Had a super fun sparring day yesterday. Second time at this gym when not counting informal spars on the ground floor in the middle of drills. It definitely feels different stepping into the ring with gear, a cornerman, and the gym gathered to watch. The only downside was how short it was: just 3 rounds for 2 minutes.

I went up against a shorter stocky guy who I only learned afterwards is one of the coaches. I've seen his name on the weekly class sign-ups as Coach Gabriel but his class conflicts with my work so I've never trained with him. Coach Eric was my cornerman this time (he was my sparring partner last time).

Of note is that I way hyped this session up in my mind, partially by design. I was thinking about it the whole weekend and as a result, my head was bursting with ideas and things to tweak from last time. 

As a result, the biggest change in round 1 was not being overly nice and actually hitting with an appropriate amount of power. Coach Eric advised me to use my reach and spar on the outside, and sure enough, his swings often fell short while my jab and cross landed over and over again. A real success was a jab followed by a lightning left hook. I don't see a lot of guys in the intermediate classes throwing this, or many combos from the same arm in  general, but I've been working on this for some time now and my hook comes really fast after jabbing from the same arm. I also landed a lot of jabs and crosses to the body, but next time I'd like to practice body hooks more.

When he'd rush in, I would meet him with an uppercut while circling out. He didn't land anything significant until the end of the round when he caught me with a big left hook that adjusted my headgear. Didn't hurt, but it was a great shot.

After round 1, Coach Eric told me he likes the punches I'm choosing and my jab is landing, but I can get even more reach from it because he sees my arm not fully extending. Very old issue of mine.

Round 2 went much the same: I landed clean the vast majority while almost all of his smaller strikes were falling short, but that leaping Frazier-style hook got me one more time again. 

After round 2, I felt that same feeling of a panic attack that occurred last session, which was also after round 2. It felt like I couldn't get enough air through my mouthpiece while I was resting and that was causing my heart to race, but I ignored it. I probably need to do a better job of taking full breaths as the action progresses, but in truth, I was 100% fine and I knew that. The breath restriction mask helped a lot with mentally managing this feeling. Funnily enough, same with 20-rep squats.

As soon as round 3 started, I felt fine again, as I expected. This time, he ended up standing in one spot and telling me to hit him harder, which I did but not enough to rock him. In the moment I thought he might have been having an ego trip to show-off and didn't know he was a coach. Round 3 ended up being slower as a result of his relative inactivity.

I was a little bummed round 3 was the end. I watched the rest of the spars where the same coach went at it with two other trainees, which made sense why he had periods of energy composure with me and probably why he got hit more than I expected since he was going way more rounds. When everyone was done I did a 4-minute sesh on the heavy bag.

Hopefully I get more rounds in next time. Even though I wasn't going against a fresh combatant, I'm stoked at the changes I made with regards to aggression and landing uppercuts.