there's a fight night every friday in patong, on sundays quite often as well, sometimes mondays and wednesdays. i've been to seven or eight of them so far but tonight's was special. it was a fight night put on by sinbi gym, so five of the ten fights were with sinbi fighters. it was great to watch; there's always a large group of people from sinbi who go to watch the fights, but with so many sinbi fighters on the card, the sinbi section was absolutely packed.

i got there about twenty minutes late and i had already missed three fights ! all first and second round knockouts, two for sinbi fighters. everyone was in good spirits because of this, naturally, but there was a definite nervous energy because there were still three more fights for sinbi to go.

watching a teammate lose is depressing and draining in a way that is untranslatable, particularly if you've sparred with them or grown close to them. last week, the main event was a guy from the gym named shane, a big, well-liked 240lb fellow. he was fighting another big guy, and right from the start it was a hard-fought war. shane's opponent was landing some good punches, but shane was going to work on the guy's lead leg with kicks that were adding up. shane was dropped in the second round but showed a ton of heart getting back to his feet and fighting into the third, and even looked like he was starting to out-work his opponent when he landed a punch awkwardly and injured his shoulder. i don't even know the guy well and it was incredibly deflating; you want your teammates to win so badly, especially in the brotherhood of shared hard effort. watching someone work so hard but come up short is ugly stuff and i can only imagine how much more difficult it was for the people actually close to him.

i've sparred with the three guys who still had fights to come; kion, who i don't know well but enjoyed working with and respected a good deal, brendan, a thoughtful australian who's laid back and very friendly but with a piercing scrutiny who works very hard, and oron. the idea of any of watching any of these guys lose makes my stomach twist uncomfortably, but they're all talented guys and i'm confident in all three of them.

brendan's fight is first. he fights a thai man who abuses brendan's leg with kicks; brendan wades through them for the first round and a half, then lands a fight-ending flurry of punches. i'm excited and relieved to see him win; brendan's a good dude and he worked hard for this.

oron's fight is a very thai affair; slow, technical and patient. oron slides into the pocket smoothly to throw more hand combinations than one usually sees from a thai fighter, but he is also active enough with his legs and lands good knees from the clinch that the judges won't penalize him (they don't like boxing !). his opponent is overmatched the entire fight and never really mounts much of an offense, and oron doesn't abuse him for it. oron takes a one-sided decision and the cheers are loud and delighted for the much-beloved trainer.



the next fight features nobody from sinbi but is easily the best fight i've seen at bangla so far; an absolute tooth and nail battle that more than anything is a display of tenacity and heart. the technique is just magnificent and they are throwing counters to counters to counters. the level of skill on display from both fighters is immeasurable and the crowd appreciates the performance with waves of applause and shouting. neither man hits the floor despite the absolutely vicious nature of the contest, and while one man was declared the winner it would be absolutely backward to call the other a loser.

kion enters the ring and prepares to fight the last fight of the night. his opponent is a brit; he's relaxed and composed. traditionally the last fight of the night at these events is a squash match where one opponent grossly outmatches the other and is just putting in some ring time.

this was not the case here. from the opening bell it is a case of kion's aggressive boxing vs. the movement & heavy kicks of the brit. kion eats a number of leg kicks and mostly defends himself with smiles and nods at his opponent. he's definitely game but solidly outpointed in the first round.

in the second his boxing begins to get a little wild; lots of power but less tight. the brit uses the clinch a lot and lands some good elbows. near the end of the frame kion eats a vicious shot and his legs go stiff, he takes a couple of awkward steps but manages to stay vertical, covering up well as his opponent attempts to capitalize.

kion's survival gets everyone in the crowd going and the excitement in our section becomes a physical thing; heavy and electric like the air here gets in an afternoon thunderstorm. at the start of the third kion presses forward relentlessly and his heart for battle is incredibly inspiring. he wears down his opponent landing good strikes and beginning to out-muscle him in the clinch. the brit is staggered and kion throws him to the mat where the referee waves off the fight. i've never felt the level of infectious enthusiasm sinbi showed as its fighters went undefeated, showing both technique and incredible heart.

