When she was a teenager, Leanna Martinez’s sole dream was to become a professional boxer when she turned 18.
That never happened, as injuries and a nursing degree from Northern New Mexico College got in the way of her goal.
Now, at 25, Martinez is refusing to give up on the dream she held when she was younger and after recent amateur success, she is set to make her pro debut at the Buffalo Thunder Resort and Casino under the Holmes Boxing banner.
She will square off, Sept. 30, against Sanaz Khamisi, an Iranian national who now fights out of Hobbs.
With a week-and-a-half until the fight is set to happen, Martinez is understandably nervous, although Khamisi is inexperienced in the pro arena as well, with one fight to her name that ended with her being knocked out.
From watching clips of Khamisi’s one fight, Martinez already has an idea of the disadvantages with which she will be faced — primarily that Khamisi is bigger and taller.
“The opponent has the advantage in her case, because she is fighting in the weight that she walks around at,” Martinez’s trainer Pat Holmes said. “She is going to be 113 (pounds). And somebody else is going to be able to come down. And the next night when they hydrate, I am sure they are going to have an advantage over her — maybe eight or nine pounds.”
Additionally, Khamisi will have a longer reach than the 4-foot-11 Martinez – a fact she will have to work around by sticking to her own fast-paced, busy style.
To keep up with her strategy in the ring, she has been conditioning and training like never before, running six to eight miles daily or biking 10 miles on Borrego Mesa, near her home in Cordova.
“This has been pretty intense training,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever trained this hard in my life. I have upped my running a lot. The training in the gym is way more intense.”
Martinez is hoping her fitness and preparation will alleviate some of her inexperience as a professional and she is planning for a differently paced match than she fought in the amateurs.
Untimely death
In the midst of all of this training, Martinez has had to deal with a similarly difficult personal life, dealing with her self-employed job in home healthcare as a registered nurse, but more troubling, the death of her great-grandmother, Clara Martinez, two weeks ago.
“When I wasn’t training or working or traveling, because I travel a lot for my job, I was with my grandma while she was dying,” she said. “It was a lot mentally and emotionally, and then trying to focus on training and keep my head where it needed to be, as far as the fight goes.”
Martinez’s great-grandmother was one of her biggest fans and went to all of her amateur fights. Denise Martinez, Leanna Martinez’s mother, said she would have been thrilled to make it to Leanna Martinez’s first professional fight.
Through the process of spending as much time as possible with her great-grandmother, Leanna Martinez did manage to find time to continue her training, although balancing the two was stressful.
“She has had a little adversity in her life, to say the least, right now,” Holmes said. “This is the time that makes fighters.”
Teenage dream
“She was a young teenager in her early teens, and she just came to us one day and said, ‘You know I really want to train for boxing,’” Denise Martinez said. “It was pretty surprising at the time. I thought it would be a good motivation for her to do well in school.”
Out of the blue, Leanna Martinez decided she wanted to take up boxing, around the age of 13.
Growing up in a household with two older brothers picking on her, she formed an aggressive streak.
Leanna Martinez began her training in Los Alamos, working with Raymond Rubio, before transitioning to work with Monica Lovato, a female fighter from Española.
Leanna Martinez ended up losing her first amateur fight as a teenager, but that did not stifle her serious case of boxing fever.
Seeing the motivation that Leanna Martinez has for the sport of boxing has won the support of her entire family, whether that is her father jogging alongside her in Cordova, or her brothers driving her to training before she was 16.
“We’re a big family, and we all pretty much stay together,” Joseph Martinez, Leanna Martinez’s father, said. “Whenever she has something going on, it’s like the whole family is involved. So she has a lot of support from everybody.”