Gone with the Wind

I have witnessed matches where the more skilled of the two boxers lost the match because they couldn't hang in for the three rounds. In one bout, the 13-year-old boxer in the blue corner was slightly more skilled and clearly dominated for the first round. Trouble is, the match went three. A half minute into the second round, blue showed signs of slowing down. Red ran circles around him, throwing scoring punches at will. Blue's breathing was labored. By the third round, he ran out of steam. "His get-up-and-go done got-up-and-went" to paraphrase nutrition segment of the ABC television series "Schoolhouse Rock" that were the staple of a generation of Saturday morning cartoons.

To the uninitiated, boxing three 1, 1.5, or 2 minute rounds seems easy. After all, they give you a whole minute in between rounds to catch your breath. At the lower age brackets, that means that you spend as much time resting as you do boxing. Yeah, right. Amateur boxing rules pair boxers by age, weight, and experience. Assuming that experience is the same for these pairings, the outcome of the match may come down to conditioning, that is, to the boxer has the better stamina.

Through contact made with this webpage, I correspond with a couple of different coaches. One of them from Great Britain asked how we approach conditioning in the United States. Did we incorporate it into our boxer's training regimen or was it just kind of left to the boxer to go out and run? He noted that his gym offered easy access to running track for sprints and the town offered several routes for longer runs. I responded that I recently attended a training clinic that discussed interval and distance training at length and offered several excellent strategies for incorporating running into a boxer's training. Then I recalled that most of the coaches seemed not to be very interested in the subject. In all the gyms where I have worked out, running was largely left to the individual. Do we figure that kids either get enough conditioning in their P.E. classes at school or that they run on their own without a little "guidance"? If we do, we proceed from a false assumption.

Of course, in boxing we have our own language. We don't run, we do "roadwork" as shown in the accompanying image from Better Boxing for Boys the 1966 classic by George Sullivan. "Roadwork" sounds like "roadkill" that unidentifiably flattened mammal that one finds in the middle of streets, highways, or country lanes. As Sullivan notes, "any conditioning program for young boxers should have roadwork built into it. Coaches of the sport declare no other type of physical exercise is as useful in building stamina, the ability to resist fatigue."

Yet, in boxing we see this as an activity done away from the gym. The image of the solo runner at the crack of dawn ala the movie "Rocky" persists. With this iconography relying on young boxers (and older ones too) to do it themselves invites defeat. That doesn't mean you have to run with them. It means that you have to supervise this part of their training, as you would any other. And what better and more efficient to do that than as a group activity? Remember, running to achieve conditioning in boxing includes distance and more intense "interval" training.

This summer, my preparation to do a "sprint" triathlon (440 yard ocean swim, 12.5 mile bike ride, 2 mile run) illustrated the importance of conditioning. Each of these events has its own considerations when designing a training program. Swimming, the event that seems to bother most triathletes, is my best event. But I got better because of careful coaching and support from other people I trained with at a regularly scheduled time. Left to my own devices, would I have been as motivated to train? I like to think I would. But, I found it harder to "get up" for running and biking, events I trained for solo, than I did for swimming. And yes, in case you are interested, on September 15, 2001, I competed in the Seagate Triathlon at Pacific Grove, California, with a time that isn't bad for a fat old guy. Motivation came, in part, by a good friend from the boxing gym who did the event with me. Being younger (by 15 years) and lighter (by 100 pounds) he was in a different division and had a better elapsed time than I, but not by much. Having him in the event was reason to train a little harder. (His wife cheered both of us on.)

After all that training, a couple a days ago after doing ringwork for eight rounds with two young novice boxers, one of them remarked about my conditioning. I smiled and said thanks. If he only knew what it took to get there and maintain it. He wants to compete. Something tells me he is about to find out....