Today’s a bit of a big day in the whole Fighting For Ellie process, with weigh-ins and the submission of match-up choices at the gym tonight as well as tickets going on sale!
The last Fighting For Ellie event – the 3rd of its’ kind overall and the first outing of the partnership between Princess Ellie’s Trust and Millennium Martial Arts (hence it being christened ‘Season 1’ – was at Newsham Side Club, which is the 350-capacity home to the Punch-Drunk Blyth events. Tickets were to go on sale at Millennium at 5:00pm on a Friday evening and by 4:50pm the queue was so long – and it being September, everyone was waiting in the cold – that they started selling early and were sold out by 4:55!
This time around for Season 2, FFE is moving to Blyth Sports Centre which recently played host to the spectacular UK Comics Boxing: Fight For Kian and which can host a colossal 800 people. So this time the tickets might last half an hour or so!
Seriously though, I’ll be at the gym and can’t wait to see how fast 800 of these things go!
The Sports Centre venue is amazing if ever-so-slightly daunting! Fancy having your first ever fight in the middle of this set-up…
So it’s a very exciting day in the FFE: Season 2 build-up calendar – but I do wish it wasn’t coming at the end of a week in said calendar that’s looking decidedly blank…
The forever-good-intentions of getting into the gym during the Punch-Drunk run faded, as usual, into nothingness and coupling that with less than desirable eating habits over the last week and I’m hoping I’m not going to be weighing substantially heavier than I will be in 4 weeks’ time after engaging full beast-mode tonight.
I promise that the next time you see that calendar, there will be a lot more colour happening because not only am I getting steadily more terrified as the hours go by – but comparing how I feel today to how I felt last Friday is easily motivation enough to get right back into it.
So I’m off to make some eggs and try to resist sticking bacon on too, I’ll check back in on how tonight went down, or might see you down there!
I’ll warn you now, this will be the first of many, many of these… Eeeeeeeeek!
L xx
Tickets for Fighting For Ellie go on sale TONIGHT! (25th March) 5.30pm Millennium Martial Arts
Standard tickets are £25 each.
Ring side at table with waitress are £35 each or £400 for a table of 12.
UNFORTUNATELY TICKETS CAN NOT BE RESERVED
Fighting For Ellie takes place on 23rd April @Blyth Sports Centre – check the event page here for further details
So my first training update – as many of them are likely to be – is all about first time experiences.
This week so far I’ve done my first Pad-Smash session at Millennium (Monday night) and my first Hill Sprints up the very beautiful but utterly sadistic Bothal Bank (Tuesday morning).
Like seriously, my little Phoebe Fiat 500 doesn’t like dragging her arse up that thing and my little legs have substantially less horsepower than she does!
It was also very nearly my first instance of throwing up as a result of working out – something that it would appear is some sort of uber-grim rite of passage for any serious boxing trainee. So I’ll keep you posted on if and when I achieve that accolade. I might even take a picture for ya 😉
As it happened today I narrowly avoided a spewing incident – but it was a close run thing.
The thing about Hill Sprints (Yes I’m giving ‘Hill Sprints’ capital letters. You would too. If you don’t respect them, they’ll kill you) is that your head will keep telling you that you don’t need to stop long after your body has quietly come to the opposite conclusion. This is because just as the uphill sprint gets too much and everything’s screaming at you to stop, you do, returning to the bottom of the hill in what in comparison to the uphill part feels like (undoubtedly doesn’t look like but definitely feels like) a proverbial jog in the park.
So guess what. By the time the short window of time has passed that gets you back to the bottom, the uphill bit now somehow seems like a good idea again. Well not exactly a good one but certainly a not-terrible one. Do 7 of these though and if you’re anything like me your body will eventually ‘put it’s foot down’ and use the threat of impending vomiting to convince you that the uphill bit is very much not a good idea any more. Yes only 7. But we’re talking firsts, here!
On the plus side, the photo below shows Bothal, of Bothal Bank fame. So it’s not the worst of places to visit first thing in the morning, even if it is a bit rainy…
BOTHAL CASTLE, AT THE BOTTOM OF BOTHAL BANK
Yep, Northumberland’s quite nice.
Going back to the other first of the week – Pad-Smash at Millennium on Monday night came directly after I had (if I do say so myself) kicked a Fighting Fit circuit class in the dick. It was super-encouraging to go in there and kick its arse because the last twice that I’d been in, Fighting Fit (a high-intensity circuit class) had unquestionably kicked my arse. The only difference really being that this time I was very aware that I had only 6 weeks until Fighting For Ellie and needed to start training in earnest. So I decided I was going to smash Fighting Fit – and I did.
Now the significance of this lies in the fact that I’m relying very much for the success of this whole process on the belief that by the very virtue of deciding that I’m going to achieve something, I can achieve it. So naturally this small confirmation of the fact that deciding I’m going to do something is the key to accomplishing it, was very welcome indeed.
Directly following the 45-minute circuit class and with my “let’s do this” head firmly on, after a brief water-break as the class members changed over, we started to warm up for an hour’s class on pad-work. as I warmed up I thanked the sadistic workout Gods that it was ‘just’ pad-work and not sparring, because I was sodding knackered already.
Now you’ll notice that I put the “just” in inverted commas. This is because since having that thought on Monday night I’ve realised the error of my ways and won’t refer to the pad-work session as ‘just’ anything, ever again.
