Carlos Condit announced his retirement from the sport at 37 just a few days and now the former interim UFC welterweight champion has explained how he came to that decision.
“It was time,” Condit told Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour. “For a lot of different reasons. After that last fight, I felt like I had put together a good camp, and I was just a step behind Max [Griffin].
“I feel like I could really try to tweak things, and I could try to figure out what’s missing, what part of the formula isn’t working right now and then go and test it again and test it again, but that’s a tough thing to do. That’s a tough thing to do because ultimately I have to go and put myself on the firing line to see if what I’m doing is working.
“At a certain point there’s diminishing returns, so I think it’s time to move on.”
A further sign that it was a good time to hang up his gloves came when Condit noted that he wasn’t taking his loss as hard as he would have done in the past.
“I’d been leaving a hotel room after a loss and been p*ssed off and leaving all my gear in a real salty mood and basically, ‘I’m done with this sh*t,’” Condit recalls of his previous defeats. “But this time was different. I wasn’t salty about it. I just felt like it was the right move.
“Probably about three weeks or a month ago, I called Dana and I let him know, so this thing has been coming down the pipe for a little while.”
