As the story has it, one day I headed to the opposite side of the globe – the Flipside. I arrived in Korea February 16th, 2005 and thought I’d do a year, then leave. I was wrong. I stayed, launched my first company, Flipside Fitness, and then opened Korea's largest boxing club, Hulk's Boxing (now called Hulk's Club).

After 11.5yrs in Korea, I then picked up one day and returned to Toronto, Canada. But then I left again.

Now I live in the Philippines where I am the CEO and head coach of Empowered Clubhouse, the Philippines' first and only boxing clubhouse exclusively just for women. I also am the founder of the Lil' Sistas Project, CEO and designer of Slay Gear and Baa Baa Black Sheep .Ph.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Challenged by This Challenge... Saturday, July 14

Challenges in life can either make you better or bitter, motivate you or make you miserable, but the choice is always yours. 

Today I struggled with that choice.

I was simply scrolling through Facebook today when a particular picture caught my attention. It was of my should-have, could-have and would-have opponents. The caption under the picture noted she had won a fight so instead of trying to translate the comments below, to find out the full story, I simply went online and Googled her. As it turns out, she just recently had a fight which is pretty interesting because just recently she canceled our fight. She had personally reached out to me to express her sad story, claiming that she hardly had the means to train because she was busy with work and couldn't afford the money for training and time needed for it. I believed her story because it's sadly a common story here with fighters. Their fight money just isn't sustainable. So I took her story for what I believed was true, We exchanged encouraging words and that was that basically.

But today, when I saw that not only did she have a fight but she went out of the country to fight, wow. She couldn't afford the day off for weigh-in and fight but she can leave the country for a weekend or longer, say almost a week, for a fight?! Interesting.

I sat starring at the screen today, pissed beyond words and wanting nothing more than to be the Mean Girl, call her out and call out all those others who are either trying to feed me boxing BS here or are participating in the dirty politics of boxing here. 

Instead, I decided to go to the gym.  I knew that once those feel-good endorphins were flowing I'd be good to go.  One problem, getting my butt out the door and to the gym.  I was ready to go but then it decided to pour.  Then, once it stopped, I still was struggling to get out the door.  To tell you the truth, I think it took me a good couple of hours to get out the door and headed in the direction of my gym.  I was still so mad and frustrated walking to the gym.  So mad that I couldn't even force myself to run.  Instead, I grumbled and groaned as I walked, pondering to myself what snappy comeback or what sarcastically rude remark I could blast online about this all.
Finally arrived to the gym. 

Started with a few sets of abs.  Abs always get the endorphins flowing.

By the time I was finished my workout, I was over that whole BS win of hers.  One of my buddies from Elite boxing has swung by The Refined with his brother so I then had to race off to catch him before I left. 

Turns out I took out way too much frustration on the weights so running was brutally hard.  I could just imagine what all those passerbyers in their cars were thinking... "Who's that white penquin".  I was waddling like a penquin, seriously.  It was bad.

Arrived at The Refined looking now like a drenched white penquin and saw my friend.  He had seen my Facebook status update about the situation and by the time I had arrived, so had everyone else at the shop.  It was nice to hear their support and I'm always super appreciative of it but the fact of the matter is something has to give.  Playing by the rules and trying to be the "nice foreign boxer" isn't getting me any closer to fighting in the ring and instead it's leaving me wanting to fight this person and that person outside of the ring because the struggle is real.  

The fights I'm fighting to fight in the ring are exhausting me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

what is her name?