Boxing Update

Creator Clash 3, an influencer boxing event that I've been training the past seven months for, has rescheduled to the end of October. As this is smack dab in the middle of our shooting schedule, I regretfully have to drop out.

I have a video I'm working on for the general public as well as you Patrons where you'll get to see the progression of my training (annoyingly, Patreon doesn't let us embed videos into text posts) but I thought I'd give you folks a little insight into my reality these past seven months.

I originally heard about Creator Clash 3 because Real Good Touring, who heled run the first two Creator Clashes, organizes our Dungeons and Daddies tours. While on the tour bus somewhere in Europe, our RGT rep mentioned they were putting together another Creator Clash, and inquired about my interest.

I was familiar with the controversy of the second event having gone into the red, but I also know that running events of any kind are complicated affairs. They were implementing some foundational changes to the approach and partnering up with Live Nation. Additionally, my experience with Real Good Touring as a business entity had been positive (Timely accounting and prompt payment? In our dumb business, that kind of thing is the exception rather than the rule).

So I said yes. Participating would accomplish two practical things:

• Give me an opportunity to promote Nail House to an audience outside our current "strike zone" - very important because the internet is wide and weird, and I've found that potential audience comes from all over.

• Whip me into shape for the physical rigor that co-starring in Nail House will demand, as my training for the boxcar sequence would segue nicely into training for the fight as we go into pre-production, which gets me into shape in advance of production in the latter half of this year.

But additionally:

• Preparing for a movie by subjecting myself to rigorous physical training and promoting it via influencer fighting event of mixed repute is interesting. It's a little gonzo, and I theorize that filmmaking needs to go in this direction in order to differentiate from slick studio slop. I see Cheslik and Hundreds of Beavers as a great example of this, as well as everything Matt Johnson is doing.

• I see the internet changing, too. With generative AI, it's becoming more synthetic and untrustworthy. Every creative is competing against every other creative for people's attention and money, funneled through narrower and more opaque channels controlled by either state-entities or mega corpos and it's not clear which is worse. How far am I, as a filmmaker, willing to go to get this movie made? What strange avenues are available here at the dawn of a new, darker internet?

• Harley Morenstein (who fought in the first two events) relayed a story of his coach, upon seeing the assembled arena crowd for Creator Clash the first time. He marveled at Harley's luck: "There are guys in Mexico working two jobs and training in all their spare time just for the chance to box in front of this many people. I was a pro. I gave up on seeing this for myself. And you guys get to just casually experience it?" He's right. It's a rare privilege and a strange opportunity. I feel honor bound, as an artist, to do what it takes to experience it myself.

They originally wanted to pair me up to fight LinusTechTips (a cosmically funny fight pairing, plus he's a long time Taekwondo guy!), but he declined. Instead, they placed me against another Canadian: Devon St. Arnaud, i.e. "Gingerpale," an animation YouTuber.

On paper, I would lose this fight. Devon is an inch and a half taller than me (incorrectly noted on this fight card), granting him a reach advantage. On top of that, my arms are shorter than average for my height, which makes buying shirts and punching far difficult.

He is also a decade younger than me, which means his heart's got less miles on it and his muscles twitch faster. Age is a true killer here - there is an entire discourse in combat sports about age that places me squarely as the underdog here.

Therefore, if I trained like everyone else, and he trained like everyone else, he'd win.

So to win, I had to train differently.

---

Yung, who visited us on tour in London, hears about the possibility of a boxing match and immediately offers to train me.

Los Angeles, he notes, is full of "box fit," i.e. fitness boxing. While a great workout, it's not comparable to the training needed to properly do the Real Thing. Moreover, within the business of boxing itself lies a tough truth - truly great and talented coaches focus on training great, talented young fighters. Training has-been schlubby YouTubers on an accelerated timetable for sloppy exhibition matches (that probably won't go the distance) does not help your reputation as a coach. More importantly - it takes your time away from training a promising fighter who is taking the sport seriously.

Consequently, the type of boxing coaches who would train a schlubby YouTuber on an accelerated timetable for an upcoming exhibition match probably aren't the cream of the crop. And even if you do find a great boxing coach and you coax them into the gig with a boatload of money, do you really think you're getting their undivided attention or are they just gonna phone in your training and collect an easy paycheck?

Yung has a lunatic gleam in his eye at the prospect of training me, I note. I've found it's better to trust the judgment of passionate weirdos over basically anybody else. He compares training me to "training a Pokemon." Lucky for him, I need a dyed-in-the-wool true blue min maxing motherfucking gamer as my coach.

So I agree. We do it Yung's way.

