Training in Progress
I spent a week training under Sert, the guy who’s back is facing the camera and is wearing the multi-coloured boxing shorts. When I first began, I thought I was not going to last through the 10 training sessions that I had waiting for me.
Patong Boxing Gym is located a short distance away from Karon and Patong Beaches, but getting to either of the beaches would require an outlay of approximately 14 euros return, so I rarely made the trip to the more touristed parts. Phuket, of course, is famous for its nightlife and associated ladies, and lady boys. However, I never had the energy to make the trip to the nightclubs or go-go bars after training.
Even if I did have the energy, my legs were way too destroyed for any movement. On Session 1, I got a huge blister on my right feet, the kind that sneaks up on you and bursts before you even notice its presence. The one on my toe came not long after that but even though I could sense its impending arrival, I did not want the trivialities that were tiny injuries to impede my training. I used all the plasters I had brought, all 20 of them, on bandaging up both the blisters and the bleeding top parts of my foot which I chafed on the heavy sandbags I was kicking. I had to get something to tape up my feet, and so I limped into town and bought some electrical insulating tape. I always knew this tape (I knew it as black tape during my bomb disposal days) was versatile, but I never knew that it could insulate my feet from the roughness of the training ground! There was nothing really wrong with the ground, but because Muay Thai involves all kinds of twisting and turning on the balls of your feet and toes, the skin on my feet tore up very fast.
For the next five days this tape saved my training life. I would wake up really early, tape up my bleeding feet, limp to training, ignore the pain during training, limp back, remove the tape, shower, eat a heavy but extremely cheap meal, read/watch a movie and take an afternoon nap, and do exactly the same thing for the evening session. By midnight exhaustion would take me over, the kind of exhaustion that I had known in the army. The army was a lot tougher mentally, since you never knew when training would end, so while Muay Thai training was tiring, it felt like a good daily routine; wake up, train, eat, sleep, train, eat, sleep.
The only time I thought of skipping sessions was at the halfway point. By then, my feet were torn up and hurt really badly, my shins were bruised and swollen from finally getting the right contact on the bag and my knees were bruised from practising my kneeing technique and I started to feel some strain in my wrists from all the punching and jabbing. The day before though, I had seen videos of my trainer’s fight where he knocked out a guy with an elbow to the head. That, plus the fact that Bo, the matriarch of the boxing gym, took it upon herself to correct my stance and technique from seeing me practise wrongly, made me have second thoughts. Bo was amazing. She was fluent in hokkien, so I managed to communicate much more with her than I could in english. We were chatting away, and in one of our conversations she offered to buy me Thai glutinous rice with fried chicken after training! That didn’t happen, because the little food-cart/motorcycle didn’t come, but it motivated me enough to train through the pain and before I knew it, my time at the gym was over.
All the trainers at the gym were amazing, having at least 2000 professional fights among them. The pictures of my training were taken during kneeing practise, since I can’t knee very well, but the kicking and sparring were the really tough ones. If I didn’t execute the right technique, I’d be taken down, and in sparring, I was getting boxed in the face if I didn’t keep my head protected enough. Sert was just messing around without any effort, but I was on the ground or getting boxed way too often! As the pictures tell, the trainers are much more muscled than me, and that is motivating me to work out more. Already I have gained 2 kgs of mass (though whether it is from overindulging during Chinese New Year or from working out is debatable), and I hope to gain a few more, in case I ever get the chance to fight at a higher level.
Most of the trainees at the gym stayed for at least a month, and you could tell by the way none of them had taped up feet. Their feet were toughened by the continuous abrasion, the skin that got ripped off replaced by a glossy layer of smooth, friction-less shell-skin. I wish I could have stayed for a few months there! I am sure that I could fight much better, and had I gained a few more kilos of mass, I would even want to fight in the ring! Such a simple, settled life that focused on getting through the next day’s training was just what I needed to shake the rust off my bones, body and mind.
Even my injured knee held up well! My left leg is much weaker than my right leg but since I was practising mostly on my left leg, I think the increased balance and strength that I gained in my left leg was good. Right now though, a week later, my knee is hurting like hell, probablu due to overexertion. I don’t dare to go for practice runs to prepare for my army run, but I’ll just have to see on the day itself whether I can grit my teeth and bear through 2.4 km of pain fast enough for a nice monetary award.
