Hello?” my mom answered. I paused for a second, trying to calculate the time difference.

“I won the Swedish Open,” I told her.

“That's great,” she said. She sounded genuinely happy for me.

“I want to come home again,” I said. “I want to talk everything out. I'm going to go to this tournament in Finland, but I want to come home after that. What do you think?”

“Of course, you can always come home.” I didn't expect for her to be so warm and welcoming. I was taken aback, but it reinforced my belief that the timing was right. I felt like things had changed.

I got bronze at the Finnish Open, but for the first time in my life, I wasn't devastated by a loss. I felt optimistic. I flew back home to L.A. with my two duffle bags. My mom picked me up at the airport.

“Hey, kiddo, how was your flight?” she asked as I slid into the passenger seat.

“Good. Long, but good,” I said.

As we pulled out of the terminal, it felt different this time around.

I was tired of the fighting and the anger and the hurt, and I missed her.

When I went to Canada, I felt like it was me versus everybody else, and I was going to prove them all wrong. I was going to win completely on my own. It was me versus the whole fucking world. I had taken a risk and I had survived. Now, I felt like I could do anything.

One of the few ex-boyfriends I had who was not a total douche bag told me this story. It changed my life.

Say you're sitting in a cubicle and you hate your job. It's terrible. Everyone around you is an asshole. Your boss is a dick. All of your work is just mind-numbingly soul-sucking. But in five minutes you are about to leave for your first vacation you've had in five years. You're going to be gone for two weeks at this beautiful Bora Bora seaside bungalow. It's literally the most lavish thing you've ever done in your entire life.

How would you feel? You would feel great.

Now imagine that you are in Bora Bora. You're on this beautiful beach with amazing people, and you've had so much fun. In five minutes, you're going to have to put down the piña colada with the little umbrella in it. You have to say goodbye to these people. You will go back to your terrible job and won't take another vacation for another five years.

How would you feel? You would feel terrible.

Now, think about it. You're sitting in the cubicle at the job that you hate and you feel awesome. And you're sitting on the beach with a drink in your hand and you feel terrible. How you feel is entirely in your mind. Your mind has nothing to do with your environment. It has nothing to do with anyone around you. It is entirely your decision.

Making a change in your life is as easy as making a decision and acting on it. That's it.

Shortly after I got back to L.A., I decided at the last minute to compete in the USJA Winter Championships. I didn't even bother cutting weight. The morning of the tournament, I stepped on the scale. Seventy-three kilos came the reading. I had expected to blow past sixty-three kilos, but I had exceeded the weight limit for seventy kilos, the division above mine. I competed at seventy-eight kilos, a division thirty-three pounds heavier than my typical division. I won anyway.

Little Jimmy just happened to be at the tournament as well. I hadn't seen him since before I had left for the tournament in Germany where Big Jim had kicked me out.

“Ronda,” he said, giving me a big hug. “You looked great out there.”

“Thanks,” I said, caught slightly off guard.

“It's been a while.”

Yeah, maybe because you guys kicked me out
, I thought. But as much as I wanted to be angry, I was tired of being mad at everyone.

“You've been doing really great,” Jimmy said. “I've been following your wins.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Things are really different back at the club,” Jimmy said. “We've got a lot of good people training out there. We've got a house where all of the athletes are living. It's going really well. We would love to have you come back out and train with us.”

A smile crossed my face. Sure it wasn't the groveling, tearful, we-made-a-huge-mistake apology I had played out in my head, but having Jimmy ask me to come back was pretty damn gratifying. I felt vindicated that I went out on my own and did better than I ever did with them.

“That would be cool,” I said.

But I was also hesitant to return to Massachusetts.

My whole day revolved around eating or, more accurately, not eating. I was constantly thinking: what is the most I can eat and not gain weight? Often, the answer was “nothing.” I tried everything to suppress my appetite: water, black coffee, sucking on ice. And the highlight of my day was what I ate. It wasn't that I had discipline issues or self-control issues or that I was a weak person. It was that I was so dissatisfied with my life that the best part of my day was what I ate. Things were looking up, but life wasn't completely better.

I had been battling bulimia since living at Big Jim's two years ago. I wouldn't have admitted it at the time or called it by its name, but I was struggling with the eating disorder.

When I moved up to competing in the senior division as a sixteen-year-old, I fought at sixty-three kilograms (138.9 pounds). Four years later, I was still fighting in the same weight class despite having grown from five-three to five-seven. But all I saw was the scale tipping ever heavier.

It got to the point where my actual weight was around 160 pounds, and I needed to cut twenty-two pounds ahead of competition. The toll of trying to take off that much weight that you don't have to lose was getting to me mentally and physically.

No matter how hard I trained, it was getting harder and harder to make weight. The idea of eating and then just throwing it all up is an unfortunately common approach to cutting and maintaining weight, especially among lighter-weight fighters and wrestlers.