Yung's approach takes into account his own training at a gym in Nanjing, China. Nanjing has a reputation for turning out high level athletes and in the videos Yung shows me, the ten-year olds look like they would kill me. He recruits the help of Vinnie "The Lion" O'Brien, who played the Italian muscle in the Boxcar Sequence. Vinnie is a former professional and a Golden Gloves champion. More importantly, Vinnie is highly respected at his gym in the San Fernando Valley. I witness numerous amateur up-and-comers ask advice from him, which he gives freely. Vinnie also has real life fight experience, and has mountains of practical insight borne from his time as a professional.

Together, they form my coaching team. I train two 2-hour sessions a day (a morning and an afternoon), five days a week, with an occasional review session with Yung on Saturdays. Some mornings are Vinnie mornings, others I drill with Yung.

We begin with fundamentals, building my footwork piece-by-piece from the ground up. Afternoons generally are focused on conditioning and explosive strength training. Both Yung and Vinnie are on the lookout for my weaknesses and coming up with ways to address them. I see them whispering to each other as I shadowbox, hands covering their mouths, eyes looking very concerned. My knees, apparently, turn inwards in an awkward way, necessitating adjustments.

For seven months I am fully immersed in a new, unfamiliar reality - one of fatigue, muscle soreness, and persistent low-grade pain. I reach a level of intensity where diet, supplements, and sleep have a direct effect on my performance. I schedule naps. I spasm awake because my hypnic jerk now has me throwing 1-2 combinations laying flat on my back.

I become viscerally acquainted with the limits of my middle-aged endurance, strength, and agility. My injuries linger. At the beginning of March, Yung tags me in my left floating rib during a light spar session. The pain crackles and lingers for the entire month, receding to manageable "I can cough now" levels a couple weeks in. "Everyone goes through this one at some point," Yung tells me.

We have to be careful. At my age, I know the extended recovery time for any injury, no matter how slight, is a disproportionate penalty on my development. I must not get sick - and I do at the end of February. Thankfully, the cold hits me on my rest day and is mostly cleared by Monday. That week, I am winded, snotty, and weak. It's a hard week.

Some days are good, others are bad. On bad days, Yung and Vinny reassure me that I'm still "putting in the work." The word "work" in boxing has a lot of layers. "Grind" implies, I think, a chore, while "Reps" feels rote and repetitive. Work in boxing is attentive and active effort, both physical and mental. It's taxing in a way that's difficult to convey unless you've done it. For the first time in my life, I look forward to running three miles or lifting weights, because during those activities at least my mind could relax for a while.

There are moments where I rediscover things about myself. One afternoon, I am tasked to roadwork - running, side shuffling, shadowboxing, non-stop for 45 minutes. At five miles in, I recall that five miles was the most I've ever had to run for anything, back when I did fitness tests in high school. I hated running, and here I am passing records set by my teenage self, and I don't feel winded in the least. The next week, I swim (more or less) non-stop for an hour. When the guy next to me asks how long my sessions are, and I tell him today it's an hour, he expels air in disbelief. Another guy in a gym being impressed with my workout? That, too, is a first.

I'm in the best shape of my life, but it's not what I imagined. "Shape" doesn't mean immunity to heavy breathing, sweat, or dogged fatigue. It just means you can weather it easier. But week by week, things don't get easier - Yung and Vinnie push me constantly to approach my physical limits. Vinny talks a lot about walls, about finding them, and about breaking through them. And beyond that, there are simply more walls to be found and broken. Every wall you break, you get a little stronger and you gain a little more physical endurance. There's probably some potent life philosophy stuff in there, but I'm too exhausted to think about it.

Physical walls are conquered with willpower, but the difficult walls are the mental ones - chiefly, my ability to function under stress. At first, my brain short circuits in the face of a flurry of punches from Yung ("punches in bunches," as he calls them). No coherent thoughts break through, only surprise and panic as I frantically flail around and try and defend myself. With enough exposure, this calms. After two months, I am able to have coherent thoughts while under attack, my ingrained defensive reactions taking care of myself, leaving my mind open to strategize.

Outside of training, I am thinking about boxing a lot, and consequently, it begins to reflect in the dark algorithms that drive my video consumption. I am served boxing videos, sparring clips, drills. I find the best YouTube videos hover around 50,000 views, what I believe is the sweet spot view count for true, pure internet videos. Not enough views to bend to the demands of capitalizing off your view count, but enough that the algorithm is finding an audience for this. It's small and passionate audience, one which can read and understand the dynamics of boxing matches unaided by commentary and voice over. Specialist content for specialists. I count myself among them.

At the end of March, George Foreman dies and I look at videos of him punching the heavy bag, mesmerized. His shoulders are so relaxed. His hits are relentless with terrifying grace and power. I try and discern how he connects his hip movement in his hooks. I imitate what I think I see in a mirror. After an hour, I think I make progress with my left hook, and that week, both Vinnie and Yung notice I'm finally imparting power as I practice on the heavy bag.

By the beginning of May, I start sparring. At first, it's with other beginners in the gym - guys with 1-2 years of experience. I do well against them the first week, but not as well the second as they catch on to my tricks. Sparring introduces an entirely new dimension and complexities. When actually exerting against actual human beings who are returning fire with intent, mind and body are taxed harder and technique is the first thing that falters.

