The Arduous Ascent
A New Year's Eve reflection on Dagestani wrestling, writing struggles, adult responsibilities, and time.
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For the past two weeks, I’ve been watching videos of Dagestani wrestlers on YouTube. They’re incredible, these stocky, rock-jawed men of the Caucasus Mountains: Russian by nationality, Muslim by religion, and raised, from birth, to engage in physical combat, as their forefathers did for at least a hundred generations before them.
Before his untimely death from COVID in 2020 at the age of 57, Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov1—father to Khabib and mentor to current UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev—was among the patriarchs of the Dagestani fighting tradition. From his remote mountain village, he built a dynasty of so many champions across the disciplines of judo, combat sambo, wrestling, and mixed martial arts that, in 2019, he was included in Russia’s version of the Guinness Book of Records. Four years after his remains were placed in the ground, new champions from his lineage continue to emerge.
Even though we often tune in after the belts have been wrapped around their waists, we all know that champions are not born; they’re made. Some are born with silver spoons between their lips. But privilege may only make you rich. You’ll start a few miles ahead in the race to glory. But you’re not guaranteed to become a winner.
Every child enters the world as clay.
The clay is molded over time, shaped by individuals—parents, teachers, neighbors—and institutions, such as schools, churches, and sports clubs. Unlike clay, we have a say in our direction, too. You can be taught discipline, like a horse that’s led to water, but the choice to drink is yours alone.
Years ago, while digging into Khabib’s family history in the lead-up to his fight against Conor McGregor, I found Rocky-like videos of the dude and his training partners thrusting stones in the air, sprinting up hillsides in winter clothes and wrestling each other in the open air 6,000 feet above sea level2. Ahead of that fight, an American filmmaker was invited to Dagestan to document Khabib’s training3, and the story deepened, answering the question I teach my journalism students to always have in the back of their minds when writing: “So what, why should I care?”
I believe that the more interesting story is always the one that precedes fame and glory. This is why I went to graduate school in 2013 in hopes of becoming the next Gary Smith or Wright Thompson, pulling back the silk curtain of pro sports to get a look at what lies beneath. To show readers the many ways we’re similar to even the greatest athletes and the few ways we’re different.4
Whhen the only recordings are home videos and no one is paying attention, you see the person climbing toward an idea with no assurance they’ll ever get close. To see a 9-year-old Khabib being made by his dad to wrestle a bear cub, a 22-year-old Pat Summitt taking the only job she’d ever have at Tennessee, MJ retiring from basketball in his prime in 1993 after his own father’s murder. You know that immortality awaits, but in those moments of fear, uncertainty, and trauma, they don’t5.
The arduous ascent compels me as a human being and a storyteller. But, when you’re in the midst of it, the feeling can be crushing, like gasping for air above 20,000 feet.
This year, I’ve started and stopped so many things.
Before Bear Den Books closed in March, I was invited to participate in a small panel with three other independent writers. In January, I recorded a four-story album of favorites I’d read there. Feeling momentum, I told people I was also working on a novella, which I was. Except I didn’t get very far6.
I’ve struggled to put the meat on the bones of any big story while balancing my responsibilities as a father and husband, my day job, teaching for extra money, and taking on freelance work for extra extra money when the bills keep our spending in the red.
On March 29, I pressed pause on the novella and launched The Attic Club with the hope of freeing up space in my head to focus. The club, which 15 of you currently pay to be members of, allows you to financially support my work so I don’t have to hustle as much elsewhere. In exchange, I give you access to my most confessional writing and a place in the Acknowledgments of books I’ll give you for free when they’re published.
Knowing I had a paying audience to write for tripled my productivity. In 2023, I published 22 stories. In 2024, I published over 70, including 22 Attic Club entries, 28 Weekly Big Head columns, and 21 in my Stories & Essays section. With increased output came the idea for another story collection, a follow-up to Big Head on the Block inspired by the visit from Future Me on my 35th birthday7.
Three weeks after that strange encounter, I was alone on the couch in the den, reminiscing. I wondered what else from my life was real but seemed not to be. There was the time Mickey and I created a superhero alter ego for Jeremy that later came to life. The freezing weekend in 2007 when Jeremy and I were pursued in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania by what we were sure was an axe murderer, the abominable snowman, or worse.
Before long, I was at my laptop scribbling “Paddlehands Pt. I.” After a legal skirmish with my rival, I published five parts online. That would become my next immediate project. In October, I hired a designer and created a cover. I have written about 15,000 words of Paddlehands: The Most Epic and Absurd Ping-Pong Story Ever Told, with my gracious editor-friend Donna helping me clean it up before releasing it as an audio- and e-book in March 2025. It wasn’t the story I thought I’d tell when this year started, but I’ve always been bad at predictions.
