the first fight
FROM WATCHING FROM THE CROWD TO STEPPING INTO THE RING
No Ragrets UNCUT · Life inside the sport
Muay Thai was part of my life long before I ever stepped into a gym myself.
Mark was already training and fighting, and I was the one sitting in the crowd at fight shows watching.
I loved the atmosphere of fight nights. The walkouts, the nerves, the crowd and everything that came with watching someone step into the ring.
And even back then, I remember watching and thinking:
I could do that.
At that point I'd never trained Muay Thai in my life.
I wasn't particularly fit. I had no martial arts background. There was absolutely nothing to suggest I should be sitting there thinking I could fight someone.
But the thought was already there.
THE PUSH I NEEDED
For a long time, that's all it was.
Something I'd think about while watching fights without actually doing anything about it.
Then I went to watch a friend have his first fight.
He'd joined a beginner program at a local gym that took people from knowing absolutely nothing about Muay Thai to stepping into the ring 16 weeks later.
Watching someone I knew go through that process made the idea feel a lot more real.
I'd spent all this time sitting at fight shows thinking I could do that.
This time I decided to actually find out.
So I signed up.
STARTING FROM NOTHING
And I really did start from nothing.
I was overweight, unfit and my body definitely wasn't used to what I was suddenly asking it to do.
I didn't have a background in martial arts. I wasn't secretly athletic.
I was just someone who'd spent a long time watching fights and thinking maybe I could do it too.
At the time, Mark was actually having a break from Muay Thai, so even though his fighting had originally introduced me to the sport, I started my own journey while he wasn't training.
It became something I was doing for myself.
And pretty quickly, I knew I wanted to fight.
MY FIRST TIME IN THE RING
The beginner program ran for 16 weeks.
I went from knowing absolutely nothing about Muay Thai to training towards actually stepping into the ring at the end of it.
After 16 weeks of training, I had my first interclub fight.
That was the first time I got to experience what it was actually like to be the person inside the ring instead of the one watching from the crowd.
All those times I'd sat at Mark's fights thinking:
I could do that.
Now I was actually doing it.
A few months later, I signed up for a similar program, this time for boxing, and had my first boxing fight at the end of that too.
By then it was pretty clear this wasn't going to be something I tried once and moved on from.
I wanted to keep fighting.
WHEN OUR JOURNEYS CAME TOGETHER
Mark eventually found his way back to Muay Thai too.
He joined another local gym and ultimately I followed him there.
That's when Muay Thai went from something we'd both experienced separately to something we actually started doing together.
We trained together.
Then came more fights, fight camps, travelling, weight cuts, cornering each other and eventually building a pretty ridiculous amount of our lives around this sport.
It's funny looking back at it now.
Mark's fighting was what first put the idea in my head.
I started training while he was taking a break.
Then eventually our two journeys met in the middle.
WHAT CHANGED
I don't think the biggest change since I started has been physical.
It's been everything I've learnt about myself along the way.
My later amateur fights especially felt like a huge step forward. I could actually feel myself becoming calmer, more technical and more like the fighter I wanted to be.
There have been good fights, hard fights and plenty of learns.
And I'm still learning.
MORE THAN A FIGHT
Sometimes I think about the version of me sitting in the crowd at Mark's fights.
Overweight, unfit, having never stepped foot in a Muay Thai gym and somehow watching the people in the ring thinking:
I could do that.
She had absolutely no idea what she was getting herself into 😂
What started as a thought eventually became training, fights, travelling, sharing the sport with my husband and building a business around a world I'd once only watched from the crowd.
Turns out I could do it.
And I'm pretty glad I decided to find out.