Muay Thai Fight in Singapore

The Start

I recently went through a 10-week Muay Thai training camp leading up to a fight in January. It was going to be my first Muay Thai fight. I was prepared to leave it all in training and in the ring and the preparations reflected that. The training was arduous, consisting of blood, sweat and tears. But stepping into the ring for the first time was exciting and I felt like I could conquer any obstacle that presented itself. It was something tough but I would be tougher.

Maintaining The Mind

Training is not easy, you study tactics, strategy and willy ways of learning to hit and to get hit. Outside of sparing sessions, the rhythm of training is monotonous. Sessions consisted of daily runs, punching, kicking and kneeing a 100 times and another 100 times over. People would think we were training for a Muay Thai triathlon! All those hours were meant to push your body as hard as possible just to get an advantage over your opponent in a contest lasting less than 10 minutes.

However, something started to creep up on me in between training sessions. I began telling myself that I didn’t need to train or that I should just take a break. Losing a fight that didn’t mean anything to anyone wasn’t a big deal anyway. I began to realise that it wasn’t my body that felt the strain of training, it was my mind. I was making it easy for myself to quit. It was tough because none of what I was putting myself through was meant to be comfortable, natural, or fun but that was the point of training. I had to constantly retrain my thoughts, accept the negative voices (because those will be loud) and to tell myself to show up, to give myself zero reasons not to train.

One Week Out

But as life would have it, I didn’t even get to fight.

When I got the message about my opponent pulling out the week before the fight, I slumped. It was a disheartening moment but not because of the physical strain of training. It was the disappointment of not being able to step into the ring. It felt that the person telling myself to not go for training, that it was not worth the effort was right. In the end, it wasn’t worth the effort.

The Fight

In a Muay Thai bout, the fighter that displays better ‘balance’ is favoured. It isn’t a balance that means one can’t physically fall, but a balance with a holistic sense, yin and yang of mind and body. It is the balance in the constant movement of the mind, of going from no to yes, from the negative, to neutral, to positive and back to the negative, continuing again while focusing to not end on the negative.

In that sense, the fight did happen and I won.

In the end, the victory was in learning to embrace the suck, to know that I have practised the ability to navigate the mental traps I laid for myself. No matter how cliche it may sound, the training and the fight was never against the opponent but for me.