Highlights of my Day... Saturday, November 29

1. Forgot to buy Mi Nam food yesterday and so today he had to “settle” for scrambled eggs and peanut butter on whole wheat bread… rough life, eh?!

2. While on route to training I was engulfed in a sudden snow flurry. It just instantly starting snowing. Massive flakes were flying down on me. It looked so pretty and so I stopped to enjoy it. I reached my arms up and opened my mouth to eat some, like a little kid. But then it hit me... this is Korea, and with that I spat out the flakes and continued on... hehehe.

3. Spent a good chunk of my day at the boxing club. I love Saturday training. It’s always so laid back and Junior Mint lets me pretty much run the whole show, allowing me to train at my own pace, letting me crank up my own tunes, and all he asks in return is that I help him out with hanging up the club’s laundry, which just means hanging a bunch of towels on the ring lines.

4. Today, however, Junior Mint and I had agreed to train together at 3pm. I was anticipating a sparring session but we ended up doing a much different exercise. Today we focused on some minor, but just as important, details with my game. With my hair now a bit longer, it’s always getting in my face thus causing me to blink a lot. Junior Mint thought he’d test out my nerves and force me not to blink by repeatedly pretending to punch me in the face. It was quite the strange exercise and a few times he actually did square me, but it was good. Next we worked on my leg work. By the end of our technical work, my right leg was throbbing from him repeatedly whacking it and my nose was a bit bruised.

5. On December 20th Junior Mint will be stepping back in the ring for a kind of “return of the great former champ” fight. He’s been training hard and was initially told to lose 14kgs… yikes!!! He’s been successful with losing 6kgs but with three weeks left to the fight, he still has 8kgs to lose… that’s 17.6lbs for those of you who don’t do kgs. It’s been said that losing 1kg (about 2lbs) is the healthy rate to lose in one week, but 8kgs in three weeks… ouch!!!

6. While training, I worked it out in my head. 8kgs in three weeks… that’s about 2.5kgs a week (2.67 to be exact)… 0.35kgs a day (just a little under a pound). It’s going to be hard but he can do it… he HAS to. Not making the weight on weigh-in day means shilling out a lot of cash to forfeit. Having said that though, it’s quite easy to drop your weight by 3kgs the day before weigh-in. The secret to that is that you train hard in the early morning wearing either layers or a sweat-jacket, the day before weigh-in, and then don’t eat OR drink until after weigh-in the next day. My weight drops about 1 to 1.5kgs everyday during training but it’s because of water weight. It’s definitely not a healthy method to go about it but in a crunch, trust me, MANY athletes do this, if not worse things, to desperately drop their weight.

7. My Japanese friend, Satoshi, came out to boxing today and so it was great catching up with him. He’s only in Korea for another two weeks but unfortunately I’ve been too wrapped up in my own things lately and so I haven’t seen much of him.

8. For the simple fact that I really don’t care to have my dating life more pried at than it already is, I’ve decided not to write about the date I had tonight. But I will say this… it was good. It was very good. My date isn’t such a mystery man though. He’s more or less a kind of celebrity, I guess you could say... hehehe. Most likely you know who he is. And with that, that’s all I’ll say about my date.

9. Ran into Newbie downtown while out with my date. He quit his job at my fitness club so that he could pursue his Taekwondo stuff. He was out in Japan for awhile, teaching Taekwondo but I wasn’t aware he was back. It was great running into him but I was a bit confused as to why his boys gave him props for talking to me considering I spoke in Korean and was on the arm of another man.

10. Running into some of my students when they were clearly drunk and I was on a date made for an interesting situation. I know drinking is a huge social thing here in Korea but what gets me is how people can drink until they literally pass out in their seats or puke. There’s apparently no cut-off in Korean bars and so if you’ve got the cash, they’ve got the drinks… that’s terrible. One of my students was walking and sleeping at the same time, quite the multi-tasking that I didn’t think possible.

QUESTION OF THE DAY...
What's your point?

QUOTE OF THE DAY...
Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain.
-- Author Unknown