back to training today. i'll probably spend the next week or so not throwing any kicks and not sparring because my movement is severely compromised (i can't be on the balls of my feet, which is where i spend all my on my feet time normally). can't wait to get back to running and sparring; i've got a lot on my mind that i need to work on; running's when i think about it best and sparring is the laboratory.

i want to tell you that i'm strong enough to not go have pizza again tonight but i also don't want to lie to you, which leaves us at something of an impasse. does it make a difference if i tell you how good this pizza place is ? because it's fucking awesome. they don't even charge me for extra toppings ! "would you mind if i got some pineapple on that ?" no prooooooblem !

so anyways i guess i just won't tell you what i'm doing for dinner for the third time this week so i don't have to lie to you.

worked with oron this morning but my foot was prohibiting sparring so i mostly did boxing pad work. afterward i went to the doctor, foot is not broken which is a huge relief, i just have a bad sprain in the joint between the second metatarsal and some other bone. the doctor gave me some celebrex for inflammation and told me to stay off it, so i'm staying off it as much as possible (ie. not training for the next little while, which of course sucks but injuries have to be expected and could be a lot worse).

i rented a scooter finally, which i've been sort of putting off doing due to a combination of the intense nature of the streets here, my general unfamiliarity with driving in the first place, and my specific total lack of knowledge on motorcycles. but considering a taxi to the hospital was going to cost me at least $30, and renting a scooter for a month cost a little over $100 and it's causing me considerable pain to walk anywhere, i figured it was time to man up.

and holy fuck these things are so goddamned fun. the first five or so minutes of getting used to the accelerator, steering, braking etc was frustrating but once i got it, i announced, "hey these quiet roads are totally easy to drive on let's go try the highway." to no one in particular, and no one suggested, "hey maybe the highway in a country where they don't seem to have road law isn't the best place for someone who has never ridden a scooter before." and i damn sure wasn't going to say it.

i took a gander at google for the directions and at first i was like hey no proooooblem. but then i took a closer look (here, go do the same: zoom in and follow the path on this map) and noticed that a number of the streets off the highway had the same number running in different directions-- sometimes the highyway split off at right angles with both keeping the same number, or once there were two streets running parallel off a roundabout again with the same number.

"welp," i figured aloud, and put on my stupid helmet and loaded the map into my ipod while i was still close to internet access. i figured if i got off track i could take a look and know which road i would want to get back to and even if there's multiple roads numbered the same thing, there's only going to be so many with that number. i'm bound to get where i'm going eventually

"welp," i reasoned further, and hopped on my bike.

the good thing about there being no law on the roads here is that you can totally suck at driving and there's still someone doing something way worse than you. i saw one woman on her bike, talking on her cellular phone, and every once in a while cradling her phone with her shoulder while she drank a fancy coffee smoothie thing. and she was smoking. i actually don't know how she was operating the vehicle. not mentally, i mean she clearly wasn't doing that, but i mean physically i don't understand what on earth was keeping the thing moving forward. up until that point i was concerned about keeping a steady velocity and not swerving too much-- after that i figured if i was going to die, it probably wasn't going to be my fault so much as some pre-teen playing a gameboy and driving with his feet cutting off a truck overloaded with a football team and spilling on top of me while i'm checking to make sure my lights are on.

so i get to that round-about and there's like fifteen streets off it instead of the five on the map. and none of them are labeled with numbers, only "patong", "promethep cape", things i didn't look at when i looked at the map.

