Now you just back off ... please!

Skulls are hard. Most people will never find out just how hard they are. The Wikipedia entry for the human skull says that it takes a force of one tone to reduce the diameter of a skull by 1 cm. As a boy, I would routinely bang my skull against hard surfaces and more than once used it to break a fall. It really is quite robust. With a good mouth guard and head gear, you really have nothing to fear from someone trying to hit you with 16 ounce gloves.

Just the same, I found getting punched hard in the face hugely distressing.

Nothing can prepare you for the real violence of an actual fight. Even the most intense sparring sessions don't get anywhere near it. So when I took a big shot in the opening seconds of the fight, my first thought was something like: 'What the Devil's happening here then!' This guy was fairdinkum trying to bash me up and I felt put out.

I know this doesn't make sense. I had, after all, spent over two month preparing to punch someone as hard as I could. I wasn't entitled to be shocked, let alone upset.

But my response was quite normal. Rory Miller, author of several books about violence reckons it takes 'multiple encounters to figure out what's going on and where you fit in the Looking-Glass world of violence.' The first times are very confusing. Miller again:

When humans go under extreme stress ... they get a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that greatly affect how they perceive, think and move

Yes. In fact, I think I remember the exact moment the cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters started to greatly affect me because I fell over. In my head it was all going horribly wrong.

The reality wasn't so bad.  I worked my jab enough to stay in the fight - just - and I've been told it was a decent enough contest up to the point he punched both contact lenses out of my eyes.

The loss of the first didn't bother me, not against the bother I felt at being killed in front of friends and family. I only realised the other had come out when I went to my corner at the end of the second round. Once my trainer knew, the fight was over. People involved in violent sports are paradoxically fanatical about safety.

In the days that followed, I put on a brave face, but I was really confused.

This wasn't my first violent encounter, but it was the longest, for sure -- I remember the panicked disbelief I felt in the opening seconds when it properly dawned that I would be stuck in this ridiculous situation for six minutes.

And it's clear I haven't had enough violent encounters to really know what's going on when they occur.

Like most people, I can be assertive in response to low level violence - manipulation, bullying, gossip, etc...  Being a bit assertive is maybe good enough for most of life, but as a boxing style, it's going to fall a bit short. I had developed a good survival tactic - good long jab, tight defense, keep moving out and around - but you have to be quite aggressive to win a fight.

Being assertive: 'No, you just stay down there until this is over.'

Finding this aggression, without getting cross, is the plan for the next fight, which probably won't come for another year. In the meantime, I'll keep training at Kick Tactics Newtown, the best boxing gym in the city if your interested in getting into this sport. And it's a truly wonderful sport, despite, or perhaps because of all the stressful violent aspects.

Now that I've bothered to set this thing up, I will continue to blog occasionally about boxing and other stuff. When I started it, I had planned to blog a lot more, but full-time work intruded once more because Sydney is a hard city to live in without regular money.  If anyone else has worked out how to do this, please write me.

White-collar, my arse!

I am a clerk. I have a long, inscrutable job title, but I am basically a clerk. You couldn't get much more white collar than me. I am not really very hard. My hands are soft like a muppet's hands and when someone bumps into me I apologise six times. In theory, white-collar boxing means I should fight someone a bit like me, but it turns out I will be fighting the guy in this picture below (I've copied it from the Facebook site promoting the event).

He is probably a highly paid IT consultant, but he looks pretty hard to me. Not because he has tats and isn't wearing a shirt - though that's pretty hard - it's because he looks like he's spent some portion of life not worrying about his head. I don't mean he's not handsome or anything, he just looks like he might have played rugby and possibly broken his nose a few times. This means he's more accepting of pain. And his head looks solidly joined too his body. I don't think mine is. I think my head would fall off first, if it was to come to that.

It won't come to that. Boxing is pretty safe. Well, not all boxing, but I think they stop these fights pretty quick if it gets ugly. And I've won the expectations game; no one will expect me to win, and if I lose, people will think I was brave just to get in the ring with him.

But that's about as good as it gets at the moment. This thing is totally out of control.

Fatliness

A person is made up of many things, but some of it is fat. Even very skinny people have some fat. Former NSW Premier and skinny person Bob Carr recently blogged that since giving up alcohol he had reduced his body fat from 19 to 13 per cent, 'measured by scanning.' According to the internet, that's about as much fat as a healthy male athlete has (women are allowed to have a bit more fat).

