A Whole Other Level... Thursday, April 5

After several rounds, I seriously thought I was either going crazy or was perhaps running out of steam unlike other days.  My energy was dying and I was pretty much drowning in sweat.

And then I noticed Coach Arnold do something.

He held the round bell switch extra long, causing it to skip the break bell of one minute and jump right into another round.  Turns out I had gone for 4 or 5 minutes straight on the heavy bag, no rest.

And then, if that wasn't brutal enough, I called him out on that and then was called into the ring.

I had just enough time to catch my breath before stepping in with a two time Olympian boxer who insisted we'd "just spar".  No head gears, no mouth gaurds, and he a southpaw.  Like I had any real energy to compete with him, seriously, not to mention his skill is, well, Olympian level.  He smiled at me through out the few rounds and I wanted nothing more than to punch that smirk of his face.  It was hard to spar with him.  He has such a long reach and he always keeps his jab out so when I try to go in under it or step to the side, I'm forced to use my legs a lot more than usual so it was rough.  I stepped out of the ring, a few rounds later, with my legs feeling super heavy and on fire.

So much for wanting to just go in tonight and go through the motions of training.

I try to go in and really give it my undivided attention but I had had a long day of back-to-back meetings and had been out of the apartment since 8am.  Seven meetings and four coffees later, I was then trying to mustard up some energy to get myself to boxing.  I gave myself a solid 49 minutes of just leave-me-alone time on the couch with Balboa before heading out.  I knew that once I got there, got to the boxing club, I'd get a second wind of energy.  More often than not the hardest thing is just getting the motivation to get up and get to training.  Once I'm there though, I catch the energy of the coaches and people there so I'm good to go.  I definitely didn't expect tonight's training to go as such though nor did I expect training to be so intense or me to be able to handle such intensity tonight.  Good job me!!!