Athletes
Trey Ogden Embraces The Suffering
No Stranger To Digging Deep, Trey Ogden Hopes To Reap The Rewards Of Hard Work At UFC Fight Night: Lemos vs Jandiroba
Trey Ogden doesn’t view the fight game like most of his peers. It’s an approach that has earned him acclaim as the head coach of Marathon MMA, 17 pro wins and two victories in the UFC.
But it’s not for everybody. Take his mindset when it comes to making weight in the days leading up to a Saturday night in the Octagon.
“There’s something beautiful about overcoming the suffering,” said Ogden, who hit his mark of 156 pounds for this weekend’s bout against Loik Radzhabov.
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“I kind of view it as the march to the battlefield,” he continues. “I think of Roman soldiers and medieval-style soldiers. They didn't just fight fresh. These dudes had to march 60 miles to the city and run up a hill just to get to the other dudes and then fight 'em with swords. And they were operating on limited food, limited medicine and water and all this. They're out in the elements. And so I always thought, how amazing is the endurance that those soldiers had to have; they're not even showing up at the battlefield fresh. They're feral almost. And so I always view the weight cut is that this is the march to battle. This is the price to pay just to get to the battlefield.”
Ogden paid the price, and he’s closing in on the battlefield, aka the UFC APEX in Las Vegas. It’s not the way most see the Octagon, but people fight for a million different reasons and need to get their mind to a certain place to do so. Ogden takes every aspect of the business seriously and intellectually, even if the willingness to go to places not everyone will is almost primal. We get to talking about distance running. Ogden ran the Des Moines Marathon once, and as we compare war stories, he reveals that, yes, he had to go to some dark places to reach the finish line.
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“Mile 18, I just hit this wall and I realized that I still had eight miles,” he said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ (Laughs) I finished it, but I quit running. I finished the race, but in my heart, I quit being a runner at about mile 20. I was like, I'm going to finish this and I'm good.”
He finished. I ask if he knows the story of the first marathoner, Pheidippides. In 490 B.C., the Athenian was tasked with running from Marathon to Athens to deliver a message of victory over Persia. He made it 25 miles, delivered his message, then died.
“What a savage,” said Ogden. “He pushed himself to the brink.”
He enjoys this stuff, doesn’t he?
“Obviously, there's a lot of bad suffering in life that's tragic,” Ogden explains. “But cutting weight and training hard and dieting, this is not tragic suffering. This is spiritual suffering. You're doing it voluntarily. And I think there's something beautiful about the mindset that can voluntarily embrace suffering and overcome it. And then, ultimately, you build yourself into where you get to complete spiritual composure in the moment of the weight cut.”
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Your humble scribe fought at super heavyweight in the New York Golden Gloves so he didn’t have to cut weight, so I’ll have to take his word for it, but it is a unique and fascinating approach to that aspect of the sport that he’s passed down to his students and to the fighters he coaches. And while he’s the center of attention on Saturday, a month ago, he was in the corner as two of his fighters, Miles Johns and Garrett Armfield, put on impressive efforts in the APEX, with Johns defeating Douglas Silva de Andrade and Armfield delivering an action-packed performance before getting submitted by Brady Hiestand in the third round.
Coach Trey was proud of both and went in-depth breaking down the technical aspects of each fighter’s performance. It’s clear that he’s a thinking man’s coach and a thinking man’s fighter. But how does he fight with instinct as opposed to overthinking everything?
“In my fighting mind, I try to split into two different minds,” he explains. “So one-half of my mind is just trying to see what's in front of me clearly and react. Hopefully you've trained your reactions correctly, so that you don't have to think. The thinking should be done before you get in the cage. But combat is a thinking man's game at the same time. So when fighters start to overthink it, it's almost like they're doing it in, I don't want to say a nervous way because I'm not against being nervous, but it's like they're overthinking things that aren't the exact techniques and they're overthinking the emotional side of it. And then I have the other side of my mind that's my Fight IQ side, where I have a battle map of techniques and tactics and details. And I would say that I'm almost talking to myself about what's happening and making decisions and making reads and assessments and tactical adjustments or even emotional things sometimes, like, ‘Calm down a little bit’ or ‘Hey, you're starting to get a little emotionally tense.’ So I relax that breathing a little bit. Sometimes I'm coaching myself through that way. I feel like it's just a balance for me of these two operating systems, operating side by side together.”
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Read this to the next person you hear talking about an MMA fight like it’s a bar brawl. It’s not, and Ogden proves it. But for all the intellectual stuff, it is a fight and the physical part is as important as the mental aspects. So it takes a little suffering in the gym and on fight week to get to where he wants to go. That’s got to be tiring.
Ogden laughs.
“David Goggins says, being run down is the price to pay for being hard.”
UFC Fight Night: Lemos vs Jandiroba took place live from UFC APEX in Las Vegas, Nevada. See the Final Prelim & Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC Fight Pass!
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