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Blog 19
04 Jul 2010 10:43PM
So after 8 weeks of training, and 3 weeks of dieting I was already to go (bar cutting about another 2kg of water) for my fight with Leigh Remedious at Knuckleup. Picture the scene, I stopped training after hammering myself for weeks and been really tight with my diet, I had literally no carbs for 20 days and had been living on 4 tiny little protein based meals a day, I've not ate or drank anything in 8 hours and I've got another 17 hours to go until the weigh in, I'm lying asleep in the back room at our gym, everyone knows its best to stay away from me as I'm a grumpy fucker. Some where in the distance my phone is ringing bringing me out of a dream about peanut butter sandwiches, by the time I reach it, its rung out. When I see its Matt from Knuckleup, the promoter of the show, nothing bad crosses my mind, I'm sure Leigh is going to turn up, the guys a professional. Then I phone back and I can tell straight away stuffs not good. To cut a long story short the whole show called cancelled, for reasons I'm not going to go into. First I feel sorry for the promoters, must have been a nightmare for them putting work into something and then having to make the decision the night before to cancel it entirely. Then I start to feel sorry for myself, all the work for nothing, all those rounds hitting stuff, wrestling, rolling, sparring, all the conditioning stuff that made me sore for days and dread going to the gym for nothing. Not to mention the money I lost holding back on work, and the shit I put Joanne through. This might have been the closest I've ever came to hating the sport. People started feeding me thinking that would make me feel better but even that didn't help.
I've not written a blog for a while as I'm still trying to get over losing 8 weeks of my life for nothing, sounds a little melodramatic but I needed some time out or I might have went mental. I decided that after I cornered Graham Turner at SFC I was gonna take nothing to do with MMA for a week to re-charge my battery's and hopefully start enjoying the sport again. Turns out a couple things happened at SFC which made me want to get straight back to training, My team mates Kieran Malone and Graham fought on the show and with out sounding bent they made me want to train and fight as soon as possible. I guess they inspired me, it wouldn't be the first time. Kieran made his pro debut against a tough guy in Dave Gilbraith and somehow drew after 2 rounds despite winning 7 minutes out of the 8 and finishing tired but with no damage compared to his opponent who was marked up and bleeding. There was some pressure on Graham as his opponent looked spectacular in his last fight and had put a video online talking about beating him and wanting to fight me. Graham put a bit of a one sided beat down on his opponent in one his best performances to date, I went away wanting to train after watching it.
I'm back in the gym with fights coming up August 28th in Manchester and then December 11th in Edinburgh. The August fight I'm still waiting on a name, the show Cage Contender announced their main event as Danny Mitchell v Gunnar Neilson, being on the same card as that fight is going to be awesome, expect big things from this promotion. The December fight is main event on Ian Freeman's Kudegra show against Vaughn Harvey, this should be a good fight, Vaughn has been on my radar for a while, I enjoy watching him fight and thought it was only a matter of time before he dropped to banatamweight after taking on so many big name guys at feather. December cant come soon enough.
Training wise I'm back on the devil weights with a horrible 6 week strength programme, still have a few cardio days out with the sport specific conditioning stuff I do in the gym, Striking wise I'm focusing on elbow and knee stuff along with thai clinch as it might be the weakest area of my stand up game, wrestling is my biggest priority in training just now as I've probably neglected it a bit in the past and really should take advantage of Kieran's coaching ability before he gets punch drunk like Paul.
Outside my own training I've got my coaching hat back on and spending time with our athletes, making sure they are developing at the right rate and in the right areas and I've scheduled a few seminars at some MMA and Thai gyms, looking forward to getting out and about again and working with different guys.
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