I was starting to wonder if I’d imagined being told that the full videos of each fight would be posted when I got home from work today and saw that the Industry Boxing Facebook page had posted the full video I’ve been itching after for the past couple of weeks.

I was so excited to see it and to finally see what I actually looked like in the ring.

I really wanted to embed it in this post so that you could see what I meant by my reflections on it without clicking between tabs. But apparently you have to pay a premium for WordPress to let you have videos on your blog and frankly that’s not going to happy.

You can watch the video here on the Industry Boxing Facebook page. I’m sorry this is apparently the best I can do.

They cut out the minute breaks between rounds, which is probably for the best, I can’t imagine those would have been particularly exciting on video. They also cut out our entrances, which is a little disappointing, because it would be nice to have a video of me marching out to the Pokemon battle theme. But I understand that that would also probably be more entertaining for me than most other people.

Somehow, I look faster than I felt and I got a lot more punches in during the first round than I remember. I’m also quite pleased with how solidly I took a few shots and how I kept my hands up to defend my head.

There were some points where I wasn’t too impressed with my performance. Some things I felt took a bit too long where I left myself open.

I like how I responded to getting hit, for the most part. I definitely took a good handful square in the face that I should’ve defended better. But if I took a punch, I generally threw a few back in retaliation.

There was at least one punch that came my way that missed purely because I was too short. I don’t think I took advantage of my height as much as I had assumed I would have to, but seeing that one made me chuckle.

There were a couple of points where my balance looked really bad.

There’s quite an obvious point midway through the second round where I start aiming high instead of low. Shortly afterwards, you can see us both start to flag a little. Seeing how exhausted I got, I’m really grateful I got someone who got tired at round about the same time! No matter how good I was in the first half, I could easily have got slaughtered in the second if my opponent had been more energetic than I am.

I don’t know if it’s just the way it’s cut, but I can’t believe how many punches I threw at the very beginning of the third round. It looks like I’ve gone full berserker mode and decided to just swing my arms until there’s no one around me left without a bruise.

I definitely had some poor moments in the third round. I took a punch that almost spun me right round at one point. I’m glad that I managed to keep my hands up high for as long as I did. I know how tired I was at the end and how much I did not want to be carrying those big gloves around any more. I won’t pretend that’s not obvious at some points.

Of course there was going to be room for improvement. I’ve been training for ten weeks, which is not a long time. And all in all, I think I did pretty well given I’ve never done anything like this before.

I’m really looking forward to the next run in September!

(In case anyone watching is wondering while one is me, I am the shorter one wearing the white gloves and black shorts.)