So this is my face right now. Obviously training is off to a good start. It’s at least smaller than last time.

I’m enjoying training. I missed last week’s sessions because I was busy being on antibiotics and feeling quite unwell. I didn’t feel great today, if I’m honest. I only came off antibiotics yesterday so my belly still feels funny and just loads of awful shit has happened to good people this week so I’ve been bummed out in general. But I figured the longer I leave it to get back into training, the harder it’ll be to reacclimatise.

I felt pretty good by the end of the warm up though, once I got moving.

Today wasn’t too bad. I won’t be surprised if a few of the group drop out. There were a lot of people who wandered off midway through the warm up to get a drink and I’m surprised Jon wasn’t more strict about it. No matter how much I’ve hated burpees (which I do, with a passion), I’ve always stuck it out to the end. And when he tells us to shadow box immediately after instead of getting a drink, I did it. Without fail. I may not be the fittest person he’s ever trained, but I’m pretty obedient. I’m also getting pretty quick at doing my push ups.

We were sparring today. It made me realise how much I learned in the last fight.

I mostly sparred against a woman who did the Pride fight, who I’ve sparred with before in the last lot of training. It was good to see her again and it meant that there was an element of challenge to today fighting her today. I still haven’t properly learned how to use my height to my advantage (diminutive though it may be) so fighting her is definitely going to help me improve.

A few of the new women told us that it was interesting watching us fight, they said that we move differently to the people who are new to it. I’ll be happy if having me around will help people learn a bit. I know that on my first time round, I learned a lot from the sparring with women who knew what they were doing.

Some of them wanted to stop and take a breather while they were sparring with me. I’m not sure if it was the exertion of the session as a whole or if I could’ve done with being a bit gentler, but I didn’t feel like I was being too tough. I thought I was positively slow. Part of me understands it, though, given it’s the first time they’ve ever sparred with anyone.

But part of me rememers the first few times I sparred with the more experienced women during training for my last fight, how they’d force me to move my feet and to protect myself, how I’d sweat more fighting them that I would in the rest of the session because they really made me work for it. I feel like I appreciated fighting them so much more because they didn’t let me rest.

Basically I’m torn between going a little easier on the newbies and … the exact opposite. I guess it depends on what each person is really prepared to give.

I didn’t feel exhausted at the end of the session, but pleasantly warm. I’m enjoying this gradual reintroduction to boxing.

My legs didn’t particularly want to ride my bike home but I managed that too. I feel like I’m going to enjoy my ride home less and less as it gets closer to fight night at the end of November. Still, coming home to find a warm shower might just turn into the highlight of my week.

Thanks to everyone who’ll be following along this time around! If you’d like to come and cheer me on, you can buy tickets here.

If you don’t want to come, but do want to support Refuge, you can donate via my JustGiving page here.

If you want to see the sort of thing I’ll be doing, you can see my last fight here, because apparently videos work now: