My ears were ringing as my teammates wrapped tape around my gloves and put the shin guards on my feet. The crowd was watching another match with attention. My heart was racing just sitting down waiting for someone to be declared the winner inside the cage.
It's a short walk from being fitted with gloves and guards for your fight, in a more professional league you'd get to walk out to music of your choosing, I don't know if that would help calm your nerves and ground you for what's to come. So while the referee did his usual checks of whether I had long nails or was hiding anything sharp or hard in my person I was imagining walking out to the Doom OST "The only thing they fear is you" it's a little intense, and it did the opposite of grounding me. If my chest was a cannon my heart would shoot out of it.
I saw my opponent walk up to the referee to get checked while they were putting vaseline on my face to prevent cuts and bleeding. I asked them to put some on my lips because they were dry, I was a little thirsty but it was mostly the adrenaline.
Walking inside the cage the only thing you can focus on is the lights. You can make out a few faces here and there but it's mostly the bright lights.
There is nowhere to go when the cage is locked for the round, the ref tells us to fight clean and touch gloves.
The bell rings and then begins the longest three minutes of your life so far.
I've trained for close three months, I've fought loads of people in sparring rounds but there is obviously a lot of holding back because you don't want to hurt a person from your team whom you see every day.
When the cage closes and the bell rings this unfamiliar face will be knocking you out if you don't get over your block of hurting people, because the other guy might not have such reservations.
If you're interested in the basic rules of how to fight a person it's all about distance control. Simply put, they can't hurt you if they can't touch you. That is easy to say but as most people who train years to understand evasive tactics and distance management would agree that there is depth in the topic. Simply put if they can't touch you it's possible you can't touch them either, so if you want to survive in a fight where you have to fight and running away isn't an option, you will have to get close enough to hurt and be hurt.
In the first round i maintain my distance, sending a few jabs his way to deter him from getting too close while measuring how close he is with the jab.
This is where I can introduce another fun rule of being in a fight. If they're expecting you to punch then kick them, and if they are expecting you to kick them then punch them.
Most fighting when done skilled people is an artform and there are patterns.
Fighters who are training hard learn these patterns and how to avoid them by dodging or slipping (which are evasive maneuvers). Fighters who have trained a bit usually are not reacting to punches as they come, this is a very bad idea and i would not recommend it. It's a very easy way to get badly hurt, but it's something you learn slowly while training. Most of the time, you are moving not based on where their arms or legs are, instead you are reacting to their body. You can reliably know what type of punch is being thrown based on how the person is moving their shoulder and kicks based on their hips and knees. All this to say is that observing these patterns, and doing some kind of evasion has significant cognitive load. Since our brain is a muscle and focusing for so long is fatiguing, a good way to make the person tired while fighting is with using fakes and feints sparingly.
To be honest high level fighters use these feints in a great way and it shows a good fight IQ if your opponent move they way you want them to.
All this to say that despite training for 3 months, having all these plans and ideas. When the first of a series of punches landed squarely on my cheek sending electricity through my head, everything went out of the window and the lizard brain took over.
The only objective was survive that round and 2 more after that.
There are lots of nuances I can write later about getting taken down and somehow surviving having a 95 kg man on top of my chest trying to pummel my face into the ring.
In case you were curious I did beat him, mostly because it came down to wrestling and after getting side control just peppering his face and stomach with hammer punches and knees to the side of his ribs. He tapped out because his ribs hurt. But this was a three round ordeal lasting three minutes each but felt more like running for an hour straight.
What I learnt from this experience is that getting inside the ring is a big deal in itself. Most people have some vague idea about how they will do in a fight but most people will have not have an objective metric on how well they'll do.
I would recommend anyone to start some kind of self defence training atleast for a year or two because it gives you perspective about your own capabilities and more.