The Glowing Edge

Category: Boxing

  • I’m looking for a fight

    I didn’t start out that way, honest. I started out just looking for a way to stay in shape despite a crunchy knee that prevented me doing distance runs. And there was that heavy bag that the Husband carted home for the boys that piqued my interest. But even when I shifted gears from regular boxing classes to joining the boxing team, I told everyone that I just wanted to learn technique.

    Hello, have I met me? I’m frankly embarrassed at this flagrant show of self-ignorance. I’m competitive and athletic. I love a challenge that engages mind and body. I’m bossy and overbearing (truly pummel-worthy).

    The fact is that no matter how slowly the ride began, the minute I climbed into an actual boxing ring and had a go at the sweet science, I was hooked. It was exactly like my first roller coaster ride: all the watching and studying just can’t compare to the incredible thrill of a single three-minute round. The need to focus, respond, endure, and deliver with power and speed is a competitive athletic person’s elixir of life.

    So I shamefacedly went to my trainer and began my long speech in which I intended to admit that I would be utterly grateful to her if she could please get me a fight. This year. The sooner the better. Despite what I told her earlier. But first of course I needed to justify my changed position and include some stuff about how dedicated I would be. I had pirated parts of the “Mom, can we keep him, he’ll be real quiet and I promise I’ll feed him every day” speech and re-worked it for my purpose.

    She let me begin without laughing in my face, but as I floundered around with my build-up, she shifted her feet and began looking around the gym for a distraction that might prove more interesting. I relented. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” I asked, embarrassed.

    “Well, yeah,” she told me, kindly not smacking her forehead. Or mine. She waited.

    “I want to fight!” I exclaimed.

    “Well, yeah,” she responded calmly.

    “Can you get me a fight?” I asked, puppy dog hopeful.

    “I can try,” she promised.

    And thus began my fascinating indoctrination into the ways of competitive amateur boxing. Weight classes and rules have changed this year; I have to lose a few pounds in order to be at the top of my weight class (142-152 lbs) rather than the bottom. I have to start saving money because I’ll almost certainly have to travel out of state to get a match, given the dearth of female boxers in the Masters (i.e., old people – 35 and above) class. I need to get very serious about sparring time, conditioning, and training with the team.

    And I can hardly wait.

  • What I Use My Lingerie Bags For

    What I Use My Lingerie Bags For

    Calm down, I’m not really posting about lingerie.

    But you know those nifty little mesh lingerie bags that you are supposed to use in order to keep your delicate lacy whatevers from getting torn up and damaged by the big bad washing machine?

    Yeah, I use them not for lingerie (I’ve been into “nots” today), but for my boxing hand wraps.

    Wraps are about 15 feet long each. Throw two (or worse, four or six) of them in the washing machine with all your other laundry and you have a recipe for wet, irritating, knotted hell. Which I believe is why many boxers don’t wash them. Ever. Which is part of the reason boxing gyms have such an incredible, dog-you-in-your-dreams, worse-than-high-school stink. WASH your wraps, boys. But I digress.

    This little conundrum is easily solved: when you get back from the gym, toss your nasty, stinky, smelly, sweaty hand wraps in a lingerie bag and leave said bag and its vile cargo in the laundry hamper. When your husband is moving clean wash from the washer to the dryer, he finds a tidy little lingerie bag (which gives him a warm feeling) and sees that you have thoughtfully made his job just that much easier. He removes the (not tangled! fresh-smelling!) wet wraps from the lingerie bag and hangs them over the pull-up bar where someone will find and roll them up for you later (your kids will like this job).

    LeSigh. Housekeeping made painless. Boxing made fragrant!

    And you thought it couldn’t be done.

    Image by kizette on Flickr

  • Why I Box

    Why I Box

    I box in a suburban gym. Everything is branded “LA Boxing” in chirpy red and blue. The branding makes me think Hollywood weight loss, and in fact, most people are here to lose weight or get fit. It’s clean, carpeted, and full of sunshine most days. There are no cement floors, wooden pallets, musty lockers. The lockers are tidy cubbyholes like you would see in an elementary school.

    None of this fits with my fantasy of being part of a dark, cramped boxing gym with big, quiet Rocky types or ropy bantamweights and their arthritic old-man trainers. But it’s certainly reflective of my life, none of which ever took place in New York or inner-city Chicago. I’ve lived most of my life in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee or North Carolina. Mine is a universe of shopping malls and bedroom communities, two car garages and Saturdays mowing the lawn.

