Day three and I’m just going to apologize now because this snuck up on me and now I’m at the Air Canada Centre trying to blaze through this and get to a quick press dinner so I can shoot the fights without being super grumpy Esther.

So what better than to tell you what I (and probably most shooters) do leading up to the fight?

Most fights in the Eastern time zone start very late so I try my best to sleep until about 10 am then desperately find steel cut oatmeal somewhere, though this time I failed.  Then I try to get in a short exercise or nap and start packing up all my gear around 2 pm.

I arrived here at the Air Canada Centre at 4 pm, only to find the press door locked.  We waited around in a bit of chaos between bag checks and things. This week, I’m extremely fortunate with a lovely shooting position.  I am a grateful shooter.  I can already here lots of the local press having a hard time with their placement and well, it sucks but if Dave Mandel of GONG Magazine can get the amazing images he does from behind the cage door week after week for the past many years, well, you can too.

OKAY.

Fights started five minutes early and I was completely unprepared. I’ll try to update this at the end of the night with more details!