Here is where I start to see the wisdom of the old school approach to boxing training - we train shadowboxing, which translates to the heavy bag, which translates to sparring, which translates into the fight, but each step of the way, we work to maintain technique and discipline. My form and focus must be perfect in shadowboxing, because each step of the way, fatigue will chip away at those things. If I get used to throwing combos of two or three punches at a time in shadowboxing, I'll be throwing easily read single shots by the time I'm in the ring. While we review my sparring sessions, Yung and Vinny note this is exactly what's happening. I have to up my punch volume. My shadowboxing improves.

It's also in sparring that I realize how important the concept of efficiency is. You can build up your stamina reserves as much as you want, but how much you chip away at it with all your motions is just as important. It's how Yung, who I am leaps and bounds ahead in terms of physical fitness, doesn't ever seem tired when we spar - he knows how to conserve and be efficient with his movements. As for myself, every time I spar I end up at some point more tired than I've ever been in my life. "You can't ever look tired," he tells me, "if your opponent sees you looking weak, that's an invitation for them to come in." Turns out, there's a bit of acting in boxing too. Clearly, I have much to learn.

One Friday, I face down Frank, an affable accountant with adult kids who are amateur fighters. Frank is built like a bulldog and throws heavy overhand rights with hands that feel like concrete. My laziness is punished when I don't keep my hand up. Frank lands his right and rocks me in the face so hard that my top teeth go numb (and are still a little numb as I type this, weeks later). This would develop into my second ever black eye. My first was when I clumsily dropped some weights onto my eye only a few months prior.

At the end of round three, I experience my first ever "gym war," where everyone in the gym stops what they're doing to watch the spar taking place. In the final seconds, we're both swinging for the fences as people cheer us on. Frank also has his kids there cheering him on too, so he got that dad bonus to strength and agility, which seems unfair but at the time I didn't clock it. We both eat blows, and though I feel like my own fists are pillows, I remain standing.

Afterwards, he smiles at me and quips "Not bad for a 52-year old Mexican grandpa, huh?'" He then went off to work his day job while I drove home, popped two Tylenol and took a longer-than-usual recovery nap.

The next week, I perform notably better, and manage to keep up with him. I weather a heavy body shot, and afterwards, Frank complements me on that. "I dropped a lotta young guys with that one!" he tells me, "but you kept coming. You're a dog." Dog, in the boxing context, is the animal everyone wants to be. People wonder if a fighter "has that dog in 'em." I was born Year of the Ox, and while I don't think I have that dog in me, I do have a certain stubbornness that Oxes do.

Vinnie and Yung talk about entering me into point sparring competitions, a sort of pre-amateur fight league that would help me prepare for a crowd and competitive pressure, when I get word from Creator Clash that they're pushing the event to October.

That was last week. It feels like a month ago.

In all honesty, Yung and I had an inkling something was going to go down, but we couldn't dwell on it. I was already pushing myself to the edge of my physical and mental limits. Most of my days were getting up around 6 in the morning, breakfast, training, lunch, napping, working (podcast, movie, running RocketJump), training again, bathing, dinner, working, and then hitting an early bedtime. My only breaks were my meals, my nap, my decadent nightly bath, and the time spent driving to training. During those drives, I preferred keeping the radio off and listening to the white noise of traffic. At that point, the demotivating effect of "maybe the event gets cancelled" is devastating.

The past week has been a blur. Everything just sort of stopped, and my body is in tumult. In the afternoons, I do intensive jump rope and running sessions because I feel compelled to. I sleep deeply for the first time in months. This past Friday, I think I get sick for exactly 4 hours before becoming healthy again in a single evening.

I feel a complicated tangle of emotions. On one hand, I breathe a sigh of relief because the training intensity was, truthfully, getting to me. I felt like I could weather it up to the fight and no more. Yung, too, I think sensed that and we had slowed down our sessions to giving me Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off for more recovery. On the other hand, I have been focused for the past seven months on a single thing, and honing myself physically and mentally for it, and to suddenly not have to do it anymore is uniquely frustrating.

That frustration, though, is tempered by the knowledge that without this to train for, I never would have gotten into the shape I'm in, especially before I turn 40. There's tremendous value in that. I also acknowledge that I move differently than I used to, in a way that I think will translate satisfyingly on screen. I think, through this work, I have gained physical abilities that I never would have had, of which I can now apply in full force to doing dumb funny shit for a movie.

In one of our final sessions, before the event got rescheduled, Yung and I revisited one of the early footwork drills where we would try and stomp each other's feet while avoiding getting stomped ourselves. I am fast, agile, tricky, and my movements feel flowing and effortless. For the first time, I win a round.

"It's like you're a totally different person," he tells me, and I agree.