THE hard work has really started ahead of my fight at London's O2 Arena on October 16.

You may have seen me pounding the streets of Nottingham doing my runs – yep, even in the rain.

I've spent the last five months in LA, retooling myself for another run at the UFC World welterweight championship after losing to Georges St-Pierre in New Jersey last March.

I can't wait for UFC 120. My opponent, Carlos Condit, is a former world champion who has only lost once – a split decision – in nearly five years.

He's a very tough opponent, but he is getting dropped like a toilet seat.

Condit had the gall to go to the UFC to demand to fight me. For that I will knock the stupid out of him.

I will be training the whole time in Nottingham, alongside my Rough House teammates, including Dean Amasinger, who just became a dad.

The UFC tell me that there are less than 400 tickets left for the 22,000 seater O2 Arena, so it will be an amazing atmosphere on the night.

But that's still a couple of months away. When I got back to Nottingham a few weeks ago, I was expecting the apartment to be in a mess. But my mum, bless her, had been in and given it a right tidy. Thanks mum!

Now I've got to wait until my girlfriend, Elizabeth, gets here from LA to do my washing up.

Honestly, she loves it. Whenever she has some sort of work-related problem to think about, she does the washing up and goes into some sort of Zen-like trance. It relaxes her and, well, she's going to have a very relaxing time in Nottingham when she gets here.

Other than getting back into training, I've been doing fan signings up and down the country, promoting the UFC's Undisputed 2010 video game, which I am in.

We had a couple of hundred show up in Newcastle, about 600 in Sheffield and, and this really surprised me, about 600 showed up on a rainy Thursday afternoon to the Gamestation store in Nottingham as well. It is very weird to think of people who you walk past every day on the streets or line up behind in the post office wanting your autograph.

So I was a little taken aback when I saw the line going up the street and BBC Nottingham cameras waiting for me.

Myself and fellow Team Rough House fighter Andre Winner (who alongside another Rough Houser, Nick Osipczak, fights at UFC 118 in Boston today) signed for three hours. The fans were great – and not just the local ones. Some of them had driven for hours to get here. It is very humbling, especially when it is young kids, wearing 'Outlaw' Mohawks, who have begged their poor dads to take a day off work to drive them there.

One dad told me he's driven from Bristol because his two kids, aged 12 and 11, wanted, my autograph.

Another fan, named Darren Broadfoot who runs one of my Facebook pages, had come straight from a nightshift in London and was immediately heading straight back down to work again.

I am a very motivated guy anyway, I love winning and I love pushing myself.

But meeting hundreds and hundreds of people who all want me to win in October has given me even more motivation... at least enough to brave the Nottingham rain.

Believe it or not, I was out at a cricket match in Clifton the other day.

I don't usually watch cricket but I had a friend playing, well, my future brother-in-law actually!

UFC 118 is in Boston this weekend, featuring the UFC lightweight title fight between Frankie Edgar and BJ Penn plus boxing legend James Toney climbing into the Octagon to face UFC legend Randy Couture.

A boxer just isn't prepared for a MMA fight. Boxing is only a small part of the skill set you need and they are two different sports.

Toney is a sprinter entering the decathlon, but I admire him for backing his mouth up.

UFC 120 tickets are available at ticketmaster.co.uk