Everything has felt like a slog this year. Bright ideas have burned out. I had to reorient myself after setbacks, like canceling my attendance at Hernán Casciari’s Storytelling Institute in Buenos Aires in two weeks because I couldn’t afford the trip.
But the Lord has been at work, too. At least I think it’s Him, and not my mental illness, that’s been driving me toward accepting that, in this season of life, my writing must come second to my family. Haley and I are responsible for molding three lives to do good in the world. We’re working to preserve their purity and curiosity for as long as possible, to become the matriarch and patriarch of a new line of the Canever family tree.
While trekking through valleys of discomfort and dissatisfaction these past years, I’ve neglected to consider that having the kind of influence I desire in my children’s lives begins now. The seeds must be planted before the world devours them, not when they’re old enough to write a critical analysis of The Lord of the Flies and compete in soccer tournaments. If I wait until they’re less tiny and annoying, once their smartphone-wielding friends have shown them how to get around content filters, they might tell me reading is boring and listen to Morgan Wallen. I can’t take that risk.
The challenge, of course, is time. That is the thing I can’t stop thinking about as this year ends.
Our culture no longer equips us for the climb.
On social media, we’re fed quick schemes for going viral. Google queries provide us with a hundred junky explainers for fast-tracking our way to fortune and fame. “You don’t want to miss out on this!” is the motto turning our God-given curiosity into perilous addiction. But the truth is that, in almost all cases, success takes time. Henry Miller published his first book at 41 (coincidentally, that book, Tropic of Cancer, which I’ve not read, is about being a struggling writer). Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility, her first novel, at 35. She was dead six years later.
Nothing is promised.
On Thursday, I used gift cards from my mother-in-law’s Christmas party to watch The Fire Inside, the biopic of Claressa Shields, the only American boxer to win consecutive Olympic gold medals. Shields ascent took place over a shorter period than others—she is still only 29—but was just as grueling. From a poor and broken family in Flint, Michigan, where untreated water caused a public health crisis in 2014 that exposed more than 100,000 people to unsafe levels of lead in their drinking water, she started training at 11—two years after her dad got out of prison—in a gym where the coach insisted girls shouldn’t be. With a thousand other obstacles that could’ve cut her hero’s journey short, Shields won an Olympic gold medal at 17.
But little changed in her life. She was too rough-and-tumble to market as a star, and brands wouldn’t touch women’s boxing with a ten-foot pole because even Dagestanis don’t like to see women punching each other in the face. On top of that, rather than support her, Shields’ mom and dad expected her to pay the bills now that she was champ. Frustrated, Shields could’ve given up and gone another route, maybe modeling on OnlyFans or using her street smarts to hustle like her family. But she didn’t. Today, Shields is the most decorated female boxer in history and a mixed martial artist who draws millions of views when she competes (If you watch only one of her fights, have it be the 2022 scrap with England’s Savannah Marshall, the only woman to ever beat Shields as an amateur or pro—simply beautiful boxing.)
On Friday morning, I was thinking about how to connect the videos I’d been watching of Dagestanis training in the mountains with the Shields biopic and the thoughts I’d been having about raising children when I flipped open the Book of Genesis to Chapter 17. It wasn’t a coincidence; that’s where I left off earlier in the week. But it sure seemed like fate when I read about God renaming a childless, 100-year-old dude the “Father of Many Nations” and insisting, with all seriousness, that he’d bless his descendants into eternity just because he wanted to. Abraham plays it cool at first, but he feels the need to remind God after He’s done talking that he’s been trying to knock his wife up for more than half his lifetime, but nada. When God says, “She’ll be pregnant by summer,” Abraham laughs so hard he nearly chokes to death on his lentil stew. “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” he says. “Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”
Two days later, some angels show up to see Sarah for themselves. Naturally, Abraham hadn’t bothered to tell her about God’s fantasy for their future. She’s listening to them talking from the backroom when one angel mentions the pregnancy. “Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah,” the text says. “So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?”
The angels lift their eyebrows. “Who’s laughing?” they ask Abraham. Blushing, Sarah comes out and insists she was laughing at something on TV. “Sureeeeee” the angels say in tandem. “Is anything too hard for the Lord? Give it a year. You’ll have a boy.” When Sarah pushes the baby out of her saggy body 9 months later, they decide to name him Isaac, which translates in Hebrew to “he will laugh.”
