So that you don’t have to scroll through this post to the end ill give you the details at the start; I lost on a split decision. This means that we didn’t knock each other out nor were the judges unanimous in their scoring. In fact of the 3 judges one had me win and 2 had my opponent win the fight.

From my end things looked very mixed, I was balancing emotion, adrenaline, coaching advice and my own ring craft throughout each and every round of the 7 we fought. In the first round despite wanting to hold back a little I couldn’t help respond to her flurry of attack – my innate desire not to back down kicked in and I responded like for like. Neither of us would have been able to sustain this intensity for the remaining 6 rounds and my coach didn’t hesitate reminding me of this in my corner after that first round.

After that things were kind of blurry in my memory and its been a process of watching the video and speaking to friends and my coach to remind me of how things went. Essentially my opponent wanted to fight pushing forwards and in fact that is what the judges probably gave her the win for as it looks much more aggressive. I was fine fighting off the back foot and managed to maintain reasonable form doing so but with her controlling the fight in that manner I felt neither of  had enough skill to pull off any decent displays of showmanship. The fight became a scrappy power struggle where we were constantly being pulled apart as we held each other or tried to turn one another.

If an opponent is launching themselves at you and you grab them and try to turn them on the spot you can then continue to use the forwards momentum they have generated but to your gain as you will now be the one moving forwards. This is a nice technique when it works but can sometimes be tricky to pull off! Watching the video you can see I had it in my head to do that as well as grab her to avoid some kind of crazy overhead right punch she seemed to like employing which to me looked more like front crawl than boxing!

My kicks didn’t have the gusto in them that my punches did – testament to having spent much more time in the boxing gym than kick boxing which I only started again 6 months ago after a 9 year break – so I wasn’t surprised about that however much work to be done there…..

Strength and fitness wise I had no problems, that’s not to say I wasn’t totally wasted by the end but fighting through 7 rounds at that kind of intensity would get most people pretty tired. However along with plenty of post fight analysis and technical work I will of course improve my cardiovascular fitness and power. This year I hope to get another opportunity to fight for this title and of course I will still be running around trying to complete 13.1 miles in under 90mins!