Strain, Gain, Pain In the Spartan Life Of a Young Fighter

BANGKOK Dawn breaks on the back streets near Lumpini Stadium, and Songkhom Wor Sungprapai is already at work, pushing himself through relentless 500-meter laps.

An 18-year-old kickboxer with a Doberman-lean face, Songkhom looks hungry, and for good reason: He must shed three pounds in the next 60 minutes to make legal weight for the night's bout, and he's working on an empty stomach.

Songkhom pauses for a breather, and Veha Lookthapfa, his 37-year-old trainer, unzips the boxer's insulated tracksuit, an oven in the 88-degree heat. Veha sizes him up.

"Keep going. You're not there yet, run it off," Veha tells Songkhom, who has dropped 10 pounds in the past three days.

Earlier this month, Songkhom lost his local championship title, and now he is craving victory far more than breakfast. It will take him many more months to regain his title, but this night is a chance to regain momentum and respect. These are two things he wants, badly.

How badly? Enough to take his speed up a notch. Enough to run until he's panting, weak-kneed and glassy-eyed. Enough that when he enters Lumpini's cement-walled locker room, he collapses on a massage table, where Veha squeezes Songkhom's tendons like sponges, draining every last drop of liquid from his body.

At 7:46 a.m., the spent boxer weighs in naked and gets an indolent thumbs-up from a bored-looking judge. He tipped the scale at no more than 118 pounds.

Songkhom's gym mates and trainer take him back to the massage table, dousing his body with icy water to revitalize him. He rushes through a breakfast of rice, spiced beef curry and prawn omelets, then joins a host of other young boxers inside a nearby medical clinic, where Songkhom is put on an intravenous drip to regain his strength while downing bags of sliced papaya. This is his brief window to bulk up again, as much as he can without affecting his speed during the night's match.

"I came to Bangkok to make my family proud," he says. "Whenever I feel tired or in pain, I think of my family."

Like thousands of rural Thai youths who come to Bangkok each year to become professional kickboxers, Songkhom is a farm boy for whom backbreaking labor in the fields would yield about $100 a week -- or 15 times less than he earns with just one 23-minute boxing match a month.

That does not mean it's an easy life. He has only five days off every 30 days; the remainder are spent waking at 5 a.m. to train until night falls, when the lights go off at the gym dorms where he bunks.

Songkhom's father and two eldest brothers also practiced the ancient Thai martial art of kickboxing, which became an organized sport in the early 20th century.