Stepping Into The Ring With a Professional Boxer– at Age 67
By P.J. Beaumont, co-creator of Tactical Pajamas (Click here for discount code!)
When he steps into the boxing ring, the man across from me went by the name of The Vanilla Gorilla. It’s a name he was given by his fellow pro fighters. At age 32 he’s still in the prime of his career, with a record of 11-1. Most of his wins came in first-round knockouts. We both had on gloves. I had on a custom-made leather sparring helmet. With a sneer, The Vanilla Gorilla declined to wear one.
I was 67 years old, and at least 10 pounds overweight. Even so, The Vanilla Gorilla outweighed me by 20 pounds. As a cruiserweight, his usual fighting weight was about 190, and his “normal” weight hovered anywhere over 200.
A mismatch? Maybe. But I had a secret to survival.
The Vanilla Gorilla’s real first name was Sam, and he’d been training me for the past 18 months. Sam has no concept of the fact that old people get tired out more easily. If I grunt or complain when I’m doing a plank, he puts his foot on my back. When he’s training you, you either come up to the goal he sets or you keep doing it until you do. That was one of the reasons I hired him.
In my younger days I did everything from piloting a whitewater kayak over 35-foot waterfalls (many times) to riding a 1500-pound competition-grade rodeo bull (just once). I’ve had sharks swim directly below me while I kayak surfed off of Assateague Island, and gone on solo backpacking treks through wilderness areas infested with bears. Back in my teens I’d gotten up to brown belt in Tae Kwon Do. I’ve done other things my lawyers and the U.S. Government have warned me not to talk about. I’m not the craziest person alive by a long shot, but I will admit I push the envelope from time to time.
My workouts with Sam usually start with six minutes of jumping rope, then strength exercises, then agility exercises. Then he puts weights in my hands, and holds up pads for me to punch at. Then I put on gloves, and do three minute rounds of punching the pads on his hands and body with 30-second rests. I’ve done as many as 14 rounds, but the usual number is about seven. Then we finish with abdominal exercises, all kinds. Then planks.
If I don’t look tired enough after all that, he gives me a 40-pound sandbag and makes me get on all fours and drag it up a 200-foot hill that’s got a 20% grade.
On my off-days, my workout consists of running a mile, 20 minutes of stretching, then putting a 12-foot boat on my shoulder and sprinting up that same hill six times. Then I go kayaking in the lake behind my house.
But while I may be in fairly decent condition for a guy my age, I’m certainly not the physical equivalent of a professional athlete who is 34 years my junior. They say youth and skill is no match for age and treachery, but I’ve lived long enough to know that age and treachery has its limits.
My biggest fear was that Sam would forget he was in a friendly sparring match, and revert to “real fight” mode for a fraction of a second before he could catch himself. Turns out I was right to be concerned.
Sam set the timer, and we bumped gloves and backed up a bit. Then the bell dinged. I’d trained hundreds of rounds, thrown thousands of punches, and done almost as many thousands of slips and rolls (types of ducks and dodges)
If you’ve never been in a boxing match before, I can tell you what your first thought will probably be: What the hell do I do next?
Really quickly, you’ll remember how to keep your hands up to guard your head. The meme I use is “adjust your glasses,” because that’s how high you need to keep your hands for proper protection.
There was darned near nothing I could do to get inside Sam’s defenses. Thousands of punches thrown over the course of 18 months is nothing compared to millions of punches dodged over the course of 14 years. He was right not to worry about wearing a sparring helmet.
I’ve got an app on my phone that connects to a chest monitor, and it reads out my heart rate. During the pad-punching rounds, I would throw at least 120 punches in three minutes, sometimes closer to 200. For that activity, my heart rate runs about 135 max. But full-on sparring is at a whole ‘nother level, no matter how many punches you’re throwing.
Adding to the physical stress is the fact that during sparring sessions the rests between rounds are only 30 seconds instead of a minute. “It makes the rests during a real fight seem like forever,” Sam explained. Of course, I never intended to get into a real fight, but to Sam that was irrelevant.
Very quickly my heart rate got up to 155, which is close to my max. I threw a bunch of punches and successfully dodged a bunch thrown by Sam, though no doubt he was pulling them.
After three rounds I was starting to feel a bit winded. I threw a jab and then bent down to try to roll under his counter-jab. Which I did, successfully.
Remember when I talked about the possibility of Sam’s “real fight” reflexes taking over before he could catch them? As I bent down to dodge the jab, I didn’t keep my hands up enough to cover my head. BAM came his right hand.
The blow landed on the left side of my head. Every vertebrae in my neck cracked. Thank goodness I had on an extraordinary sparring helmet, which had just arrived from the Philippines that morning. My head barely felt anything, but either I was going to need a trip to my chiropractor or I wasn’t going to need to see him for a long time.
Sam apologized and asked me if everything was OK. Amazingly enough, I felt fine. No dizziness, no soreness. We finished out the round with no problems.
I managed to do two more rounds, though I had to call for a rest after two minutes in on each of them. Still, for 67 years old, lasting five rounds of sparring isn’t too bad, even with the extra rests. And I didn’t need to see my chiropractor.
So what’s the great secret for a 67-year-old surviving a sparring session with a professional boxer in his prime? It’s simple, really. Don’t pay him until after the session is over. If you’re unconscious, you can’t give him his money.
