There's a lot of work, and a little play, going on as Cathal Pendred preps for his stab at the UFC...
So I mentioned in my last blog that myself and my team mate Chris Fields were heading to Las Vegas for a training trip. Well we’ve been here almost a week now and we’ve been really enjoying it. I have to say though, it’s completely different trip than the last time I was in Vegas.
I was here in 2007. I had been living in San Diego with a few friends who were on J1's. We took a road trip up to Vegas and stayed for three days. It was three days of absolute drunken madness, and the parts that I can remember were amazing.
Six years later, I’m here again, but this time I’m a professional athlete and I’m here on business. That’s not to say we’re not doing any fun stuff, but we’re not drinking, and coming to Sin City and not drinking or partying is a very different experience.
We’ve been doing most of our training in a gym that isn’t too far from the hotel in which we’re staying. The gym is called Cobra Kai (named after the gym of the bad dudes in ‘The Karate Kid’). This gym is very cool, and the training there has been great. The gym is one of the smaller MMA gyms in Vegas and it has great vibe and learning atmosphere. It’s quite similar in that way to our gym back home; SBG. It’s owned and run by Brazilian Jiu Jitsu blackbelt Sim Go. He’s a really small guy but he’s highly skilled and attention to detail makes him an awesome instructor.
One of the greatest aspects of Martial Arts is the possibilities of travel for the purpose of training. Training in different gyms really helps with your growth as a martial artist for a few different reasons. Firstly, you can pick up new techniques and approaches to training that you haven’t seen before. Every gym has their own unique methods, you can pick useful things up that are new to you, whether it be a different type of stretch or a variation of applying a choke.
Secondly, you get to train with people who are not used to your game. When you train in the same gym with the same people all the time you become familiar with their style and techniques. It’s great to then train with people who aren’t familiar with you and vice versa, it can allow you develop certain situations that don’t usually occur with your regular training partners.
Lastly, it’s just nice to get a change of scene. When you train in the same gym with the same people everyday, it’s a nice breath of fresh air to train somewhere different. It reinvigorates your love for the training, which can sometimes get repetitive in the same place all the time.
No matter where you travel to train, martial artists always welcome their own and make them feel welcome, It makes travelling and training so much easier. I’d advise any martial artist to take at least one training trip in their lives if they can, it’s well worth it.
So like I was saying, this trip to Vegas has been very different to my last. However, there is one thing I have done on both trips. Six years ago myself and my friends went to a comedy hypnosis show in The Planet Hollywood Hotel. It was the most memorable part of the trip because one of my best friends was brought onto the stage and was hypnotised for the duration of the show (about an hour and a half).
A very blurry shot of a hypnotised Punisher
In that hour and a half he did some of the craziest and funniest things I’ve ever seen. In fact it was so funny, I remember waking up the next day and having a sore stomach because I had laughed so much and so hard!
It being the highlight of my previous trip I was determined to go back to the same show this time around. Luckily the same show is still going on and it’s still performed my the same hypnotist Marc Savard. When I mentioned it to Chris he was seriously sceptical about hypnosis and wasn’t really interested.
I convinced him in the end to come…. And man is he a believer in it now. I volunteered to be hypnotised and it ended up working on me. I don’t remember it really, it’s sort of like waking up from a dream. But Chris has filled me in on what I was getting up to.
Apparently I was convinced I was a model for Playgirl and performed a shoot on stage and the grand finale involved me being convinced I was a pornstar and performing some rude acts on a blow up doll! According to Chris, when I was asked by the hypnotist what my porn name was I replied: ‘The Punisher’….. I don’t know where I got that from!
