During her boxing career, Melissa O’Flynn has never shied away from the work. And lately, she’s been putting in some serious overtime.
The 29-year-old O’Flynn lives in Quesnel, where she trains regularly at 2 Rivers Boxing. But, for the past six weeks or so, she’s been throwing extra punches at Inner City Boxing PG in preparation for Canada Cup 2025 next week in Calgary.
At first, O’Flynn was doing the drive to and from Prince George one day per week. Then she bumped that up to three days per week.
O’Flynn works full-time and is a single mom to two young boys, so the days she comes to Inner City are long ones: they start at about 5 a.m. and don’t end until after 10 p.m. Her sons – 10-year-old Randy and six-year-old Zeke – do the late-afternoon journey to Prince George with her and hang out at Inner City for a couple hours while their mom works on her power, technique and conditioning.
O’Flynn is motivated by her desire to win at the Canada Cup tournament, but she also sees a bigger picture.
“I have two children, and I don’t want them (seeing me say), ‘I can’t do that,’” she said. “I don’t want them to make up excuses for their lives, and I think the best way to teach, is to do, so I’m doing.”
O’Flynn is a veteran of 18 fights, and it was early on in her career that she met current Inner City coach Jag Seehra. When O’Flynn said she’d be interested in doing some extra training at Inner City in advance of Canada Cup, Seehra and fellow coach Kenny Lally immediately opened the doors to her.
O’Flynn’s regular coach is the highly-respected Wally Doern at 2 Rivers. Doern has helped to develop O’Flynn into a finely-tuned boxer with an impressive blend of speed, power and footwork. Still, O’Flynn welcomes the additional training and learning opportunities with Lally and Seehra.
“With Kenny and Jag, honestly, they’re very supportive,” she said. “They welcomed me in, they’re sponsoring part of my trip (to Canada Cup), and they’re giving me lots of little things to work on at home.
“When I go home and train with my team at home, I just focus on (what they’ve told me). One of the things was tightening up my guard, getting my arms a little tighter together. So stuff like that. And I’ll go and I’ll focus on that the whole time and by a week later I’m noticing improvements and changes.”
