I’ve fielded a variety of questions about why exactly I decided to move to Thailand, and the best, most succinct answer to that question is something that I said jokingly to my friend Kevin, paraphrasing the above tweet by twitter user ‘rad_milk’: my biological clock is ticking, I need to go to war. This post is going to be a long-format answer to that question; a manifesto, if you will.
I’ve found that the best jokes are based on a kernel of truth. It does, seriously, feel like the biological clock on my athletic prime is ticking. As most people eventually do, I have reached an age where I realized that most of my favorite athletes are younger than me1. I have therefore been forced to reckon with the idea that for most of my athletic dreams, I am already far beyond the point where competing at a high level is attainable. For most of those dreams, I’d either decided that I didn’t love them enough to pursue them as a career2, or started too late, or didn’t have access, or recognized that the talent wasn’t necessarily there. Muay Thai, however, is the one athletic passion of mine that I simultaneously feel like I can be good at, and that I have not yet pursued with my full focus. After working 55+ hour weeks for nearly a year during Covid, I realized that I had saved enough money to be able to pursue my dream of training and fighting in Thailand, and I made the the decision to do so. This is my war3.
My relationship with Muay Thai has been passionate, if inconsistent. Muay Thai, for me, has always felt like that good friend who you don’t stay in close enough touch with, but anytime you’re together, it’s like nothing has changed. You follow them via social media, check in occasionally, but never spend as much time together as you’d like.
I became aware of the ‘Art of 8 Limbs’ through a combination of Tekken, the Ong Bak movies, and the UFC. I’d pantomime throwing low-kicks and elbows while messing around with my friends Montell and Glenn in high school, but I didn’t have the money to even think about pursuing martial arts back then. I started training seriously at the Combined Martial Arts Club at the SUNY University at Buffalo4, trained for about six months, won my first fight, trained another six months or so, and then dislocated my right shoulder in my second fight. I took my sweet time in getting my labrum surgically repaired5 which burned a few years, and then started training again at a local school in Syracuse6. The level of pure Muay Thai in Upstate New York in general is pretty low, and in Syracuse specifically, it’s borderline nonexistent. There are schools with excellent BJJ and even some decent MMA guys, but in terms of pure striking, there’s basically only one local school with a notable pro, and that particular school is much more of a karate-based kickboxing operation. I ended up being pretty disappointed at the level of instruction I was getting7 in Syracuse, when an opportunity to train in Thailand opened up. I answered a Reddit post from the marketing manager of a gym8 located in Bangkok, who was looking for someone to do a social media marketing internship for three months9. In exchange for shooting photo, video, and writing blog posts, I would have my housing and training provided for free; all I had to come up with was airfare and money for food. For 22 year-old Adrian, this seemed like a dream come true, and so I told the go-kart track I worked for that I was going to be taking the opportunity, that I would love to work there again when I returned, and bought the flight.
Upon arrival, I found that I had been oversold on a couple of key points. The room and board was going to be a "discounted” $30010 a month, rather than free, which is what I budgeted for, and I also found that the camera gear that I was told I would have access to for shooting content was either several years out of date or straight up nonexistent. At the time the only camera lens I had was a ‘Nifty Fifty’.11, which was amazing for portraiture and less than ideal for pretty much anything else. The prime 50mm focal range meant that I couldn’t zoom in or out, and so in order to shoot photo or video with the entire subject in frame I had to be 15+ feet away from the subject, a difficult task in the middle of a hectic training session. I also found out that while I was ostensibly allowed to train whenever I wanted, I was expected to be shooting footage during group training sessions. It fell on me to demand what amounted to a free private lesson from one of the trainers after the group sessions, something that I was uncomfortable with. Unhappy with the conditions I found myself in, which were compounded by some creative differences with one of the gym’s owners about what content was worthwhile12, I decided that the next month’s $300 would be better spent elsewhere and quit the internship after the first month. Dan, one of my training buddies from my home gym in Syracuse, happened to be training in Bangkok at the same time as me and we decided to go down to Phuket for a week, for a mini-vacation. The plan at this point was to go down and hit the beach, maybe train a couple times, return to Bangkok, train like mad, and get a fight before I returned home.
The Phuket trip ended up being a disaster. Dan and I, making plans at the last minute, balked at spending $90 each on the last minute flight to Phuket, and instead decided to take a bus down.13 The bus was an overnighter leaving from Khaosan Road14, and took about 12 hours total. About 9 hours in, as the sun was beginning to rise over Surat Thani, we were woken up and told that we had to switch buses. In the process of either leaving the bus or eating a quick breakfast in between buses, I lost my camera. A day or two later, on my second day ever of riding a motorbike, I clipped the rear corner of a minibus while trying to filter forward15 and gashed my shin open. 12 stitches later16, and with a strict order not to get the leg wet, my odds of having a fight in Thailand had vanished. Dan and I did a fair few rounds of boxing sparring in our Airbnb17, but kicking was clearly off the table. A couple of days later, while out at a bar on Bangla Road, Dan set his bag down when he went to the bathroom, and it was promptly stolen. His bag had his passport, his GoPro, and some clothes in it. Upon returning to Bangkok, we got to trek half an hour with all our bags, wait for the BTS18 to open, and then stand in line for an hour at the US Embassy so Dan could get his passport replaced before he returned to the US. All in all, not a great time.