Now there are pros and cons to doing pad-work with Gav Humphries as your partner. The pros include that he’s bloody good at holding pads (which it turns out is actually harder than throwing good punches, or at least more confusing) and a good pad-holder makes for a good training session.
The cons are simple – when Gav repeatedly punches pads that you’re holding with the tiny hands on the end of your chicken-wrists for half of an hour-long session. It eventually gets to fucking hurt.
About 50 minutes in (so 95 minutes into my gym session all together) I asked Gav if we ever got to leave the gym again or if this was it. I mean I knew there was a second wind in there somewhere and that I’d finish the class but we did get to leave at some point, right? I needed to know there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
Thankfully it turned out we were allowed to leave. After a “burnout.” This turned out to consist of what felt like endless consecutive sets of straight punches, right & left hooks and upper cuts followed by burpees and press-ups. My self-consciousness about making a racket whilst throwing everything into a punch was very quickly wiped out. There was no way in hell I was finishing that without a peep! I managed it though and even managed to keep my face almost grimace-free while Gav took his turn at what felt like 7,000,000 punches. Then did star-jumps until everyone finished their own burnouts.
Let’s just say I left more than a little bit exhausted and after talking to a friend in the carpark for 20 minutes – very cold – as the once-warm sweat went cold on the back of my t-shirt.
I have to admit that I decided against a third first tonight by dipping out of the sparring class that I’d been considering. I’ve heard the sparring class at Millennium (where you make your way around the class practising sparring with as many different partners as possible) described as a shark-tank. And after watching one or two of them I can confirm that description to be terrifyingly accurate. But I’ve got to fight – that kind of being the point of this whole thing – so after a few more pad-work sessions and some practice at home over the next couple of weeks, I’ll have an undoubtedly hilarious account of my first sparring session for you.
This feels like leaving it a little bit late to get into those classes to be honest but with the Punch-Drunk gigs running Monday-Wednesday next week, Monday and Wednesday’s classes will be a no-go 😦
A little while ago I asked my Mam if I could raise some money for charity because I wanted to help people that don’t have as much money as us. So I asked Aunty Lauren if she wanted to help and she was very excited. Me, Mam and Aunty Lauren came up with a big list of ideas and we decided on two things to do. The first thing was a sponsored walk from Blyth beach to St. Mary’s lighthouse which was my Mam’s idea. We did our sponsored walk yesterday and we walked about 7 miles in very very strong wind! At one point it was so windy that we were nearly blown into the sea! Before we even started walking, in the carpark at Blyth beach, a man in a big DFS truck stopped and put some money in our bucket! We also already had £156 in sponsors on our JustGiving page before we did the walk! Everyone was really generous and they were all saying good luck and well done. The walk took us 1 hour and 45 minutes but that was with lots of toilet breaks at the pubs on the way! I also went to the public toilets next to the beach and they were ugly and horrible, but thats enough about the toilets! We had 10 grown ups and 5 children and the grown-ups complained more than the kids! My little cousin Jak is only 4 years old and he walked and ran the whole entire way! When we got there we had some food and drinks and we bought an ice-cream, even though some of the grown-ups thought this was crazy because it was so cold and windy! But it was fine because me and my Uncle Liam kept warm next to the van attached to the ice-cream van, at one time we were sitting inside the door of the van! A few more people had stopped to give us money on the way because we had made special t-shirts with red nose faces and the red nose logo on the front and a “please sponsor us” message on the back.” When we got back everyone was very tired but we were excited about how much money we had made. We counted and we were up to about £310. A family friend even knocked on the door a little while after we got back, to give us some money! My Aunty Lauren and Jade snuggled up on the settee and had a sleep, while me and Aunty Caitlin let Kenzie do our make-up. We made some tea and some cupcakes and then we had an early night to get ready for facepainting the next day. The second part of our fundraising was facepainting for children and grown ups at the Keel Row pub. Once we had picked Sophie up we went to the pub and at first we were locked our because they weren’t open yet! But we were let in early and we got a table and sat down to wait for my Mam to come with the facepaints and the rest of our posters and things. When my Mam got there we set up everything on the table and people were starting to come in. We painted each others faces first. I did a silly red nose face on Aunty Lauren and made her whole face bright red! I got one done too, by Sophie. It took a while for the first person to come and get their face done so we just had fun painting each others faces. The first person to come over was a little girl who got a butterfly just like me! After that some of the men came to get theirs done and that was really funny! One got a pirate and then the other one asked for a pirate but his friends were sneaky and asked us to do Kermit the Frog instead, so that’s what me and Soohie did! He was surprised when he looked in the mirror. Everyone was very very geberous and even though not many people got their faces done, we still made about £120! There are still some sponsors which people have not been able to pay yet so we do not know our final, final total but we counted everything tonight and we have made £427.58!!!!!!!!!! That is so much more than we were expecting when we set our first target of £50! I feel really happy that we have made so much. From one little idea that I had it has spread and spread with people sharing and sharing it, from our friends to their friends to their friends. Thank you very much everyone for sponsoring us. I’ve had a great weekend and I cant believe how much I’ve raised with everyones help. Thank you!
And thank you especially to my Mam for helping with everything and making sure we didn’t forget anything, so everything could be perfect!
The funniest part of the whole weekend was when my Dad let me paint his face as Raphael! I even painted his spiky hair (not that he has much)! Thank you everyone! Love Nicole Barnes xxx
laurend0uglass 