First days of 2009

Went to the boxing gym Saturday and had a fantabulous workout. On Friday I did an upper body circuit and ran 4 interval miles, so I had a nice (sore) baseline to work with as I gloved up for the first time in the new year. Punished the bags (and my joints) with a steady 12-round circuit on the heavy, double-end and hook bags and finished with 4 rounds of abs. I'm definitely happy with my "raw" strength and cardio but, as my relatively "normal" workout reminded me, lifting, running and cross-training is only mortar - the real work and "brick-laying" has to be done in the ring. A lot (ton) of work ahead of me, but it's good to be back.

Ran into an old sparring partner and talked about our training timetables. Going to touch base again later this week and set up some workouts. He works at the gym part-time, so he knows his stuff, can help break down my technique and - the big perk - has a key to the gym so we can workout unimpeded late at night or on Sundays when the gym is closed.

No excuses, train like a champ.

Speaking of which, I officially have been left out of the 2009 New England Golden Gloves, which begin next week. I shouldn't say "left out" so much as "left behind," since, as I've mentioned before, the gym owner literally left me behind when the team drove to register. But that's old news and neither here nor there. I can still feed off my usual training partners and have sparring sessions aplenty the next 2 months, so I'll still continue to sharpen my game and save myself a 'L' on my record. (I train with a 3-time champ in my weight class. I wasn't going to go anywhere anyway.)

I had a scheduled day off on Sunday but was so pumped that I ran 6 miles and did some body weight exercises. Glad that the holidays had such a refreshing, invigorating effect rather than bogging me down.

I read an article in Sports Illustrated where Michael Phelps' coach said that, to recover from an extended break, you need to train 2 days for every 1 day you took off. Based on these past few workouts, I definitely can live with that.