Fighting is hard, and the harder the fights, the harder it is. Fighting is hard on the body, and as the body breaks in places, it can effect the mind and spirit. Sometimes it gets so bad, the only to win is to not fight.
UFC featherweight Felice Herrig took off 15 months to recover, following a loss to Paige VanZant at UFC on FOX 15, and it worked. She came tearing back, tapping Kailin Curran in the first in front of a hometown Chicago crowd at UFC on FOX 20 on Saturday night.
What’s next?
“I don’t really have a plan,” said Herrig at the post-fight press conference, as transcribed by Chuck Mindenhall for MMA Fighting. “I haven’t really thought about it. I want to enjoy this win. But now that I’m back to normal, back to myself…people don’t realize that, you know, my last fight was the first time I ever had felt like, after the first minute-and-a-half my body just went numb. I didn’t know what was happening, and so I had a bunch of lab work done and medical tests done, and my body has been just so burnt out from all the years that I’ve been fighting. So I took a few steps back. That’s why I took the time off.
“I was always training, but I was working on all the things that I maybe had been stubborn to do before, and I worked on getting my anxiety under control which was a huge factor. And this was the first fight where I felt relaxed and where I felt like I did everything in the fight I know I’m capable of, things I do in the gym. So we’ll see what’s next. I don’t really know.”
“I was pretty focused on this fight, but I did feed off the crowd’s energy a lot. I could tell I had a lot of people backing me and supporting me here. Like I’ve said before, I grew up in Chicago This is where I’ve been my whole like. Back when I started fighting when I was 18 I fought on all the local kickboxing shows. So it’s nice that as my career has evolved I’m able to fight here again, because a lot of people have supported me for quite some time, my friends and my family, My parents have never been to one of my UFC fights. They’ve never ever been to a fight outside of Chicago. So I was just happy that people I’m closest with could be here to see it.”
