Yon the first days of her training camp in the Caribbean, Nina Meinke felt like she weighed a ton. Everything hurt, every movement with temperatures of more than thirty degrees Celsius and humidity of almost one hundred percent. The Berliner's dark blonde hair became soaked in her black helmet during the fight. Her sweat ran across the patched floor of the ring at the Kid Dinamita Boxing Pavilion in Puerto Plata. She sometimes she was about to vomit. But neither the Dominican boys at the gym nor the hired sparring partners gave up. “I've been through hell and back. My training partners pushed me to the limit,” says Nina Meinke.

That's exactly how she wanted it. The world and European featherweight champion has done crazy things in her boxing career. “But on a scale of one to ten, now it's an eleven,” says the 30-year-old woman, who just returned to her apartment from a run and was looking for a place where digital telephony works.