Boxing: Conditioning: We expect it, but it’s an intangible nonetheless

When there’s a big fight upcoming, we as boxing fans can only muse about how one athletes' speed will match up against another’s power, or defense or similar speed. We measure out all the checks and balances until coming out with something resembling an educated guess. But there’s one aspect of the game that we often overlook, sometimes to the point of naivete: conditioning.

There’s a mass assumption that since boxers know the risk of what they are getting themselves into, that there’s a corresponding loyalty to their training. Yeah, we’ve seen heavyweights who could probably fall through 20 floors of an office building if they jumped up and down hard enough, but on the average, most professional fighters appear to be in good shape.

But boxers, despite the rigors of their chosen vocation, are as human as the rest of us and I’ll bet that even a Bernard Hopkins has decided on more than one occasion to hit the snooze button instead of confront a chilly Philly morning for 5 miles.