Kaewsamrit
Unfortunately as I was editing this post the first few paragraphs got deleted. A reminder to never use a public computer for this blog again. Heres a summary of what I wrote.
I arrived at Kaewsamrit at 12 am and got shown to my room. I was staying in a basic room with fridge, dresser and fan three houses down from the gym. Kaewsamrit is located in a quiet neighborhood slightly outside of Bangkok but for really it is still part of Bangkok even if it officially isn’t.
The gym is 4 houses. One is the gym with the pro shop and rooms for fighters and trainers. The second one it seems is for the owner and his wife, another house for fighters and trainers to stay in and another houses that seems to act as a storage/kitchen and probably has people in there too. The whole area is a beehive of activity with people constantly going in and out.
At the moment of this post there are only 4 guys training there and thats not that much, I was there 2 years ago and this place was packed. I was very surprised because this is known as a very strong gym that currently still has Anuwat fighting, whom by the way will be fighting in Jamaica next month for what I have heard to be half a million baht ($20,000 ) purse which is a whole lot of money in Thailand. It is also home to Hiroya, a 17 year old Japanese fighter who recently fought Masato in K-1 for the first of Masatos trilogy fights. He is the seen by alot of Japanese as the next great Japanese fighter.
The gym is made up of two rings. One in the front on in the back. From what it seemed the foreigners stayed in the front with the trainers and the Thai fighters would be in the back and there would be casual cross over all the time but generally this was the case.
My first day there I tried running but having been accustomed to the beautiful scenery and crisp mountain air of Pai I couldn’t do it and turned around after maybe a kilometer. The air even in the suburb was pretty bad, at least to me, everyone else was doing 10k’s. Around 7 o’clock the trainers had us shadow boxing and I start sweating much faster than normal due to the humidity. Warming up and staying warm was real quick. We next did 4 x 5 minute rounds and I felt good but felt way more exhausted than usual because of how hot and humid it got. I could feel the heat trapped on the outside of my body with no where to go. I felt like I had a fever.It gets very hot in there. Very, very hot.The pad work with my first guy was really basic, but that’s normal for not knowing someone. After that we were made to hit the bags under supervision of a trainer who would be correcting us and pushing us to go harder on the pads. After that was a little bit more shadow boxing and then 200 sit ups. There was a trainer with you the whole time and they didn’t let you get lazy, during training time it is all business. In the afternoon we sparred and I sparred once with Anuwat and I don’t know what to say about that because we didn’t go very hard. But yes, the guy is very, very good.
I’ll continue with some of my thoughts about my time in Kaewsamrit in the next post along with how training is at Paddy’s Gym in Phnom Penh.
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