How to lose 2 kilos in just 4 hours, that sounds like the slogan for a scammy weight loss regimen that involves some not so legal pills. Well, that is where you would be wrong, this was a true practical challenge that the athlete Mary Kom was faced with when arriving in Poland highly jet-lagged for boxing competition. And not only did she shed the weight, but she also went on to grab her third gold medal of the year.
Mary Kom landed in Poland at 3:30 AM knowing that the competition’s general weigh-in would be at 7:30 AM – that is when she realized a major problem, she was a good 2 kilograms above 48kg which is the category she competes in. As a London Olympic bronze medallist she did not want to let her country and fans down, so she decided to shed the extra kilos in a couple of hours. The problem was she only had four hours to drop the weight or she would be disqualified by the judges.
That is when her coach told her to start skipping. Mary Kom skipped for an hour nonstop and burnt through the extra kilos. Just like that as she said, she was ready to compete in the tournament. And not only did she compete she went on to win the whole thing, earning her another gold medal. The Manipuri was the only gold medallist from India in the tournament, and at 35 years of age, she would be considered quite old for the sport. Kom puts down the longevity of her career in boxing due to the lack of depth in the sport in her home country of India. As there are not many new world-class Indian women boxers coming through the ranks, she can keep hold of her top position.
Mary Kom is also known for taking the sport and each boxing match up extremely seriously, despite now being a mother of 3, she watches her opponents closely and studies their strategies late into the night. Staying late into the night at the gym is a common sight in her hometown.
One of the godsends in this whole story was that her flight from India to Poland was not very full, this allowed Mary Kom to lay down and keep her legs stretched out. She has mentioned that had she been forced to sit down the whole flight, there would have not been any possible way to shed the weight so fast as she would not have been physically ready to skip for that amount of time.
