Training, Steve style

LORD O Lordy, it's hard to remember a time I felt this pole-axed. In fact, I'm not sure I ever have.

My legs are in absolute agony, and I'm hoping that the two tonnes of protein I took on after my first real training session at the Fight Club will sort them out by the morning. Tonight was also my first introduction to Robbo's new number two, Darren, who I'm beginning to suspect may be a closet sadist. In a nice sort of way, of course. Ahem.

A long, long warm-up kicked off proceedings tonight, perhaps 20 minutes or so. This was followed by a trip round the bags, a minute at a time, plus two skipping stations. Straightforward? Not when, in your minute rest in between, you have to do 12 burpees. Everybody has an exercise they hate. Until Tuesday, I thought it was press-ups. Now I know it's burpees. As well as the bags, Steve had a pad in the ring and Darren was on hand pads outside, and they motivated us to exhaustion in their own ways. That made it 12 stations in all.

Another session on all the bags and the rest came next, with 30 seconds on each punctuated with 20 sit-ups. I was on home territory here, until the final set, when I struggled around the 15 mark. Still, plenty to be pleased about.

Then we did all kinds of jumping from different positions. This pretty much killed us all off. When we were stretching at the end, I started to see black and dots around the edge of my vision.

But that makes it sound like it was a bad experience, when it was nothing of the sort. It was great to see some of my old mates from the other gym there, like Mike, Little John and Brandon, who reckoned afterwards that it had been the hardest session they'd had so far at the new Fight Club.

I was pretty pleased because I managed to do everything, and I was no more or no less tired than everyone else. It's an elusive business, this fitness lark. Since I've been back, I've found myself excelling at the sort of things I used to do badly, and struggling in what were once my areas of strength. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. But then, as my brother once said, it's wrong to look on the human body as a machine, one that responds to an oil change or a fresh tank of petrol. The best you can hope is that you follow all the rules, that you eat what's good for you (which is protein, in my case - I can feel the shake and the prawns I had afterwards at work repairing my aching leg muscles already), rest when you should, don't overcook it, but do enough to make sure you lose weight (in my case) and get fitter.

Next Tuesday presents an interesting conundrum for me. I haven't sparred for at least six months. Steve suggested afterwards that he put me in with Matt, if he's there. This is good and bad. Matt won't bang the shit out of me. This is a weight thing. If I fought guys my weight I'd be in real trouble, but Matt must ship at least three stone to me. However, as you probably know if you read my last blog, I've had a number of classic encounters with him, enough to know that he's like the Terminator: he never gives up and he can keep going long after I run out of steam.

So the question is whether I sit out sparring for a couple of weeks until I feel fitter, or whether I jump straight in with both feet. At the moment, I'm tending towards the latter. We do this because we want to fight. There's a unique and irreplaceable buzz at the heart of boxing that makes all the hours of training worthwhile, and it happens in the ring.

Your observations, opinions and comments would be greatly appreciated.