I spent the next month and a half trying to conserve money, renting a room on the 5th floor above a bike shop in the Chatuchak area of Bangkok. There was a vendor with a grill attached to his motorbike who would set up around 4pm every day and sell various cuts of grilled pork, so for dinner most days I would have a couple of bags of pork, some pineapple or mango from another street cart, and my drink of choice from the 7/1119 across the street. This dinner usually cost around $4 USD, which was good, because like I mentioned before, I had not budgeted for housing. My mom came to visit for the last two weeks or so of my time in Thailand, which meant a significantly improved quality of life, as well as some much needed companionship. I’m incredibly grateful for my mom in general, but her flying halfway across the world to come visit me is something that I appreciate more than she’ll ever know. She and I returned to Phuket20, went to an elephant preserve, saw monkeys, swam in the ocean, and generally had the kind of vacation that Dan and I were hoping to have. My mom and I flew back to the states together, ending my first trip to Thailand on a high note.
Perhaps obviously, spending a quarter of a year in the Mecca of Muay Thai and barely being able to train left a bitter taste in my mouth. Since then, I’ve had a sense of unfinished business as it pertains to the sport. Returning to Syracuse in mid-April was demoralizing21 largely because the level and intensity of training was so much lower. Going from 2 hour, high intensity training sessions with sparring and/or clinching at the end of every session, to hour long classes with 15 minutes of “warming up the kick”, no sparring, and a DIY approach to conditioning made wanting to show up to class difficult. Dan and I both ended up drifting away from the school; having experienced the real thing, we were no longer excited by the very limited offering at home. In mid 2019 I trained for about a month and a half at Bangkok Boxing in Atlanta, and dropped in for a day at Manop Gym in Chiang Mai while visiting my ex, who was teaching English there.
It wasn’t until the Covid lockdown, ironically, that I got back into training. I had a dinner-and-a-movie club with my friends Jordan and Sydney toward the end of 2020, and that somehow morphed into my teaching them some Muay Thai. The three of us ended up doing padwork and sparring a few times a week in one of our respective living rooms (much to the chagrin of our respective up and downstairs neighbors). Realizing that we needed more space, we looked for a small commercial space to train, and incorporated my friends John and Zhan into our little group. Eventually we worked out a deal to split time in the basement of the Gear Factory, an old factory that had been repurposed as a bunch of studios and practice spaces for musicians and artists. We trained there 3-4 days a week for a few months, incorporated a few more people who were interested in learning, and more or less split the cost of sharing the space until John and I found a local jiu-jitsu gym22 that was opening and wanted a fitness kickboxing class.
A mutual friend put us in touch with the owner of the BJJ school, who had an extra space in the back that he was looking to fill during class times. He’d invested in 10 or so freestanding heavy bags, and wanted someone to teach a cardio kickboxing class. John, Z and I, looking for a space to train, ended up negotiating access to the space in exchange for running the classes and a cut of the proceeds23. This period, lasting a little less than a year, ended up being the most regular training that I had done since college, and I started to get into okay shape again. The kickboxing class we ran, rather than being strictly a cardio class, attempted to teach basic fundamental Muay Thai techniques in addition to the workout, to give the class some practical self-defense applications. The owner of the gym put us in touch with a local fight promoter and I signed up for an amateur Muay Thai fight in early January of 2022, my first since my shoulder dislocation 7 years prior. Unfortunately, I tested positive for Covid two weeks before the fight and had to pull out. I then signed up for another fight with a different opponent in early April. Camp24 for that fight went well, although being unaffiliated with any of the larger gyms in the area, I definitely had a shortage of similar-sized training partners. I sparred a lot with John (30-40 pounds heavier), Z (10-20 pounds lighter), Montell (10-15 pounds lighter), and a local Sheriff named Matt (25-35 pounds heavier), and felt good going into the fight.
The fight itself went smoothly enough. My opponent came out strong, winging hooks. In the first clinch exchange I hit him with a clean dump, and was immediately told by the referee that I wasn’t allowed to do that. I landed a left head kick in the first, but when he backed up, I got a little overexcited and threw a telegraphed superman punch, which allowed him to clinch with me and recover. For the majority of the fight, my opponent would throw two or three hooks, clinch, and then try to push me up against the cage and throw short knees. At some point in the second round, the ref stopped breaking up these clinch exchanges. I was much too content in the clinch: I didn’t want to gas myself out by trying to wrestle out of them because he wasn’t hurting me, and I believe the lack of activity in the clinch lost me the fight. I definitively lost the second round, getting caught with two relatively clean hooks and not landing much of substance myself. The cleanest punch of the fight was in the second round, when I pump faked an uppercut and tried to cut an angle directly into a right hook. At the beginning of the third round, my opponent threw the same two hooks he had been, which I avoided. I pivoted, threw a kick to the body, and then doubled up to the head, which landed clean and knocked him down. As he was falling, he ended up shooting a low single leg25 takedown and tripped me up. The ref called this a slip, rather than a knockdown. For the remainder of the final round, my opponent more or less tied me up, pushing me up against the cage and occasionally putting his glove in between my legs when I tried to circle out. I lost the fight by decision.