"oh i'll just check my ipod while in the middle of this roundabout going 60km/h," i mentally ridicule my planning, then think about how that would not be out of place at all on these streets and laugh to myself. i end up taking a street that's approximately the direction i think i want to go and get to my destination, really without incident. i'm flooded with my first flush of driver's cockiness, credit the years of racing video games for my success, accept an imagination bouquet of flowers and start to swagger to the winner's circle emergency room until my mangled foot almost spills me flat on my face.

fucked up my foot although i'm not sure when exactly. probably an accumulation of kicks landing on elbows and knees finally leading to limping and now missing classes. i did all my classes this week, worked with oron yesterday morning, then ended up throwing up all last night again. felt better this morning, not nauseous but a little underslept and generally weak. didn't train today (i usually only do one class on thursdays anyway so it's not a big deal) and i'm having a lot of trouble walking. i called my insurance company about going to the hospital for x-rays and they were very evasive over whether or not they would cover the costs. fuck it, i'll go tomorrow anyway. not looking forward to dealing with an injury at all but i guess it has got to be expected when you're flinging your body parts around hundreds of times a day for weeks on end.

clinched with some aussie dude today, focused not on how to fix his mistakes but how i should capitalize on them. i tried not to just overwhelm him because i clearly had the advantage, but instead experimented with a lot of the techniques i've been shown for clinching. some worked well for me but others that have been working did not work so well.

first thing he said to me was "so yowah tha BJJ goy."

"i roll once in a while," i replied, sort of confused. i've grappled with a couple of guys here, but only briefly. how come they aren't tha BJJ goy ?

anyway, we went sort of hard but not viciously hard. his girlfriend was watching the whole time which was sort of strange-- made me wonder how stressful that is for both of them, particularly when he's getting molested.

pot was refereeing and every time i got an advantageous grip he would break us and then give me a devilish "yeah that's right" grin. these motherfuckers are all so playful and fun to train with that you really can't get mad at them, even though they're constantly being dicks.

i'm so frequently impressed and inspired by the people around me, both the trainers and those training. there are so many people training, and training hard through fatigue, injury, heat, frustration and a multitude of other blocks that it just forces me to elevate myself out of some mix of desire and pride (and a dash of inertia).

i've decided i'm not going to gas out anymore training and today was the first day in the experiment-- it actually seemed to go really well. just remembering to breathe, not throwing every fucking single strike as a KO punch, and trying to stay relaxed. sparring went so smoothly, counters came easier, the guy i was sparring with gassed after one round while i was staring at ann waiting for him to start the shit back up.

just had my first fanta. i wondered why fanta is so popular here, with fanta being much easier to find than any other soft drink. a brief perusal of the ol wikipedia shed some light on things:
"As common in the south east part of Asia, the sugar content of these flavours are exceptionally much higher than in the rest of the world, giving the drinks a quite different taste compared to similar flavours around the rest of the world. Red Fanta has been officially endorsed by the King of Thailand as one of his preferred drinks. Consequently, glasses and open bottles of red Fanta are often seen as offerings on the small Buddhist altars displayed by every Thai home and shop."

it was very green, and it's called nam quiew which further according to wiki translates as "green water" and is cream soda flavoured (although according to my face no it isn't). the first gulp left a miserable aftertaste, but subsequent gulps convinced me that the stuff was actually pretty tasty (ie. sugary as fuck).

i drink so much liquid here it's sort of shocking. i didn't train today (sunday) and i put back at least 4L of water, as well as the aforementioned fanta, a mango smoothie, probably about a litre of milk, and a gatorade.

oh ! gatorade here comes in only 500mL bottles and only in two flavours: lemon lime, and grape. no orange, no fruit punch, no mosh, no core, no joke. i offered oron a drink of my gatorade when he was looking at it particularly longingly one day, and he took that to mean that all future gatorade concerns belong to him and he slaps me on the shoulder and shouts "NO !" when i drink more than him. also if i don't produce the gatorade in a timely fashion, he will happily and shamelessly root through my bag insisting "yellow !" the entire time (responding to me saying, "it's in there." with both demands of "yellow !" and follow-up queries of "...yellow ?") until he finds it. one day i made the mistake of bringing a grape gatorade and he was positively inconsolable. i think i deeply tested the thai patience that day.

"yellow ?" he was asking into my bag as i wrapped my hands.