    Contrary to my initial experience at LA Boxing, there are actually plenty of women at the gym, I just never see most of them. It seems like most of the women go to kickboxing classes and rarely come to a boxing class. It reminds me of the seventies, when great waves of women suddenly decided to sign up for jazzercise and self-defense classes. I never did that, not because I thought anything was wrong with it, but because I was motivated by different things.

    I love having discovered how orderly boxing is. In boxing you have a stance, there are ways you move and duck and punch that remain the same, no matter what. There’s a purity about it that I love.

    I also love the sense of heart and tradition. There’s a lot of theater and drama here, but also a lot of incredibly difficult work, endurance, pain, and even legend associated with boxing.

    Boxing engages my competitive spirit, my desire to be good at something that not everybody wants to do, and my desire to learn from masters. The sport demands my strength, my intellect, my focus, and my patience.

    I train in a suburban gym, but I’m a part of something with history and passion. I don’t box to lose weight. I don’t box in order to be able to defend myself. I box because boxing is beautiful, difficult, and inspiring. There are heroes here, and I want to know and be a part of their greatness.

  • I Got My First Boxing Trophy

    I Got My First Boxing Trophy

    I now have my first boxing trophy and it’s purple. Yesterday it was reddish purple, but it’s trending darker today and headed to black, I suppose, then the normal green and yellow. I’m feeling all Fight Club. I’ve been tilting my chin up and doing show and tell with my “I’ve been eating uppercuts” bruise for anyone who will listen; I don’t know why I’m so proud, but I am. Probably because I blocked more uppercuts than I took on the chin. You gotta let somebody throw ’em before you can learn to block ’em.

    This was about my fifth time in the ring, and I’m finally — finally! — beginning to understand a few things. I blocked a significant number of punches, for the first time seeing that you don’t have to swat or shove a jab away (which takes too much energy) but simply catch or capture it with or between your gloves. I’m also learning to keep my right glove higher and my right elbow tucked in to my ribs against Bonnie’s wicked double left hook. In fact, several times I defended against that fast and nasty punch and countered with a left jab of my own, and I felt like cheering every time. I did shout and dance a little at the end of the second round. Before she took me to the shed for a serious whuppin.

    Here’s how my ringtime — during which I earned my trophy, yay! — went.

    Anticipating the jabs
    My first round I’m feeling great; light on my feet even though I just trained hard for the hour previous. This time I don’t even feel the nerves, I’m just ready to get to it. So we go in, she’s easy on me, we’re both seeing what the other has in store today. After a minute or so I’m suddenly aware that I am anticipating and therefore blocking some of her punches!

    I stop right in the middle, put my hands on my hips and demand, “Are you ‘letting’ me see, or can I just… see these coming??” She gives the kind (and possibly truthful) answer that I’m starting to get a feel for being in the ring. I let out a “Hollaaa!” and drop back into my stance, feeling all bouncy and grinning like an idiot.

    And I eat a few punches ’cause I’m too busy celebrating and not paying attention. My trophy is being constructed. I settle in and she throws a dozen in quick succession and I get better at blocking them. Some of them. These are jabs, though, not her meanest punch. By the final bell I’m pretty full of myself.

    From flight to fight, thinking ability returning
    The next round I have combos in my head for the first time ever. I’m amazed for the second time in six minutes! Up until now I’ve been so overwhelmed in the ring that I just can’t think. It’s been all I could do to… well, to be blunt, to not run away. I know it sounds funny but there it is.

    You’ve heard of fight or flight? It’s true. And my “flight” siren seems to get tripped far more than my “fight” indicator. So one of my major battles in the ring has been to toggle that switch over to the other side. And today I’m not only blocking punches (and not running away) but I have combos in my head and can throw them!

    I spend enough time marveling over this minor miracle that I eat more yummy punches. This is gonna be a great trophy when it gets here.

    Surviving
    The third round is the kicker. Between bells Bonnie waves me over. School is in session, she says, and it’s time to Bring It. She tells me to not hold back, to throw what I have, that we’re gonna do this thing. I’m breathing hard but still excited. That only lasts for another minute.

    I don’t know it yet, but I’m about to wish I had an oxygen mask and an ice pack. And possibly a bucket to puke in. Trophy time, coming right up!

    It’s just amazing how hard you can work in three teensy minutes. I mainly remember the sound of her punches, the way the air hisses between her teeth when she gets rolling. I move quickly from attack mode to defend mode to please-God-let-the-bell-ring mode.

    In boxing there’s a warning bell 30 seconds before the round actually ends. It can either be a signal for your final sprint, or it can make you think that if you had enough air you could break into great heaving sobs. You might be able to guess which it is for me.

    Once, only once, Bonnie gives me an out: “You okay?” she asks, no hint of a grin on her face. “Come on,” I tell her, like Rocky to Apollo Creed in the twelfth.