Despite the loss on the scorecards, I felt okay. I took practically no damage26, and was relieved to have had a full contact fight without catastrophic injury, since my last fight in the ring was short-lived and took me out of commission for literally years. After a falling out with the BJJ gym27, John and I ended up working out at Hercules, a local powerlifting gym that had a turf section that we used for padwork, and a heavy bag. I signed up to fight again in early September, but sprained my wrist badly and had to pull out. At this point, I had decided that I was going to go to Thailand for at least six months, so I didn't try to get another fight, fearing injury. Yet again, I was left with the feeling of unrealized potential.
Bro-history has long repeated that Vikings used to burn their ships upon arrival to a new land, to make retreat impossible. Quitting my job28 and moving across the world to pursue a career in something I love is my way of burning a boat, if not quite a bridge. I’m not actually leaving everything behind: Stacie, the love of my life, is still in Syracuse (and coming to visit for a month, thank God), and I’m sure that I could be re-hired at Al’s if there was an opening, but this is nonetheless the biggest leap of faith I have ever taken in chasing a dream.
I turned 28 four days after arriving in Bangkok. I realize that I am at least 12 years of consistent training late to the game. But I feel viscerally that not trying is infinitely worse than failure. I don’t want to be Marlon Brando on a barstool somewhere, talking about how I could have been so good if I had just pulled the trigger. If I try my best while I’m here and it doesn’t work out, so be it. If after a few months, I find that I lack the discipline, or the heart, or the love for the sport that it takes for me to be good, so be it. But fuck it, I am going to try.
I am going to war.
Realizing that Max Verstappen was younger than me was the first thing to spark this particular existential crisis.
Soccer.
Hopefully one with limited casualties.
Shoutout to Wing, Manny, Merrick, Caleb, and Will, in particular.
Just get the surgery. Especially with shoulders, your labrum will not repair itself, and you’re probably not going to be able to strengthen the muscles enough to keep your shoulder where it’s supposed to be.
Which will remain unnamed, as I’ve still got a couple of friends there. IYKYK
for $145 a month(!) in 2017(!)
Which will also remain unnamed, although it’s not that hard to figure out if you’ve kept up with my whereabouts or followed my Facebook posts in the last half decade.
Conveniently, the exact length of a tourist visa’s validity. I will not speculate on the legality of conducting an unpaid internship on a tourist visa.
10k THB
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens.
My favorite quote was (paraphrased) “Who reads blogs? I don’t! I want more Instagram videos, let’s scrap the blog.” Meanwhile, the single blog post I wrote was the most viewed thing on their website when I left. I am not bitter.
Protip: Take the flight, even if it’s last minute. Bangkok to Phuket is about an hour and 10 minutes in the air. The 9 hours you save yourself from spending on a bus with white dreadlocked people is worth it.
Crusty backpacker/western tourist heaven.
AKA lane splitting. Despite my injury, I’m a huge advocate for lane splitting, as it decongests traffic and feels safer when done correctly (not crashing into a minibus).
12 stitches that cost me nothing, because the motorbike I’d rented was insured and Thailand has universal healthcare, which means everything outside of huge cosmetic procedures is incredibly affordable.
A big shoutout to Dan Campbell, who prevented the guy whose van I hit from taking the motorbike keys, talked to the police on my behalf, and scooted to and from our Airbnb to bring me my documents at the hospital, in addition to hanging out with me and boxing in our hot-ass Airbnb when he could have been swimming in the Andaman sea.
Bangkok’s elevated SkyTrain, which doesn’t open until around 6 am.
American’s might be surprised to know this, but 7/11s are so ubiquitous in Thailand in general, and in Bangkok specifically, that it’s a rare sight to go a quarter mile in any city in Thailand without encountering at least two.
We flew this time, and had no motorbike crashes or theft.
Not least because it snowed on the way home from the airport.
Starting to notice a theme with the anonymity for shitty gyms?
We were offered free jiu-jitsu in exchange for running the class, but as I was working 50-60 hours a week at the time, I didn’t have time, and John wasn’t super interested. Instead we were offered a 70-30 split in our favor, which we thought was a great deal, since the gym owner did nothing to run or promote the class, and we ended up with a little money to invest in more gear.
The 6 or so weeks of fight-specific training for a bout.
Ankle pick? Idk I’m not a wrestler.
My biggest injury post fight was my shin/foot where I landed the head kick.
Coincidentally as soon as we had an established core group and started making some money, we were pushed out in favor of someone who was willing to trade free jiu-jitsu for teaching the kickboxing class.
The best job, co-workers, and bosses that I’ve ever had.
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