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sport | pimedia.org.uk


Muay Thai: punishing but rewarding martial art


The head of UCLU’s Muay Thai society spent a month training in Thailand in a boxing camp. Here is his story


Mike Maris


I CANNOT recall many instances in my life in which I have been so petrified that I shook physically. Standing in line at Heathrow airport at half five in the morning, desperately gulping insipid coffee and clutching my half-eaten sandwich, was one of those times. My overwhelming sense of


panic was accentuated all the more by the fact that most people aren’t especially fearful when queuing to go to Thailand. South-east Asia tends to conjure images of crystalline shallow seas, mile-long radiant beaches, cheap food and cheaper booze. Although my fellow travellers


in the Heathrow line were no doubt eagerly anticipating some or all of those things, I was not. I was going to Thailand not only to eschew all of the conventional holiday practices, but because I had willingly signed my name up to month in a professional Muay Thai boxing camp. Sixteen hours later, after a


desperately expensive stop-over in Abu Dabi, I touched down in the bustling, vivacious and surreal city of Bangkok. Waving a piece of paper with the name of the camp I was heading to – Kiatphontip – in the best Thai I possibly could I informed the taxi driver of my desired destination. Kiatphontip is run by the only


foreign Muay Thai journalist in Thailand – Rob Cox, a Londoner, whose wife is the sister of a celebrated Thai champion. If ever you see photos of Thai boxing, they will most likely have been taken by Rob. The camp is found in rural


Bangkok in a roadside strip of shops, markets and foodstalls called Salayaa. The town’s claim to fame is Mahidol University, one of the two primary universities of Bangkok. The camp is nestled among rice paddies and prawn-breeding lakes,


just down the path from a large Wat or Buddhist monastery, home to a peaceful population of Buddhist monks. Kiatphontip is one of the feeder


stables to the three primary stadiums in which tournaments and bouts take place: Omnoi, Rajadamnoern and Lumpini. Muay Thai, or the “science of eight limbs”, is a martial art which has its origins in the indigenous fighting styles of south-east Asia. Almost every surrounding nation


to Thailand practices its own form of Muay (Sanskrit for boxing). The defining features of these arts are their battlefield origins and their ubiquitous use of all of the body’s weapons; fists, feet (or shins), elbows, knees and even the head, before its use was banned in the ring following the standardization of Thai boxing in the 1920s. Up to that point, the format of


Muay Thai had been rather less precise than the five rounds of three minutes with strict rules that is the sport today. Practitioners (known as Nak Muays) begin between the ages of five to eight an active career that usually ends at the age of about 26 or 27. The very best might reach 32


before hanging up their gloves and becoming instructors, or krus, in one of the many prestigious camps of Bangkok, or the more touristy camps of the islands. Being a Nak Muay is punishing.


Days begin at around 5am or earlier – the youngsters of the camp train will often get up for a nine mile before run they head to school. This tends to be performed as a group and is supervised by a senior instructor who, to the frustration of the sweating and bleary-eyed boxers, is often on a motorbike or bicycle. Following this, the group begins


a skipping session using punishing heavy ropes made of thick plastic tubing with bolted wooden handles. The skip tends to last between half


December 2011 | Pi Newspaper sports@pimedia.org.uk


Alien culture: the training regime was a shock to Mike Maris’s (far right, kicking) system.


an hour and forty minutes, usually ending around half seven. Accompanied by the omnipresent


and pervasive sound of atonal Thai pop music or the cutting edge of small-village folk tunes, the boxers exercise in rounds of five minutes, in between which burnouts of press-ups, chin-ups and burpies (a jump, pressup then squat thrust) take place.


Following a nine-mile


run, the group begins a skipping session using heavy plastic ropes


Beginning on a heavy bag (a large


cylindrical affair that hangs from steel girders), everything from fists to the kicks is practiced against a simulated opponent. Then into the ring, where the students are drilled relentlessly by an unforgiving instructor holding pads to allow for a much more realistic imitation of an actual fight. The first break is between the


morning session (6am-9am) and the afternoon session (3pm-6.30pm), thereby avoiding the pounding heat of an Asian afternoon; the boxers eat their first meal of the day in this recreational time. The few precious moments spent


not sweating profusely and getting uncomfortably close to large and intimidating fighters are whiled away eating, eating and eating even more, with sporadic moments of sleep. At 3pm the boxers head out again as a group for a shorter three mile run, before repeating another session similar to the morning with more emphasis on sparring and contact practice. At the end of both sessions there


is a mandatory 300 sit-ups, 150 press- ups, 50 chin-ups, 300 knee strikes, 100 front kicks, and 50 power kicks with each leg. A truly gruelling programme that is repeated six days a week for a lifetime for those who choose to carve out their name in the sport’s long list of champions. There is no doubt that for a nice,


slightly podgy middle-class Surreyite like me it was a serious shock to the system. It took me two weeks before I could actually make it through two runs and two sessions each day, and even then it wasn’t until my last that I could do so in any graceful fashion. Besides me, there were about


seven other foreign kickboxers who lived at the camp, some of whom had been there for two months, some for two years, living an identical lifestyle to the Thais. To give you a sense of the frequency of competition, most young boxers have around one hundred fights


by the age of 12. By the time they finish, they can


have up to three hundred. Naturally, western boxers tend to have far fewer. The camp was home to about ten young fighters, eight trainers and two ‘golden boys’, the seasoned but active veterans of the age of about twenty- eight. Both had been ranked in the top three at the top stadiums and were now fighting and annihilating the international circuits Despite my spluttering


inadequacy, I learnt a great deal in the month that I spent there and forged some relationships which hopefully I will keep for the rest of my life. Living in a Muay Thai gym is a strangely monastic experience. The day begins well before the sun comes up and ends when it goes down. The physicality of its activity is draining but enormously rewarding; from beginning to end, boxing in Thailand is a personal journey in the truest sense. It is an unparalleled opportunity


to engage with a highly intricate and at times befuddlingly alien culture. It is one of the last avenues available to falang (foreigners) to meet and be treated by Thais as an equal. In these small enclaves that have not yet been exposed to the international trends, it is possible to get a brief sense of what life is like on the other side of the world, a long, long way from home.


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