A day after we watched all-time craziest, longest and bloodiest eliminations in the history of MTV’s The Challenge, Derrick Kosinski recounted a request he had for someone on his flight back from a guest appearance as a “mercenary” on Vendettas.

He needed help getting his bags down from the overhead bins.

That’s how beat up he felt after going head to head with Joss Mooney in Tuesday’s episode, in what many Challenge fans will no doubt consider one of the all-time greatest battles.

Plus, he must have gotten some strange looks from fellow passengers given that he looked like he’d been in a bar fight.

“I couldn’t tell anyone what I did the night before,” Kosinski told For The Win on Wednesday during a phone interview, adding that he got in touch with Mooney for his Challenge Mania podcast and found out his opponent had the same problem on his flight and afterwards. “He couldn’t move the next day. Rolling out of bed was difficult, it took me three tries.”

Kosinski was brought in with three other big-name Challenge legends to battle with current Vendettas competitors, and the game of “Crazy 8” involved grabbing a ring away from your opponent. The bigger Mooney and scrappy Kosinski fought viciously before a mental error from Mooney delivered a win for the vet, but not before they had fought for some 90 minutes (about 84 more than what was shown on Tuesday’s episode).

Here’s the moment Kosinski triumphed, with Mooney thinking the pair had gone out of bounds, which would have led to another restart of the game. But play was still live and Kosinski finished with a victory:

Kosinski recounted the moment a cut opened above his eye, which meant a visit with medical personnel on site in Spain.

“In the middle of this match, I got busted open,” he said. “They sat me down, like it was a Rocky movie. They give you a water bottle. You’re bleeding, they’re stitching you up, they asking, ‘Can you still go?’ The medics are talking to you, producers are asking them if you can go.”

His response? He was absolutely fine to keep going, but when he walked back into the ring, he saw Mooney also getting medical attention for a biceps injury. That, coupled with hearing Mooney say “What are we doing, man?” mid-match led Kosinski to believe he had the mental upper hand.

Kosinski had been in attendance for the other all-time great “mercenary” moment in which C.T. Tamburello arrived on the set of The Challenge: Cutthroat and put Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio on his back.

But he thought his scrap with Mooney didn’t compare to Tamburello’s shocking display of athleticism, although when he learned he was flying to the set for just a couple of days, he wondered if it would.

“The CT-Johnny thing was such a magical moment. You go from your super savage competitor to the (trash) talker that people want to see beat,” he said. “It doesn’t compare as far as physical brutality, it doesn’t compare to how long we fought.”

And for those people out there who consider The Challenge a sport? Kosinski likened the “Crazy 8” melee to one.

“We hit another extreme in this sport, it’s that mano a mano grudge match that you won’t see unless you watch the UFC,” he said. “That was the closest thing we’ve had to a UFC that we’ve seen on The Challenge.”