This story on Ronda Rousey was originally published on Dec. 15, 2016. Rousey will be featured during a Women's History Month presentation on ESPN2 on Sunday at 8 a.m.

The cabin is about two hours outside of Los Angeles. Directions come in the form of a screenshot -- cell service is spotty up here, so it's best to have a backup.

Ronda Rousey's all bundled up when she answers the front door. She knows what this looks like. She's broken, right? She's been hiding out in a basement since her stunning loss to Holly Holm last November. Shattered in a million pieces. Listening to Adele and hissing in the dark. She smiles. It's fun to feed it sometimes.

"It's like I'm doing the chick version of growing a beard and living in a cave, you know?" Rousey says. "You remember when Batman goes off to this ninja place, then time lapses and you see he's grown this beard? My woman version of growing a beard was letting my highlights grow out and changing my number."

But this isn't some remote cabin at the end of a winding dirt road. This is a small mountain community. Her neighbors know who she is and what she is doing, but they don't bother her here.

On this crisp November morning, Rousey wears a hoodie and Ugg boots for the short walk from the cabin to the detached garage her longtime trainer Edmond Tarverdyan has turned into a dojo. Six days a week, twice a day, Rousey makes this trip to train for her comeback fight against Amanda Nunes on Dec. 30.

Sometimes, as she walks over, she'll stop at a small chicken coop.

"The chickens don't need me to entertain them," she says.

It's a joke. Sort of. Because damn, she really spent way too much energy trying to put on a show last time.

Back then, when she was undefeated, she'd spend hours and hours thinking of all the things she was expected to do to be successful: Sell the fight, build the women's division of the UFC, take photos with fans, pose on the red carpet. Tweet, Facebook, Instagram. Entertain. She'd stew and swirl all night until an alarm clock would sound way too early.

Now she just wakes up whenever the sun bursts into the back bedroom of the cabin.

"That loss saved me from becoming what I hate," she says. "One of those people who live their lives to impress everyone else. Who put up a front for the world to admire. Who make sure every charitable act is posted and shared for their own image gain. Who posture and pose for people they care nothing about except for the opinion they have of them."

This year, this space she's created for herself is for one purpose.

"I'm just getting my life back," she says.

She always used to spend a few weeks up in the mountains during training camp. That was the plan last year before the Holm fight, as she and Tarverdyan scheduled out her typical two-month fight-prep routine.

But then the January 2016 fight was moved up to November 2015 after UFC 193 headliner Robbie Lawler injured his thumb. UFC president Dana White needed someone with enough star power to replace him for what became the largest crowd in attendance at a UFC fight in history, at the 55,000-seat Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, Australia.

The change in schedule meant Rousey and Tarverdyan had just 44 days for camp. It meant no cabin. But Rousey still said yes because saying no felt like admitting she couldn't do it.

"Ronda was basically like, 'What do you need? I got it,' " White says. "'And if anybody else turns something else down, I'll do what they were supposed to do too.' "

"I was just trying to make too many people happy," Rousey says. "But when I try and do favors and make everybody else happy, at the end of the day, they walk away happy and I'm the one who has to deal with the depression. All the pay-per-views in the world, all the money in the world, it means f---ing nothing to me because I lost."

She's had a year to think about all the things that went wrong in that loss. She remembers how weak and dehydrated her body felt from an excruciating weight cut. Afterward, Tarverdyan had doctors analyze her body chemistry with blood and hair samples. Her cortisol levels were off the charts. But all those are symptoms of a simple truth that looks so obvious in retrospect.

She just should've said, "No."

Rousey still cries sometimes as she relives details from the fight. It's painful and embarrassing. But she is the one who kept saying yes to everything. She left herself vulnerable going into the fight, and Holm made her pay. Rousey's got to own that.

It's easy to fall back down that shame spiral, but that's not productive anymore. Now she has to train and feel strong again. To remember why she fights. That was the point of coming up to this cabin. Having a physical boundary is essential for someone who has trouble setting any limits on herself. It's a way of compartmentalizing.

The other night, for instance, she painted a scene of pine trees on top of a snowy mountain. The trees in the center of the mountain cast a long shadow. Maybe twice as long as the height of the trees themselves. It could be seen as an artistic expression of the weight she's been carrying around all year. Long shadows, fallen trees, distorted perspective.

"Nope," she says. "It's paint by numbers. I'm going to paint more trees on the side of the mountain. It won't look that way when I'm done."

It's cold in the dojo when she enters. Rousey stretches while a space heater warms the room.

"Keep the door closed," she says as Tarverdyan walks in. "Don't let the heat get out."

Rousey slides her legs up and back on a foam roller, breaking up the stiffness in her hamstrings and quadriceps. Then she grabs a long wooden staff and twirls and twists it through a series of poses that look like an action sequence in a Bruce Lee movie.

This summer she had surgery to get her knee into better shape. She can throw kicks and put weight on her leg when she steps back on it now.

But it's better. Not fixed. "My ACL is gone. My cartilage is gone," she says. "It's been gone. I don't even know when it left."

A year ago, it would have been shocking to hear her talk this way. But she's done pretending like things are fine when they're clearly not.

Tarverdyan comes over to start wrapping her hands. He's done this hundreds of times over the past few years. Each piece of tape and gauze has a message written on it, and after the workout, she'll crumple it into a ball. If they were back at her home gym in LA, she'd toss the ball over the wall of the Octagon cage. A little game to break up the monotony of training camp.

There are hundreds of balls of tape and hand wraps from over the years. Many say, "Retire Undefeated." During this training camp, she's writing a new slogan on her used wraps: "FTA." F--- Them All.

That includes rivals who try to get press for themselves by drawing her into faux fights on social media. Everyone who cheered that she lost. "Fans" who promise they won't tag her location in photos but violate the trust as soon as she's out of sight. "I'm being geotagged like a rhino," she says.

But her mom, a former judoka herself, keeps reminding her that her motivation has got to be more than "FTA."

"F -- everybody is not a good reason to fight," her mother, AnnMaria De Mars, told her. "I think that's stupid and bulls -- ."

De Mars has never been afraid to challenge her daughter. This time, her message to Ronda was simple: "You need something to fight for."