For three months, UFC welterweight Emil Meek thought of nothing other than beating Kamaru Usman.

Meek (9-3 MMA, 1-1 UFC) imagined taking Usman’s (13-1 MMA, 8-0 UFC) No. 11 spot in his division and putting himself in line for a marquee opponent. So it was a shock when, after 15 minutes, the announcer called Usman’s name as the victor of their UFC Fight Night 124 meeting.

“You stand there, and you lost, and you’re like, ‘Oh (expletive), I wasted all this,’” Meek, who next faces Bartosz Fabinski (13-2 MMA, 2-0 UFC) at UFC Fight Night 134, told MMAjunkie Radio. “That sucks.”

After some thought, Meek calmed down and took positives from the experience. He’d fought a ranked opponent and not gotten finished. He’d forced his opponent to wrestle in order to get the win. With more preparation, he believed the result would be different.

This is the negotiation fighters are forced to do with themselves after an unexpected outcome. It’s never easy, especially when you spend so much time planning for one result.

“That’s what makes MMA the hardest sport in the world, because you have one shot,’ he said. “Most likely, you won’t get another shot at the guy, like in football or soccer. You’ve got 15 minutes, and you put 1,000 hours in.”

Like many fighters coming off a loss, Meek poured himself back into his work. He hit the gym and trained, hoping to get a short-notice turnaround. Two weeks into his comeback, he hit a wall, and he powered through it over the next two weeks.

Meek now feels a lot better about what happened. But he also had to blow off some steam to get to that point.

“In the beginning, after the fight, you’re not hungry – you have adrenaline,” he said. “But the three days after the fight, you say, ‘I can have a slice a pizza, and then you have a slice and you say, I can have another one, and then you end up eating a whole pizza.

“Then you’re like, now I started, so you manage to finish off a Ben and Jerry’s. Then you’re really, really, full and sick and you want to throw up. And then you feel like, ‘Maybe I’ve got a little more room up in there,’ and you’re like, I can go to the 7-Eleven across the street and get something else.”

These days, Meek is back on the wagon as far as his training and diet. He’s visualizing another challenge: his fight with Fabinski, which takes place Sunday at Barclaycard Arena in Hamburg, Germany and airs live on FS1.

A loss wasn’t enough to break Meek’s will to succeed in the UFC. He imagines climbing back up the ranks as his skills improve.

He’s also wrestling a lot more to prevent the same outcome. After training with a room full of grapplers at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, Meek sees a knockout of Fabinski.

“I always visualize that, too, and I feel like my work pace is really high,” he said. “He’s a wrestler, so he’s going to try and take me down. That’s why I work with all the wrestlers here. I think he’s going to get tired and sluggish. That’s what happened in his last fight. He hasn’t fought in a lot of years, so I think he’s in for a hard, rude awakening.”

For more on UFC Fight Night 134, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

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