"there's one in there. might be a grape actually."

his eyes went wide and his digging took on an edge of concern (it was actually panic but he would deny that it was panic so we'll call it concern). upon finding the bottle, disappointment, frustration and disgust mingled across his face. "no yellow." he asked rhetorically.

"nah, they just had grape at the 7-11."

oron shut his eyes to gather himself, tapped his foot, the fist not holding the detested bottle firmly planted into his hip. he looked skyward, then left, then at my feet. everywhere but my eyes until i snickered at his not-so-carefully concealed anger. the disbelief in his eyes was sharp, like superman using heat vision to burn a hole in a lake because it had the wrong flavour of fish in it.

"ok," said oron, shaking the bottle at me, "i no like. grape, i no like."

"hahahaha tough it out princess," i say to him. he doesn't understand my words, but i think he gets the scorn in my tone because he kicks me in the ass hard enough that i yelp "hey !!" at him.

"GRAPE I NO LIKE !" he yells back, and kicks me again as i laugh and try (but fail) to dodge. "ONLY YELLOW ONLY !" he dropped the bottle on my bag and went into the field in search of a stick.

he found one.

pulled out the question mark kick sparring with senchai today. he smiled and his eyes registered something a few steps below surprise and then he punished my legs. his catch and sweeps are magnificent, somehow leaving me sailing down from about six feet high. he goes to touch gloves as i get up, pulls back at the last second and drives home another leg kick. i try to check them but the guy is like lightning if lightning were five or six times faster and targeted your leg and instead of thunder the skies echoed with calls of "OH AYYY !"

i'm facing a strange mental situation where i'm so used to going slow and training for the benefit of others as training partners that getting used to being selfish and being okay with others being selfish in their training has been hard mental work. sparring here with a few of the other falang means a fight a lot of the time. it's not just a matter of being okay with getting hit, it's a matter of getting your game ready and going to war. it's not a place for experimentation with technique. i'm not used to that.

on the other hand, sparring with the trainers is a lot of fun. they hit you hard but they never go in to take your head off, and they have a keen awareness of your abilities. i've been hit by hard kicks, hard knees and hard punches from a number of trainers, but they were almost all because of my mistakes.

i apologized to the guy who kicked my balls that i treated badly. he took it well, then tried to take my head off sparring again. it's fine-- i shouldn't expect other people paying to train to have the best interests of some dude in mind; they're just trying to get as good as they can and that's the way they feel is best. if i don't like it i don't have to spar with them. and i want to spar with them.

was sparring with some dude today. he kept going full speed and the trainers kept telling him to slow down. "ok right ok" he'd say, and i'd throw light and slow, and then OH SHIT he's throwing haymakers at me, driving full power leg kicks and is jumpy like cracked out motherfuckers. "slow down, relax..." bam, leg kick to the balls. in spite of the cup it definitely registers. i take a minute to make some adjustments to my testicles and go back to sparring. this guy's seriously trying to take my fucking head off. "alright, all in." i figure, and launch a hard straight to his body and come up with a hook to his head. he tries to clinch after i land but i circle right and throw a rear cross with my right that lands behind his ear. i take a boxing stance and walk through his leg kicks to land better power with my hands, then BAM kick right up the middle into my balls. i fucking crumple and try not to throw up. the trainers all try to be polite about it to the guy when he's apologetic, but when he comes and pats me on the head i push it off and tell (whimper at) him to get fucked.

goddamn it, temper again. i forget that the thai culture has no respect for anger; they only respect being polite. it's just weird and embarrassing to them when someone gets angry.

it takes me a while to get to the point where i can stand. douchebag is sparring with one of the trainers who tells him after every combination "ah, slow, slow..."

eventually i spar with oron for a bit, working against waves of nausea and his superior technique. we go a few rounds (he manages to not kick me in the nuts and i return the favour), and then senchai asks if i want to spar a bit.

fuck yes. light me up dude.

