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I got to the gym a little late. I had to put a tensor bandage around my right ankle after twisting it running one night last week. "Mark, get your wraps on," Sean 'White Chocolate Chip' tells me. I do perhaps the ugliest wrap job in the history of boxing. Into the ring I go.

I'm sparring against a guy I've never met between the ropes before. He's a regular and he'll be fighting on the 10th as well. We're pretty much the same height and weight. "Go easy, don't try and kill each other in there," Sean says to us.

The bell rings. He comes at me with intensity - he's quick, but I'm no slouch either. We dance around, fake, throw and counter. We're getting each other pretty good. We're even blocking a few. Chucky (I think) yells "ease up in there!"

I'm not easing up and neither is he. Inside the ring the fighters aren't pulling their punches like they should anymore.

It's Monday and the fight is on Saturday and we're trying to prove our worth, fighting beyond the control of the trainers.

I have a weakness - a rookie flaw that I know not to do but when I get hit, it's a natural defence mechanism: when I try to get on the inside, I tend to put my mitts up against my face and my head down and attempt to bob and weave an oncoming barrage. More often than not this leads to more strikes to the face.

Round two, more of the same mistakes. I double jab and throw a left on my way in and he hits me with a straight punch, I don't know if it's a left or a right. Mitts up, I duck, weave and throw wild left hook that catches him right on the button. He falls to the ground. He's flat on his back. I dropped him. What the hell? It was a one-in-a-million punch, maybe one in a hundred (for my luck, I hope it's one in 10).

I connected with a wild, blind left that shot out of me as an act of self-defence, and now my sparring partner is sprawled out on the ground. Instantly, I go from hostile fighter to apologetic aide. He's helped out of the ring - he's okay.

Without saying a word Sean takes off my dazed sparring partner's gloves and puts them on. Into the ring he comes.

I get the distinct feeling he's not in there to train me. His silence worries me more than his size. He doesn't tell me to keep my hands or head up - he just looks at me and waits for the bell to ring.

It does and I'm running close to empty. For me it's round three and for Sean it's round one.

My cardio's not where it should be. The running isn't helping. It's not helping my endurance - or my ankle for that matter.

I'm fighting as if my life depended on it. He's on the defensive, jumping and dancing; my strikes hit nothing but air. He's danced his way to the ropes (purposefully) luring me in. I throw flurry of body blows, hooks and uppercuts with everything I have. By now I'm all but spent and my strikes have lost their pop. He waits for a beat in time, then hits me with surgical strikes to the face and kidneys.

He's not trying to kill me after all, otherwise I'd be dead by now. But when the buzzer goes to signal 30 seconds left, he stops pulling his punches. I'm jabbing, bobbing, weaving, blocking and countering as best I can - I stick him once with a left thrown twice in rapid succession and arch to my right to throw a body shot. That's where he's waiting for me. Sean sees it coming and hits me with a fierce body blow to the solar plexus.

If there were crosshairs, a line running between my armpits and another one that ran between my nuts and nose, the intersecting point is where he hit me.

The second he did, something between a yelp and a grunt escaped my mouth and I collapsed to my knees, clutching onto the bottom rope gasping for air that wouldn't come.

Later, Sean comes up to me and says "you've got to keep your head up. You're not going to learn to stop doing that by Saturday, but you're ready to fight. You gave me a fat lip in there."

Next week, my debriefing of the fight that matters most.[[In-content Ad]]

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