Time. “…You just keep going, and one day you’re going on without me,” Andy Mineo raps in a track from 2018 about turning 30. “Time—where you going? Come back.”
I have no idea what 2025 has for me and my family.
I imagine publishing at least two books. That Alba and Enzo will start wrestling or Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes before the fall. Now that she’s licensed, Haley may sell a few houses, alleviating the financial pressure on me while increasing the load on her back as she homeschools Alba through kindergarten. I want to go to the beach. I want to go to the mountains and catch trout on small flies, skirting Black bears as bald eagles soar above me. I want to go to Argentina and meet Casciari. I want to run the half-marathon in April and then not stop, getting fitter than I’ve been since I tricked Haley into marrying me when I had time, money, freedom, and CrossFit to keep my pizza-belly in check. I want a greater sense of purpose in my work.
The list will get as long as the climb if I keep going. I want to take pleasure in the journey, even when it feels like my writing is going nowhere, like no one is reading or listening. Someday, far into the future, the TV cameras may be rolling, and I won’t get the luxury of emailing stories full of typos or chasing new ideas each second. It’s best I get this out of the way now.
What distinguishes artistic pursuits from physical ones is that recognizing growth or improvement is nearly impossible without external validation. If you lift weights or run, you can watch the fat disappear, your skin tighten, your muscles bulging from exertion. And, in writing and art, even if you do get validation from the outside world, it doesn’t mean what you’re creating is any good. Blockbuster films and copy-and-paste pop stars far outsell the good stuff. Rare are the people like auteur filmmaker Denis Villeneuve who get paid bajillions to do whatever the heck they want. (I mention Villeneuve because he’s attached to direct a film version of Nuclear War: A Scenario, the bestseller by journalist Annie Jacobsen that Apocalyptic Cowboy recently gave me to read, along with plans for how to build a communist-proof bomb shelter and a list of “Required Weapons and Other Items for Surviving Armageddon”).
To all of you who’ve been following along with me this year, thank you. If you’ve recently found spare change hiding under your cushions or extra dollar bills in your piggy bank, consider upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year), buying me a coffee, or ordering a copy of my first story collection, Big Head on the Block. Of course, you can listen to my stories for free on YouTube and Spotify. And I’ll continue to comp subscriptions as gifts throughout the year to readers who read more than 90% of my stories.
You can also support my work by sharing it with others, writing reviews of BHotB on Amazon or Goodreads, or just saying something kind in the comments. I don’t pay for half of the Substacks I subscribe to either. But I pay for Weigel’s coffee a few times a month, and my money is definitely better invested in reading than a low-quality caffeine source.
When I was a bill collector and worked the late shift at a bank in downtown Knoxville, the older man who tossed the trash was named Ralph. He had a voice as country as the cornbread at the Cracker Barrel and a go-to phrase he’d repeat every Thursday night we saw each other. “Almost there, Ralph,” I’d say, referencing the weekend. “Yeah, buddy,” he’d respond. “We’ll make it now.”
The summit may still be too high up to see. The road up to it is only a few miles shorter than at the start of 2024. But a new day dawns. A whole year of new days—if we’re lucky. Hope you’ve made good plans for how you’ll spend yours.
We’ll surely make it now.
“Dagestani Dynasty: How Fighting Became the Nurmagomedov Family Business” by investigative journalist Karim Zidan is the most thorough profile of Abdulmanap, his upbringing, and his legacy of champions.
For comparison, the highest-altitude U.S. town or city east of the Rockies is Beech Mountain, North Carolina, which is 5,500 feet above sea level.
His trip was released in eight parts as “The Dagestan Chronicles” on the Anatomy of a Fighter channel.
I’m currently listening to Thompson’s latest book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, about the lynching of Emmett Till, which goes much deeper than anything a journalist has written before about Mississippi, its razing and conquest, slavery and race relations there through Jim Crow, and how all these threads came together in the killing of a teenage boy by vile men seeking to preserve the social order.
Two excellent examples of this kind of journalism are “Eyes of the Storm,” Smith’s 1998 profile of Pat Summitt, and Thompson’s 2013 profile “Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building,” both of which I teach in my feature writing course at UT.
The Color of His Brother’s Heart is about a family divided by their devotion to two rival soccer teams in the village of Nahualpán in the fictional South American nation of Andaría. But all I’ve got beyond the main idea is a shoddy outline, three disorganized chapters, and less than 2,500 words.
Strange Encounters with Myself will include the 20 best overall pieces of writing from this year, along with a few others I haven’t shared yet. I hope to publish it by July 1.