he obliges. he's so fucking fast and sees almost everything i do. his counters are perfect; my boxing defense is usually pretty okay but he makes me feel like i don't even have arms. his movement is impeccable. i land a few jabs and feel like the fucking champ of the world but he's just cataloguing, analyzing, waiting. he starts countering off my jab, making me tentative to throw it even though my hands are really my only weapon. what the fuck am i supposed to do, kick this guy ? haha.

fuck it, i kick him. it lands. "oh, heyyy," he announces, and his eyes light up at how unexpected it is. i land a grand total of zero more while he continues landing on me. any time i throw to his body he catches it and immediately hammerfists the quad. it doesn't hurt but we both know those are actually elbows in the real world and that they in fact hurt quite a lot.

we spar a couple of rounds, he dominates me everywhere, but afterward he tells me i have great technique. i'm sure it's what he says to all the boys but i still feel like a fucking champ again. thanks senchai.

douchebag comes over to apologize again and i tell him he's an asshole in spite of trying my absolute hardest not to. that doesn't go so well. thanks a lot, temper.

this trip has been great for understanding where i am, what i'm good at, what i need to work on and most of all who i am when it comes to fighting and who i want to be. how i move, how i want to move, what i see, what i do, what i feel. all of this is malleable and must be put through the fire of judgment and go under the hammer of refinement. i have so much time to focus on fighting; thinking about fighting in addition to spending my day actually fighting.

i sparred twice today, which is what i desperately need. working the pads with oron in between, one of the old dudes came over to me and told me in the month he's been here he hasn't seen anyone as good as me at working the pads on boxing. that's great, but connecting with this shit on a moving, blocking opponent who doesn't want to be hit is something else entirely. particularly when they're also kicking you when you're punching them. i land some punches here and there but the importance of setting this shit up, of moving, of feinting, of changing things up has really been impressed upon me. i've been trying to work my movement more than anything but the footwork is so much different for muay thai than it is for boxing (and has to be depending on if you're basing your weight more on your lead or rear leg). i frequently use a much more dutch style of kickboxing and it just infuriates the trainers here, which is understandable. i have to remind myself i'm here to learn muay thai, not out-box people.

my clinching and boxing are both excellent relative to the other people here and based on trainer's feedback. none of them have tried to change anything about how i punch, and the clinching is all little details for better execution.

my kicking largely sucks. i feel like i'm on page one of my kicking 060 textbook going "uhhhhhhhhhh".

that's probably an exaggeration for effect but every trainer i work with wants to change something about how i kick. it's good, kicking is probably the single greatest element of muay thai in my eyes and the thing they do better than anybody so i want that correction, but i feel like i'm actually losing power in my kicks trying to do it the right way, which is incredibly frustrating. although not unexpected: it makes sense that i've gotten comfortable with how i kick and can kick with a relative amount of power even if my technique is ugly. learning a new style, of course i'm going to be awkward and uncomfortable with it until it's natural and i can swing it without muscling it.

however, currently my kicks suck and oron is still hitting me regularly with a stick. he found a bigger one recently.

i think i finally get question mark kicks ?! god, i hope so. they're definitely not perfect but they follow the mysterious path of the enigmatic question mark and land on faces, so,

oron wasn't around this morning so i worked with wang. he had me doing those repetitive kicks in brutal sets that left me gasping for breath, but he was complimentary of my technique so no beef.

yesterday working with oron, he was totally dissatisfied with my bag kneeing technique and ran out of the gym into the adjacent field and got a stick and brought it back and hit me with it when i fucked up (which was regularly). he giggled every time he did it too. i'm fairly certain that oron is at least part demon trickster; likely his granddad is half demon trickster and his granddad's dad was a full-blooded demon trickster that used one of the oldest tricks in the demon book to bang his great grandma when she was a gorgeous young thai princess. no one believed her that the demon came to her in a dream and impregnated her and she was therefore outcast, raising oron's grandfather in poverty while she worked three jobs etc etc and now oron hits students with sticks and laughs because it's simply in his blood. that's really the only conclusion i can come to using occam's razor.