4 weeks to go

I’m getting closer to fighting now. It’s something I’m looking forward to, but maybe not for the normal reasons. I’m at home today looking after my son who has the chickenpox so I have some time to be introspective. If you’re not willing to be bored to tears, look away now. I don’t compete because I want to be a fighter. As I’ve said before, the sort of guy I want in my gym and on my fight team is not the sort of guy who just wants to fight, but someone who wants to compete. I think if a lot of the guys hadn’t found fighting, they’d be competing at something else- rugby, football, athletics. There are lots of guys who want to “foight” and I get one of them into my gym a month, and I lose the same guy usually within a month too because the realities of training, getting fitter and stronger and learning skills are opposed to the image he has in his head of fighting. So I don’t want them and usually they don’t have any real fight in them anyway. I don’t want to go all Rocky on it, or maybe even all Oprah, but real fighting is all about heart. If you can stick at something through the boring stuff, through the hard stuff and through the stuff that makes you want to cry, then you are a fighter. You’ll have that fight whether you’re a martial artist, a rugby player, a badminton player or a runner. Sure, you have to be tough but if you’re a cyclist and you do a mountain stage then you are tough. If you’re a rower and you can do 1500m pulling hard all the way in the water beyond all that pain then you are tough. The benefits of being a fighter transcend just climbing into a ring or a cage, and transcend the sports field. Who gives a damn about business decisions, meetings, job interviews, being let go from a job when you know you have the mental strength to carry you through? That’s what it’s all about for me. If I wasn’t fighting I’d be doing something physically and mentally challenging (Lots of people say I’m mentally challenged all the time).

That’s enough of that. Here’s some video of what I did yesterday. The first thing was a 150m shuttle run, repeated 10 times. 4 really easy and then 6 flat out with a 30 second recovery between intervals. I was WRECKED after these. So much so that I was totally unrecovered for this:

After that, two minutes rest and then into another 6 shuttles, this time with 45 second recoveries in the middle. So hard. At about the fifth I had nothing left. A bit of a better rest this time because it took a while to set up the Viper belt and the X Vest. Then I did this:

Nasty shit. 20lbs in the vest but it may as well have been 200lbs. It restricted my breathing, made the push ups much harder and having the Viper on the kicks was awful. That little bit of drag back made them really hard.
Then I finished up with another 6x 150m shuttle runs. Here was the penultimate one. I’m actually running as fast as I can. That might seem hard to believe since I look like I’m running at marathon pace, but there was literally nothing left in the legs at this stage.
I actually cannot believe how short my stride is, I look as though I’m on an invisible unicycle. At that stage I was so fatigued I just wanted it to be over. Denise came into the gym afterwards when I was still sitting recovering and I think she thought I had the flu or something. The nicest thing I can say about that session is that it’s over.