MacDonald on UFC: The final countdown

We’re quickly closing on my fight with Ryan Jensen at UFC 129. The last few weeks fly by pretty quickly. I start to buckle down, watch what I’m eating, focus on a game-plan, do more sparring and do more of the five-minute rounds.

In fact, I’ve been trying to do much longer rounds, like seven-minute rounds, to retrain my body to keep up. I find when I train to fight five-minute rounds, my body gets used to that. So I’ll be doing five minutes and I’ll start to get a little tired and I’ll look up at the clock and find it will be within seconds of the five-minute mark. So doing the longer rounds will make the five-minute rounds seem a lot shorter and help be able to go bell to bell.

I brought a high-level wrestler to my gym here in Red Deer for three days to help me with that part of my game. He just finished second at the wrestling nationals. He’s doing a lot of shooting on me so I can prepare to stuff the takedown.

Next I’m going to Vegas on Thursday to train for five days and get some hard sparring in with some different guys. There are always a lot of good people to train with at Xtreme Couture. I get to work with new guys doing different things, and of course train with some of the cream of the crop. Hopefully Randy Couture will be around training for his fight, I expect he will be.

Over the weekend I traveled to Victoria to corner one of my guys, Ryan Machan at his first Armageddon show. It was my first time in the city and first time at one of that promotion’s events. I must say Victoria lived up to its reputation. It was cloudy and raining the whole time we were there but I still enjoyed it.

Armageddon is a good product, and it had good fights. Unfortunately, Machan lost a split decision. It was a bit disappointing because I thought he won. It was another case of leaving it in the hands of incompetent judges, and he was fighting a hometown favourite. The head of the boxing commission actually came up to me afterward and apologized and said he was going to have a lengthy talk with the judges. That’s fighting.

Over the past weekend the first sanctioned show in Ontario took place. Jordan Mein continued his path to the UFC with a hard-fought victory over Josh Burkman. It was also nice to see Chris Horodecki getting a submission. I love seeing the Shawn Tompkins’ guys getting submission wins. Everyone sees them as strikers and they are, but people used to think his fighters were one-dimensional. Now they can see that all of those guys, (Chris, Sam Stout and Mark Hominick), can knock you out or submit you. Let’s hope Hominick can do one of the two on April 30.

I thought it was very noble of Thiago Silva to be honest and admit what he did, taking a banned substance and then trying to hide it, and also explain why he did it. I get it — he was injured but he needed the fight by the sound of things. Silva probably needed the money. It was a calculated risk for him and it didn’t work out in Silva’s favour. We see those things happen all the time in high-level sports. Take Ben Johnson. I definitely don’t think it’s right, but I get it.

This Wednesday, the crew from MMA Connected are coming to town to shoot a day-long feature with me. They’ll be arriving at my house at 7:15 in the morning and doing a whole “day in the life of Jason (The Athlete) MacDonald.”

Should be interesting.

Lastly, if there’s anyone out there who has some extra UFC tickets and is interested in selling them at face value, please shoot me an email at firre@shaw.ca, I’d be happy to trade some signed t-shirts or something in return. I have a number of friends who were unable to get tickets and they’re more than willing to pay face value for good tickets, but not three or four times. (Nor do I expect them to, I’m actually discouraging them to.)

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