here’s one back at you.
Strength.
Everyone wants it, reveres it, boasts about it, without the first fucking clue what it is.
As a kid I thought strength was earning a black belt. I kicked through boards and felt them splinter under my feet. I thought strength was a guttural yell, an opponent stumbling backward in the ring. In my twenties that turned into a title, a trophy, and the endless climb toward championships. By my thirties I thought strength meant expanding my reach, turning my passion into a career, a company. In my forties I decided strength was found in giving back, doing more to help my community and passing on the maybe four-and-a-half things I know.
I woke up a few days ago as a fifty-year-old woman in a villa in paradise. That’s not a metaphor. I thought fifty deserved a holiday—a beach surrounded by lush palm groves and filled with enough lounge chairs and Bahama Mamas to properly salute the last half century. I didn’t meditate or reflect. I didn’t come up with some bullshit advice no one wants to hear. What is fifty, anyway? Enough trips around the sun to feel the rain in your bones or to send ungrateful little versions of your DNA into the world, if that’s your thing. And enough time, at least for me, to figure out what strength really means.
When I woke up that morning, fifty years old, I didn’t want to lounge or drink. I didn’t want to tour pastel tributes to colonialism. I was Midwestern-sweaty, my winter skin blistering and winter lungs stinging with one pure need.
I wanted to fight.
I cut the trip short, flew back to the frigid heartland, and went straight home. Our home. I surprised everyone at the club after the regular evening beatdown and invited the trainers to strap on their gloves, all the faces our Minneapolis members know and love to hate. Jessica, senior trainer and legendary glute buster. Rae, our happy hour warrior. And of course Aaden, who graduated from the Strike Next after-school program to become one of the fiercest fighters I’ve ever trained.
I went into the ring with every single one of them and I fought them all into the ropes, all of them who, let’s be honest, were giving the old lady a pass—except Aaden. Guys, he knocked me on my ass. This kid can jab you from three paces away. He can kick you from the fucking locker rooms. When I first met Aaden, I asked if they had kickboxing in Somalia and he said no; they liked football but they never had a ball. You don’t need a ball to be a kickboxer, I told him. You were born with all the equipment you need. And damn do I hate being right. Aaden gave me a beating I’m going to feel until fifty-one. He was a blur of tendons, a tornado of roundhouses, and when he threw a cross-hook-uppercut combo this boss-gone-bottoms-up took a cartoon flop straight to the mat. While I was lying there, doubled over laughing in pain and spitting blood at the hands offering to help me up, I knew exactly how I wanted to celebrate my birthday.
Strength is knowing when to get the fuck out of the way.
This is a milestone, guys, and not because I hit the half century mark. This week, the New York Times rated Strike the #1 premier urban gym in the United States. We have locations in twenty-nine major cities and teach self-defense, martial arts, and body conditioning to thousands of members who understand what strength is, because some of you have been fighting all of your lives. This isn’t my milestone; it’s yours. You’ve risen up. You’ve beaten back the odds. You’ve found the strength inside yourselves and tapped it every day, called it into the ring again and again.
YOU are the employees who file awkwardly into Strike for a team-building exercise and an hour later knock your manager sideways with a left hook you never knew you had.
YOU are the city kids who catch two buses to spend the afternoon pummeling a body bag and learning one-arm defenses against common grab assaults.
YOU are the women who barely notice the glass shards as you punch through that ceiling. Your resistance has given my life purpose, has galvanized me, and together we’ve made something that’s stronger than all of us. YOU are Strike.
Today I’m making it official. I’m handing this company to you.
Get ready for Strike Down.
Fighters, whether you’re from all over