Mir explains time off and decision to keep fighting
Frank Mir: “So I was like, let me take time off, address these issues and train healthy – relatively speaking for what we do in our sport – then I’ll keep fighting.”
Frank Mir is a former UFC heavyweight champion, but coming off four losses, Mir decided to take some time off and let some injuries heal. It will have been over a year when the thirty five year old Mir fights Antonio Silva at UFC 184, but the time off is something Mir believed he needed:
“The whole thing about focusing on why I took so much time off was basically just because – it was funny. A lot of people asked me, ‘What are you going to do? What are you doing?’ Well, I didn’t even know myself yet. I was tired of always just taking fights and training through camps with injuries and I told people, ‘Hey, it’s not like I’m getting injured before the fight and I have to suck it up in the fight.’
“Almost everybody at the UFC level can fight through an injury. We’re all hurt by the time the fight comes. I’m starting camps off with the injuries that I haven’t properly addressed and that’s affecting the way I train, movements we’re using and what we can do on a certain day. I’ve got Forrest Griffin making jokes about it like, ‘It’s time to retire when I train like Mir.’ I’m like, ‘what are you saying?’ He’s like, ‘Well you walk in the gym, what doesn’t hurt?’ So I was like, ‘well, you’re right.’
“So I was like, let me take time off, address these issues and train healthy – relatively speaking for what we do in our sport – then I’ll keep fighting. But it’s to the point where I’m only 35-years-old and you know, the quality of life. I’d like to play a pickup game of baseball with my kids…So that’s kind of the decisions and why I did what I did.”