Paul Garrigan is not a typical fighter. As a child, he dreamt of imitating his hero Bruce Lee; he even practiced Kung Fu for a number of years, but he never got past his fear of being hit in the face. By the time he reached his twenties, the only fighting he was doing involved a battle with alcoholism. Garrigan turned from a ten stone weakling in his teens to an overweight alcoholic in his thirties, but the desire to practice a martial art never left him. He ended up living in Thailand where the fiercest of all martial arts is practiced: Muay Thai. Eventually, he managed to find his way out of addiction, and even though he was now in his forties, he decided to pursue his martial art dreams.

In this book, we get to see what happens when a middle-aged ex-drunk decides to learn the toughest fighting art in the world. Garrigan wasn't expecting it to be easy, but he could never have anticipated how demanding the training was going to be. It brought him to levels of physical and mental pain that he never guessed existed. A famous saying in martial arts is that the only person you are really fighting is the person you were yesterday. This is the inspiring tale of how we can all still achieve our dreams no matter how much we have messed up in life.