Despite the lure of attractive fights at junior lightweight, Ireland’s Mick Conlan is not in a hurry to box at 130lbs.
Conlan returns to the ring in Dublin on September 5 when he boxes Britain’s Jack Bateson.
Conlan, a two-time Olympian, is now a 33-year-old veteran, but he is training as hard as ever to make an impression and keep moving towards another title try.
Now 19-3 (9 KOs), and training with Grant Smith in Sheffield, England, Conlan returned with a routine eight-round win in April in Brighton, England, as he prepares for another run at glory.
Against Asad Asif Khan, Conlan – despite his advancing years – saw that the job of making 126 was no problem.
“That was the easiest I’ve ever made weight,” he insisted. “It was the best I’ve ever made weight and the easiest – it was really easy. That was 128, I think, so not 126, 128. I’ll make 126 just as easy, if I’m going to be honest. I always get in shape. I always stay in shape. I never really let myself go too out of shape. Even if I'm heavy, I’m still in shape – you still see abs. I don’t even know what the [body fat] percentage was, but it definitely was low.”
Conlan is a voracious runner. He has clocked a treadmill 5k time of 15 minutes and 53 seconds and has marked 16:23 out on the roads.
He can cover 10k in just 36 minutes and has a sub-three-hour marathon.
But while he runs, and does enjoy it, he is not hooked on it. He admits he has used it as a crutch for his mental health before, being able to escape and be alone with his thoughts.
“I could stop running right now if I didn’t need to,” he said with a smile. “I like running – and especially on my year off, because it was somewhere my head could go, because I just had an awful lot on my mind and the running kind of really helped me. The thing is, I love training hard. I love hard work. And that’s something that I made sure I’d done when I was training for that marathon, was put the work in, because it’ll pay off in the end.”
Conlan ran the marathon in 2:55, but he believes he could go much quicker.
That said, at mile No. 24, he hit the wall.
“At mile 24, I felt like a sniper come out and just went bang! – shot me,” he recalled.
“I was in hell. My missus and my kids were at mile 24 and they were shouting for me and I didn’t even see them. I’m in a dark place at that stage.”
At mile 21, Conlan had miscalculated his timings and so picked up the pace – not knowing he was still well on course to break his three-hour target.
Some severe self-talk kept him in the race and on schedule, but Conlan was alone with his troublesome thoughts because he is not one to always run with music. Instead, he uses the time to process his life and what’s going on.
“The thing is the breathing, listening to your breath and feeling how you’re feeling. And then, obviously, just thoughts start to creep into your mind,” he said.
“‘What was this?’ ‘What was that?’ ‘Why did I do this?’ ‘Why did I do that?’ I’m feeling, ‘Am I all right?’ ‘Can I push harder?’ ‘I can ease off.’ ‘Go.’ Like, there’s so much shit that comes into your head. Like, how much thoughts do we actually have a day? How much thoughts creep into the mind per day? And when you’re running and you're by yourself and there’s no other sound, bar cars driving past on the road or the air, you’re going, ‘OK, now I can actually listen to what is going on in my head. And sometimes it’s better to sit back, not to interrupt your thoughts coming into your head, sit back and listen to your thoughts and view them and go, ‘Why has that came like that?’ ‘Why have I said that?’ ‘Why is that coming?’ It’s not me saying it, it’s my head saying it, but why has that been said in my head? “Why am I trying to think a certain type of way here?”
Tris Dixon covered his first amateur boxing fight in 1996. The former editor of Boxing News, he has written for a number of international publications and newspapers, including GQ and Men’s Health, and is a board member for the Ringside Charitable Trust and the Ring of Brotherhood. He has been a broadcaster for TNT Sports and hosts the popular “Boxing Life Stories” podcast. Dixon is a British Boxing Hall of Famer, an International Boxing Hall of Fame elector, is on The Ring ratings panel and is the author of five boxing books, including “Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing” (shortlisted for the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year), “Warrior: A Champion’s Search for His Identity” (shortlisted for the Sunday Times International Sportsbook of the Year) and “The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing’s Wastelands.” You can reach him @trisdixon on X and Instagram.
