Evolve Women's MMA Podcast · Shelley Devine

Evolve WMMA Show #74 With Riley Martinez

October 23, 2023·53 min·5 clips

Riley Martinez shares she was born with an extra heart valve and underwent major surgery as a child.

Boston is right up front. Shelley opens with Evolve Boot Camp, then moves into clear hometown excitement about Invicta FC 54 coming to Boston. Riley Martinez gives the excerpt its weight. The conversation has that local fight scene feel: the Boston card, gym life, and the private emotional side of fighting all sit close together. Shelley talks about Evolve WMMA as a space for upcoming female fighters who move past old assumptions and grow through mixed martial arts. Riley does not dress her answers up. When losses come up, she says she gets back to it and tries not to dwell. She wants to win, of course, but she also treats the sport as a place to grow, learn, and take in new things. It is a simple answer, and it lands because it sounds lived in. She can cry in the locker room, then suck it up and keep going. Shelley stays there for a minute. She pushes against the joke that there is no crying in MMA, and says men and women cry in the sport. Then she tells a gym story about a woman who would cry after hard training because the work was intense and that was how the pressure came out. Shelley remembers men in the gym reading those tears as proof the fighter was not ready. Her point is gentler than that. The tears were effort, anger, pressure, and release from someone who wanted to fight. The episode circles back to Boston at the end, with Shelley pointing listeners to reviews, podcast platforms, YouTube, the website, Facebook, and Riley's Friday night fight in Boston against Julie Dommy from Germany.

As heard by us

A warm fight-week conversation that treats resilience as part of the sport.

The episode stays with Invicta FC 54 in Boston and uses that setting to explore what loss can do, how fighters find their footing again, and how emotion surfaces in MMA training.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want fight-week talk with real gym-room honesty, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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