{"id":7667,"date":"2014-07-13T06:47:32","date_gmt":"2014-07-13T12:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/?p=7667"},"modified":"2014-07-13T06:49:55","modified_gmt":"2014-07-13T12:49:55","slug":"fight-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/?p=7667","title":{"rendered":"Fight Time!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday- Weigh in day. I woke up, had a double espresso, gave that some “working time,” and stepped on the scale at 137.6 pounds. Weigh-ins were at 5:30, so I had all day to sweat off that couple of pounds and chill out until it was time to go. I decided that I’d throw on a few layers of clothes and go over to my parents’ house and mow their lawn for the while they’re out of town (they’ve got a huge yard and a baller zero-turn riding mower).
\nWhile I was out there sweating, my phone was blowing up with John and the dude who was the matchmaker for the fights trying to get in touch with me to tell me that my opponent- Toni Tallman, had reported in that she wasn’t going to make the 135 weight, and wanted to see if we could fight at 140 instead. Just to prove to myself that the cut to 135 was do-able, before I had a snack and some water, I went back home, cleaned up, and weighed again…<\/p>\n

\"scale\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Boom!<\/p>\n

Since I had 5 pounds to play with, I ate a couple of small snacks, drank a bottle of Gu Electrolyte Brew, and laid around until it was time to go. Just before I left, I weighed myself again, and was 138.6 pounds.\u00a0At weigh-ins, their janky beam scale said I was 135.5. Toni ended up weighing in at 142… meaning she was probably a full 10 pounds over our initial intended weight class.<\/p>\n

Whatever.<\/p>\n

Saturday, I watched Ryan and Matt race a local training series crit. Time seemed to move like cold honey all day, but eventually, it was time to get going to the fight venue…<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4716\"<\/a><\/p>\n

John and I settled in to a spot in the “blue corner” side of the locker room and, as the start time approached, he wrapped my hands up so we could start warming up.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4715\"\u00a0\"IMG_4717\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"IMG_4718\"<\/a>\u00a0\"IMG_4719\"<\/p>\n

I had occasional waves of nerves, but generally was pretty calm and focused.<\/p>\n

Fight time finally arrived…<\/p>\n

This is where things went all 6s and 7s. I totally cat 5’d it. The bell rung, and it’s like I forgot most of the things I’d learned about how to not get hit in the face. We squared off, I took a bunch of hard hits (maybe landed a couple of my own), then we were against the cage for a hot minute. I did get in a few body shots that felt awesome, but once we broke, it was back to taking hits to the face. About that time, I remembered that I had legs and landed a couple of leg kicks that felt solid, and, I saw a glimmer of that taking a bit of the hardness out of Toni’s punches, but, unfortunately, by then, I was so beaten up that I couldn’t take the incidental punches that’d make their way through even if I’d gotten my shit together and started to do what I’ve been practicing so hard in the past few months. I knew my nose was broken already, and my “live to fight another day” instinct was like, “dude, it’s time to GTFO,” so I verbally tapped out at just under 2 minutes in to the fight.<\/p>\n

Disappointed? A little. Discouraged? Nah.
\nJohn said to me just before the fight that I was about to learn so much<\/em> in the next few minutes. He was exactly right. I made lots of defensive mistakes. LOTS of them. I know exactly what they are, and the wild thing is, it’s all stuff that I’d planned to do that totally escaped me as soon as we threw the first punches. Learning the hard way x1000.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4720\"<\/a><\/p>\n

‘Tis but a flesh wound! I should heal up with some ice, ibuprofen, and time. I don’t have any symptoms of a concussion, and, other than a slight modification to the shape of my nose, nothing is permanently hurt.<\/p>\n

Ryan got the whole thing on iphone video, and I’ll try to get it uploaded to youtube today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday- Weigh in day. I woke up, had a double espresso, gave that some “working time,” and stepped on the scale at 137.6 pounds. Weigh-ins were at 5:30, so I had all day to sweat off that couple of pounds and chill out until it was time to go. I decided that I’d throw on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa8Uq-1ZF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7667"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7667"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7677,"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7667\/revisions\/7677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}