My approach to making weight was a combination of deprivation and purging. Ahead of tournaments, I would go as long as a week without eating an actual meal. I was constantly tired, not only physically exhausted but sleepy. Thinking of eating consumed me. Other times, I ate, then forced myself to throw up. Even with these extreme measures, I struggled to make sixty-three kilograms.

I had been hiding this secret ever since I had left Big Jim's. I went through phases where I would try not to throw up, but eventually, it seemed like the easiest approach. I was just so hungry, and I backslid right into it again.

But this time around, it had been different. After I moved back home, I started seeing a guy named Bob. (His name wasn't really Bob, but my mom calls all of her daughter's boyfriends Bob. The only way a guy gets called by his real name is to marry into the family. “Why waste time learning his name if he's not going to be sticking around?” she says.)

One day I collapsed onto the couch beside Bob, starving and exhausted. We had never addressed my issues with eating, but he saw what was happening. He asked why I didn't stop dieting.

“It's not that easy,” I said defensively.

“It's as easy as making up your mind and making a decision not to,” he replied.

Then he told me the Bora Bora allegory and it was like a switch flipped on in my brain. I decided in that moment that I needed to stop forcing myself to throw up. The decision was the best possible move for my health, but when it came to cutting weight, things got worse. Without purging, my weight became even more unmanageable. But I was convinced I could make it work.

In January 2007, I returned to the Pedros. I moved into the athlete house and actually felt like I fit in. I was older and the group of athletes training in Massachusetts were more dedicated to the sport than Jason's crew. Everyone welcomed me, and Big Jim, whom I had only exchanged very brief hellos with when we crossed paths at tournaments, seemed glad to have me back in his own Big Jim way. There were seven of us living in the house, six of us doing judo—four guys and two girls—plus one of Mikey Pedro's friends. I had my own room, with an actual bed. I was moving up in the world.

One of my housemates, Rick Hawn, was working at Home Depot as part of a program where the company hired aspiring Olympians. I signed up and got myself a Home Depot job as well.

Bob and I were giving the long-distance thing a try. I had left my family on good terms. For the first time in a long time, everything was going great. I was happy.

At the end of January, I headed to Europe for another round of tournaments on the European circuit.

The first tournament was the British Open.

Weigh-ins at European circuit tournaments were chaos. Unlike at the Olympics or the world championship, where only one or two divisions fight a day, at other elite tournaments, everyone in every division fights on the same day. That means dozens of hungry girls from every division, wanting to weigh in at once. And there is no decorum. I was standing in an open room, filled with girls covering themselves with nothing but their passports. The athletes were waiting around, some preparing their post-weigh-in drinks and food, everyone just waiting for the weigh-in to officially start.

The female official in charge announced them open.

Every naked chick in the room ran toward the scale. It was just titties and passports everywhere.

The officials started grabbing passports out of the sea of athletes who were waving them in the air and began calling the names of their owners. Girls were pushing up against each other. Caught in the fray, I eventually pushed myself to the front.

I used to be really shy about being naked in public, but in situations like that, you lose any self-consciousness real quick. When you starve for a week, you're dehydrated as fuck, and the only thing standing between you and a bottle of water is a bunch of naked bitches, you will rub titties with any country in the world in order to get on the scale first.

I made weight, then chugged a bunch of water and Gatorade. The cold fluids gave me the chills, and later on I was still shivering under a blanket at the venue with my teammate Justin Flores.

Justin ran a couple of sprints up and down the mat, trying to get warm. Suddenly, he turned and ran through a side door leading outside.

“What happened to you?” I asked when he returned.

“I puked everywhere,” he said. “But I feel a little better. What about you?”

Throwing up after a weigh-in is common, as athletes who have been fasting for days eat or drink too much too quickly. But I never threw up after weigh-ins.

“I'm fine. I'm fine,” I told him, my body still shaking.

“Well, you look like shit,” he said with a grin.

I felt like shit. But the officials were calling my name, so I pushed everything else aside. I won my first three matches. There was supposed to be a break before the semifinals.
Thank God
, I thought.
I just need a little time to recover
. But when I looked at the schedule, I saw that one semifinal had moved up before the break: mine. “Motherfuckers!”

My next opponent was reigning European champion Sarah Clark from Great Britain. It was no secret that cutting weight was killing me and that making weight for this tournament had been especially rough. The British Open tournament organizers saw an opportunity to give their girl an edge.

Halfway through the semifinal match, we tumbled to the mat. I landed on my stomach and Clark landed on top of me. I felt like someone had jumped on my stomach. Before I could even clinch my jaw, I threw up on the mat. I was afraid that I'd be disqualified, which is what happens if you puke on the mat. But I was lying facedown in my own vomit with my arms crossed, and I managed to wipe it up before anyone saw.