Of boxing and burning heat.
My Dad was a boxing fan. He didn’t like a lot of sports, but he did love boxing, and when I was a kid he sometimes took me to the Hobart City Hall where the “big” small town boxing and wrestling events were held, and so early on I fell prey to the weird fascination that boxing holds over so many people.
Those were the days when Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali were the kings. Every heavyweight title was televised and was big news, and so everyone, whether they liked boxing or not knew who held the current world heavyweight championship.
It’s all so different now of course. Back then the only global boxing organisations were the WBA and WBC, and it didn’t much matter because the holder of both world championships was invariably the same person, at least when you spoke of the heavyweights. But in the ‘80s and ‘90s the boxing world seemed to go mad. As the list of boxing champions grew – Tyson, Spinks, Holyfield, Lennox Lewis and so on, so did the number of boxing organisations grow, each with their own “world” championship title. First there was the IBF with their champ Larry Holmes head-hunted from the WBC. Then came the WBO and the IBO, both trying to change the rules and ratings methods of the sport. Their motives might have been good, but it quickly became all so very confusing. Boxing began to disappear off free-to-air television and keeping track of it all became too hard. Mike Tyson did his best to keep boxing in the headlines with jail time and acting roles, while George Foreman found his way back onto telly with constant ads for his fat-free grills. Of course, it only seemed to belittle boxing, and the endless parade of WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO champions began to look more like a cattle show than a glorious sporting world title. And so to my eyes, boxing sort of lost its way, and I lost interest.
Yesterday however, something very unusual happened that had me watching it again. For the first time an Australian won a world heavyweight boxing title. Blink though, and you might have missed it, for it was, by one commentators count, the fifth world heavyweight championship bout in just the last six months. And so the victory in the tenth round by Aussie boxer Lucas “Big Daddy” Browne over the more highly favoured and current WBA “regular” heavyweight champion Ruslan Chagaev made Australian boxing history. Mind you, if you were relying on the news media to find out about it, you had to skim past stories of a new species of octopus, and that of the appearance of packaged, ready-peeled oranges in U.S. supermarkets before you found the story about Browne’s historic win. The world of boxing, with its disparate “regular”, “super” and “undisputed” championship titles is so very, very different now, and I for one yearn for the simpler days. But then, those simpler days were (apparently) far from fair, which is why boxing became so fragmented and confusing. As Don King, the famous boxing promoter was fond of saying, in the world of boxing you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Talent alone won’t cut you a deal, my friend. Not even now.
The (very) tenuous link with my scheduled short easy run today was the self-talk and negotiation required with myself to do even this simple, six kilometre leg-loosener following on from Saturday’s long run. The compression skins had, it is true, done their job well and my legs were totally fine all day yesterday and again today. My feet however, were sore enough to leave me hobbling slightly. And this soreness was a little weird, because this wasn’t the usual kind of pain you can name, such as my old friend plantar fasciitis, an Achilles strain or my more common problem of late, arthritic metatarsal pain. No, this was pain on the tops of my feet, which is something I’ve never experienced before and don’t recall ever even hearing about really, certainly not as a running strain. I can only guess this was due to my new and different shoes and new orthotics combination perhaps. Maybe. Whatever caused it, is was somewhat uncomfortable.
On top of that, the weather here continues weirdly tropical: daily maximums around 30 Celsius with humidity around 90% and none of the usual relief in the form of evening storms. We’re now approaching the third week of this, with another relentless week of it still to come according to the weather boys. I mean, I’m not complaining really, it’s pretty good summery sort of weather, but combined with night shift it means just at the moment I’m left with only the hottest part of the day in which to run. Hence the necessary self-negotiation I mentioned a paragraph or so ago.
Luckily, or perhaps cunningly, I have written about this very problem only a handful of weeks ago. These are the very runs (the short, easy, recovery runs) which cause me so much grief, because they come at a very difficult time with the double whammy of hot weather and night shifts, but also because it is so damn easy to simply give them a miss. After all, they’re just short, easy runs of no great consequence in the greater scheme of things. This however is actually all the more reason to knuckle down and do the bastards, because otherwise I invariably slide down that fireman’s pole into the pit of languidness and the training schedule sidles off into the background where it lays ignored and undisturbed on a pile of cushions somewhere. And I grow fat and lazy again.
So, there was nothing else for it. Up and on with it was the call. And you know what? That short easy six kilometre jog turned out to be a real bastard after all. Exhaustion and hot weather take their toll on even the simplest of runs, and so it proved to be today. It was not fun, it was not easy and everything about it annoyed me. Which brings me neatly back to the boxing. Lucas Browne won the title, but he had a pretty ugly time of it. He was cut up and knocked down in the sixth round by Chagaev and seemed to struggle after that to get back into the bout. Then quite suddenly in the tenth he just seemed to get sick of it all. With less than a minute remaining in the round, he snapped out of the zone he was in and crunched the Uzbek with a solid, furious right straight out of hell. Chagaev stumbled just slightly allowing Browne enough of an opening to unleash a furious onslaught that had the defending champion on the ropes. Within seconds Chagaev had stopped fighting and was a mere punching bag for Browne before the referee rightly stepped in and stopped the bout before Browne killed the poor guy.
And that’s how I felt toward the end of my run. Fed up with the whole damn thing I just upped the pace to heart-stopping level and finished off the bastard and got the hell out of the ring.
Some days are just like that. I’m glad I did it, but I’m sure as hell glad it’s over.
As for the Track du jour, this is one I don’t think I’ve encountered before on a run. It’s actually a beauty, and whilst it gets played every so often in Chez MLCMM (off Led Zep's Presence album), I’d never considered it a running track before. I was wrong, it's a beauty! This live version is especially great, and given the ferocity with which I finished today's run, perhaps somewhat appropriately titled...
Long March Rocket
