I'm always entertained when new members walk into our club, gear up for training, do their stretching and skipping, and then think just like that they're going to be pro stars at boxing. I definitely admire their go-get-them attitude and eagerness to learn, I even envy and feel proud of their fresh beginner's excitement, but boxing is simply not that simple.
I remember when someone I knew asked me if I was able to give them a working visa so they could work for me and stay in Korea, after all I do have a legally registered business. I do have "visa power", if you want to call it that, but the visa requirements are different than that of say a public school. "Well, why don't I just get my boxing license", said this person who had never so much as even hit a sandbag before. And with that I rolled my eyes and thought to myself, "I rather deport you then help you out". It was such a slap in the face comment and though I was hoping he didn't mean it like that, it was such an insult.
My two most hated comments that people throw my way, comments they have come to be very annoyingly insulting...
"...But it's your job."
As if I don't get tired and want a day off "work" like the next person. If anything, I probably want to take a day off more than the average person BECAUSE it is my job. It's very mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting to keep up with the demands of sponsors and my coach, to stay consistent with training, and then to have to train a club worth of aspiring and hobby boxers. I don't even know when my next fight is but I always have to train as if I have a fight next month. I've been in pre-fight mode now for well over a year and a half, that's not easy. It's not easy at all. I'm by no means at the level I want to be so I feel all that more pressure to stay on top of my game and stay intense.
The more appropriate word would be "lifestyle" because a job is something that you clock out of at the end of a work day where as a lifestyle includes all aspects of your life. I can't simply hang up my handwraps and call it a day. My "job" as a professional boxer goes well beyond the training I do at the club. It's in what I eat and do with the rest of my day, like roadwork in the morning and sponsor meetings before the club hours start and even after the club finishes, what I do on my weekends, and so on. When I went on my honeymoon, I had to train and so did Snickers. Whether we were running on the beach, playing tennis or doing laps in the pool, we made sure we got in our daily exercise because we knew we had our coaches to face when we got back.
"You can eat anything because you workout hard."
Do you honestly think I got the athletic body and can push it to the levels I do because I eat potato chips and fast food?! Seriously, no. I don't eat junk food. I eat real food and not just because I want to but because I also have to. I come from a mother who was well overweight and a cute pudgy father, so skinny genetics weren't in my genetic pool. Moreover, do you know what it feels like to eat "fake food" and then be expected to go 12 rounds on the sandbag after the x-number of rounds of skippy and padwork?! Thankfully neither do I because I stick to the plan before me -- I eat clean so I can train mean. I am by no means where I want to be, don't get me wrong, but everyday I'm working on it.
A while back I saw a posting on ESPN.com, it was in reference to the top 60 hardest sports. Boxing ranked first [enter me grinning and thinking "take that hockey fans"]. I copy and pasted parts of the article below here and added in the chart of their top 15 most difficult sports.
We sized them up. We measured them, top to bottom. We've done our own Tale of the Tape, and we've come to a surprising conclusion. Pound for pound, the toughest sport in the world is . . .
Boxing.
The Sweet Science.
That's the sport that demands the most from the athletes who compete in it. It's harder than football, harder than baseball, harder than basketball, harder than hockey or soccer or cycling or skiing or fishing or billiards or any other of the 60 sports we rated.
But don't take our word for it. Take the word of our panel of experts, a group made up of sports scientists from the United States Olympic Committee, of academicians who study the science of muscles and movement, of a star two-sport athlete, and of journalists who spend their professional lives watching athletes succeed and fail.
They're the ones who told us that boxing is the most demanding sport -- and that fishing is the least demanding sport.
We identified 10 categories, or skills, that go into athleticism, and then asked our eight panelists to assign a number from 1 to 10 to the demands each sport makes of each of those 10 skills. By totalling and averaging their responses, we arrived at a degree-of-difficulty number for each sport on a 1 to 100 scale. That number places the difficulty of performing each sport in context with the other sports we rated.
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