I've always suspected Bob Carr thinks alot about his fat - his blogg is called 'Thoughtliness'.  I'm not saying you should wait until you look like Manuel Uribe (below) before you give it some thought.  But I think the ranges Bob is talking about are pretty low, and probably not worth the stress. I also think some people conceal their misanthropic tendencies through fat-hate. Love the fatty, hate the fat? I don't buy it.

Above average levels: Mexico's Manuel Uribe

I have no basis in science for saying that. And perhaps when some of my alcoholic friends start getting diabetes and other fat sicknesses, I may take a more forensic approach to my own fat.

In the meantime, I am continuing with my long-standing approach to fat, which is to engage in periodic bursts of intensive, inappropriate, and potentially lethal exercise. It doesn't really work because I don't change my diet, but it does make me feel better about overeating.

I have lost some fat, training for this fight, but not as much as you'd expect. And at this age, having carried a bit of fat for a while, it comes off the body in a very uneven way, and you are not the old shape you remembered.  For example, I have quite a big arse, and it has stayed big while the rest of me has gotten a bit smaller. And there are other loose bits of fat that look like they've been stuck to me as an afterthought.

It doesn't really bother me. My training is going quite well.

Pie Eaters

Just under five weeks to go now. I signed up for this thing in August but they reckon 6 weeks is the optimum training time leading up to a fight, so long as you're not a pie-eater.  I was a bit of a pie-eater so I started training sort of hard a few weeks ago. I've been mucking about with pads and bags for a couple of years.

A 'pie-eater' is not a technical term, just short-hand for someone who is not in reasonable shape. So you can be pie-eater and only eat sausage-rolls. I got out of shape from eating different kinds of salty, meat things and alcohol.

I mention this because when I asked one of my trainers about my opponent he said they're not yet allowed to give details but that 'he won't be a pie eater.'  That's all I know about him. He has a reasonably balanced diet. They don't give away anymore information this far out because they want to be careful not to give either boxer the upper hand.

This means I am free to make up stuff about my opponent. I can then use this make-believe person as motivation to help me endure the unending drudgery that is boxing training.

Most sports are about beating someone else, or a group of other people. Some sports are very rough and physical. But because in boxing you really do have to punch someone else, it would seem obvious that you would want to punch someone who made you cross.

Maybe that works for some people. It isn't working for me. There are lots of people I'm cross with, but it seems I'm not cross with anyone enough to make me jog; a good learning, but not yet enough to make this experience rewarding.

There's a lot on the internet about the psychology of boxing. I've read this article, which takes the line that boxing is 99 per cent psychological. You can say things like this about boxing and everyone is fine with it.

Why is that?

You never hear rowers say, 'Rowing is 99 per cent psychological'. That's because most people would say, 'Nope, I think rowing is about 99 per cent rowing.'

But I think it's mostly because people know that boxing is actually 100 per cent fucking mental and the psychological dimensions are quite easy to grasp: you could get beat up in front of lots of people even though you wanted them to come and watch. All vanity and humiliation with fear the prime motivator. Proper boxers are meant to get a handle on it, but fear is the only thing really motivating me at the moment. I'm a bit spewing.

Because it's good for you

I'm going to fight a stranger in a charity boxing event on the 5th of November. This blog will chronicle the six weeks leading up to the fight, and perhaps some days following that. Mostly it will be about boxing. If you are not interested in boxing, something of interest might be revealed indirectly, sort of like the way Bible stories do. In most respects, it won't be like the Bible.

It's not quite the real thing, this fight, but at 38 it's about as close as I'll ever get. My opponent will be carefully selected to avoid a complete mismatch. He too must be a first timer and if he's younger than me, it can't be more than 5 years - I am 38. Beyond that, regular amateur boxing rules apply, the only difference being we fight for three rounds of 2 minutes instead of three rounds of 3 minutes.

I've been reluctant to call it 'White-Collar' boxing.  One reason is that there is no guarantee my opponent will have a white collar job, even though I do. So I feel I deserve some credit for accepting the risk that my opponent might spend his working days punching holes into concrete.

But the main reason is that, until recently, my gut reaction to white collar boxing was that it was for wankers; investment bankers and real estate agents punching the shit of each other to find their inner warrior.

It's natural to want to distance yourself from wankers, but I don't think that having superior reasons for doing something this dangerous makes one less of a wanker. And I don't really have a superior reason. I don't have a deeper than average interest in violence -- although the average interest seems pretty high.  If there's a deeper psychological impulse at work, as there surely is, then I'm not smart enough to write about it. So if I can get the 'why' out of the way up front, the reason why I'm doing this is pretty simple: Boxing is good for you.