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Jonathan Gottschall felt stuck. He was 38 and making about $16,000 a year teaching English on contract at Washington & Jefferson, a small liberal arts college in Washington, Pa., just outside of Pittsburgh.

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Harvard was never going to call. And his students didn’t care; they never showed up at his weekly office hours. To pass the time, he would stare out the windows of the faculty lounge, searching for a new path in life.

Then one day there it was, right across the street: Mark Shrader’s Mixed Martial Arts Academy, a cage fighting gym.

“I could actually look out the window and see the guys in the cage, young guys, dancing and hitting and grappling and fighting,” Gottschall says.

“They were so alive in their world while I was rotting away in mine. I started having this fantasy in my head about getting up from my desk and joining them.”

Eventually, he did. His body is now shot through with tendinitis, and his neck aches from an unfortunate encounter with a 120-plus-kilo adversary. But he now knows how to choke another man unconscious or twist off their arm, if need be.