MMA fighter Catherine Costigan not caged by convention

By her own admission, MMA fighter Catherine Costigan, is not a normal person. In fact, challenging convention is the theme of her life. She comes from a family where her father is a former soccer player who was felled by injury,while her brother Alan is currently plying his trade as an opera singer in London.

Traditional choices were never meant for the only daughter in the Costigan household, and she knows it.

While declarations of that nature can normally smack of a cliche, this Limerick woman’s life is a sequence of events which justifies that self-assessment. Striking up an association with MMA during its formative years in the 1990s, when others told her she was “mental”, would be the first example to point to.

Indeed, the community of MMA dissenters has contracted somewhat in the passing years, but there are still the persistent few who survived any attempts at a conversion and still strive to demonise the sport.

Speaking on a local radio station recently to promote an MMA tournament, Costigan encountered a radio presenter who not only disapproved of MMA, but who also dispensed some archaic advice about what women ought to be doing instead.

“The guy was saying that women should be in the kitchen cooking and not going out, and that he wouldn’t want his daughter doing this.’’

Safer option

Unsurprisingly, the advice didn’t resonate with the 36-year-old and if you consider the monstrous blisters one can inherit from cooking oil splashback, the octagon might be the deceptively safer option.

Prior to her MMA days, Costigan's specialities were kickboxing and freestyle karate. After being inspired by Bruce Lee movies, she was intrigued by the world of mixed martial arts. And at 14, she began her training at the Pankration Kickboxing Academy in Limerick.

She was previously diagnosed with epilepsy as a child after suffering two seizures, and although she later grew out of it, worry was never far away at home. And although her family are not “100 per cent down” with her choice of sport, their support is always assured.

Costigan fights in the atomweight category (105lb) which is one of the lightest weight divisions in MMA. She started out in her early 20s and, last year, she reached a pivotal moment in her career when an opportunity to fight at the Invicta Fighting Championships in Las Vegas came up.

It was a dream prospect which cruelly coincided with some significant back pain that surfaced about two months ahead of the fight and worsened as the event drew closer. But her MMA record at that time was a handsome 5-0, and while hindsight tells her she should have withdrawn from the fight, the gladiatorial nature of the sport provoked her to plough on.

“I would go and train as much as I could,’’ says Costigan, who now co-owns the Pankration Kickboxing Academy, “but I probably would not get up off the floor for at least half an hour after with the pain.

“But again, there was so much on the line for Invicta, it was our dream. We put so much in to getting medicals in Vegas and no one knows how hard it is to actually get a medical to fight in Vegas.’’

“I should have had the cop-on to say no and I might have let a lot of people down but at the end of the day, no one cares whether you’re injured or not, they just care whether you won or lost.’’

The gamble didn’t yield the dividends she hoped for and Costigan succumbed to her opponent in the first round. And upon arriving home, it was discovered that Catherine had a herniated disc in the lower region of her spine that required surgery.

An MRI later confirmed that she also had a trapped nerve, just to compound the agony of a first MMA defeat.

But this wasn’t uncharted territory for her. She previously underwent a surgical procedure on her hip and in 2012, she also needed neck fusion surgery which brought her into the path of a few surgeons whose opinion on MMA was not all that dissimilar from the radio presenter who wanted to shackle her to a cooker.

“One or two were okay to do it,’’ she says, “but they weren’t super confident so I wanted a surgeon who believed and understood what I actually did and a lot of surgeons weren’t really sure what MMA was.

Too barbaric

“The first surgeon said it was too barbaric and then as he sat me down he felt quite sorry for me and recommended me to another guy to get their opinion.’’

Another surgeon cautioned that she might lose her voice, a possibility Costigan quickly accepted, having had no plans in place to pursue X Factor stardom. But she still needed to recruit a willing surgeon and eventually she found a suitable candidate.

Through a connection of one of her kickboxing students at the Academy, she discovered her saviour, Ashley Poynton.

Poynton – who had also performed surgery on Brian O’Driscoll – assured her that he would carry out the procedure and give her his blessing to continue fighting. And to this day, their allegiance remains strong and her neck problems are a distant memory.

After the pain of losing at Invicta in 2015, Costigan was intent on rediscovering her winning form and the British- owned MMA event, BAMMA, was coming to Dublin the following September. Some intense physio treatment, coupled with an epidural injection, were hoped to be the tonic that would help her through the pain, but again defeat was to be the outcome of her labour. Her opponent ambushed her with an armbar in the first round, forcing the Limerick fighter to tap out.

And when she saw the same dilemma inflicted on Conor McGregor at UFC 196, memories of her submission came rushing back. “Any fighter, when I see them tap out, I feel for them. I know how hard it was for Conor to lose, especially with the bravado and what he does and what he says he’ll do and he truly is a believer. But the best fan is the one who will support us no matter what.’’

Costigan's opponent, Norwegian-born Celine Haga, was a last-minute replacement for the fight. Weighing in at 114lb ahead of the bout, Haga failed to make the catchweight by four pounds while Catherine clocked in at the significantly lighter 108lb. The weight gap proved to be a decisive factor in the fight. After BAMMA, Haga went on to fight in America and not only did she fail to shed enough weight for that event as well, she almost collapsed in the process.

On the subject of dramatic weight fluctuations in MMA, Costigan says she has no worries about her own approach to weight management and has one defiant response about why some fighters struggle in this area.

“Some fighters are lazy. In the 12 weeks leading up to a fight, that’s your camp and you don’t have ‘cheat meals’. Even though you might feel like you’d love a bar of chocolate, you’ve gotta reflect back to ‘I don’t wanna be in a sauna for two hours trying to get that extra kilo off because I didn’t have the discipline’.

“There are so many top nutritionists out there,’’ she continues, “who don’t charge that much and will work with you for 12 weeks to help you cut your weight. I made a few mistakes in the past and ended up in the sauna trying to lose the last kilo and I learnt from that. I blew them away with my medicals in Las Vegas. I’m 36 but they told me I have the body of a 20-year-old so I don’t think there’s any danger in cutting weight. If you do it 100 per cent right, you’ll never have an issue.’’

Privileged

Catherine Costigan doesn’t come from privileged beginnings and at 16, she found herself a job in the local supermarket to help supplement the family income. Shifts could last up to 35 hours a week and heavy lifting was a core part of her job detail, so if there were any suspicions that her unenviable list of injuries can be exclusively attributed to a career in MMA, Costigan knows this is not the case.

“I will never say that it’s down to MMA but in saying that, some of the local tournaments that I would go to, there was never a girl my size to fight so I would have to fight a girl who was bigger. I wrestle with men as part of my training as well, but we try to find men that are closer to my size.

“You’re always going have to be dealing with that physical strength a little bit more. It’s good training but sometimes you have to critique it and pull it back.’’

Costigan hopes to be back in the octagon this summer when either another appearance at Invicta or BAMMA will hopefully mark her return. The journey to this point has been painful in many ways but also educating in equal measure. MMA has enabled her ‘to do something outside the norm’ and the chance to resume all that, is steering her towards her comeback.

It’s not an ordinary life. And that has made all the difference.