    I make it, crawl out of the ring, wrench off my headgear and spit out my mouthguard. The single imperative of my body is to breathe. Oxygen is wonderful. I don’t even feel the purple spread of the trophy bruise on my chin.

    I can hardly wait to do it again.

    *************************

    Note, added later: The next time I donned headgear to spar again I realized that the real reason I had a massive bruise on my chin was because the headgear itself has a metal or plastic bar through the chin piece. Sucky, nasty, thing! As soon as I took my first good hit I felt that bar bang against my chin bone, and I realized that even though I ended up with a nasty bruise before, it wasn’t necessarily due to uppercuts, but really any shot that landed to that headgear. I don’t wear that headgear any more. (I still get bruised, but they’re different bruises!)

    *************************

    Image by balt-arts on Flickr.

  • Getting in Boxing Shape: How Many Ice Packs Does One Need?

    Getting in Boxing Shape: How Many Ice Packs Does One Need?

    I would like to pretend otherwise, but after my first boxing class I hurt so badly I could not sleep soundly for about five nights in succession.

    I would wake up in tears just trying to roll over in bed. I did that thing where you hook some part of your body that isn’t in severe pain (foot? elbow? fingers?) over the edge of the mattress and try to haul the rest of your body into a less agonizing position before falling back into an exhausted half-sleep.

    And it isn’t like I wasn’t in reasonable shape, either. I could easily run a 5k and I went to the gym two or three times a week. I’ve given birth three times at home with no drugs; it hurt. Getting over my first boxing class was worse.

    After the initial shock I began to adjust. I was able to go to one class a week, then two. For the first three months or so I needed an icepack pretty nearly every time I came home. Since I have three boys, we already had one standard-grade icepack in the freezer. It stays cool-ish for about 15 minutes and has soothed many a contusion and more than a few sprains, strains, and black eyes over the years, but I had no idea just how small and inadequate it was until I started boxing.

    My local drugstore got me the hookup, though. I gratefully and without whining paid fifteen dollars for a Serious Icepack, the kind that is wretchedly, blissfully, miserably ice-freaking-cold for a good 80 minutes or so; nothing namby–pamby about that bad girl. You can do unanesthetized surgery on yourself after using that thing for a half hour.

    It has one slick and exposed-to-the glacial-ice side, and one covered-by-fabric but still arctic side, plus a looong industrial-grade four-inch-wide strap with Velcro and a buckle so that you can affix that mother to your dying flesh and still be able to mix a Bloody Mary.

    Problem was, the Serious Icepack was frequently a great boon to my shoulder, but my wrist or elbow or knee would still be crying silently in the waiting room, begging to be moved out of triage and into the trauma room where people were paying attention.

    So I went back to the drugstore and got a second Serious Icepack.

    And truth be told, there were times when I wasn’t ashamed to have three ice packs on various parts of my body doing their stop-the-pain routine. But I was actually too much of a weenie to return to the drugstore (although on reflection, I could have gone to a different drugstore) for another ice pack so I just used peas.

    Peas are great. Not arctic circle great, but still pretty decent little helpers. I kept some at work too. No one notices that you’re defrosting dinner on your knee if you roll your chair up close to your desk.

    Image by Juan-Vidal on Flickr

  • Boxing Update: Curiosity Killed the Cat

    Ok, when I first posted about learning to box, I promised to keep you up to date. Those of you who see me regularly in real life have trouble getting me to Shut. Up. about it already. I even convinced one of my instructors to let me film him for 12seconds.tv (he’s a machine).

    Up until now I’ve been working on a heavy bag, the focus mitts (a little) and that’s about it. So yesterday I stepped in to talk to the woman who runs LA Boxing here in Cary, Bonnie “Queen B” Mann, professional boxer for 13 years and world championship title holder — the first woman from NC to take home the Big Belt. And it IS a Big mamma-jamma Belt. I actually stepped in to talk to Bonnie about coming with me to a networking event for which I was the keynote speaker; I planned to use boxing as an illustration for how to get started with social media.

    As we were chatting, I mentioned my intense curiosity about what it would be like to actually get in the ring and throw a punch at a real person.

    You know what they say about curiosity and the cat?

    Now it’s on, baby. I’m getting special dispensation to miss church on Sunday (gasp!) in order to show up for her class, after which she’s gonna gear up and put me in the ring with her. Understand, now — Bonnie will not be throwing any punches. I’m supposed to punch her. Never fear, there’s no actual chance that she will be injured in any way. Please worry about me, however.

    I was fine fine fine on the heavy bag. Fine, I tell you. Aaargh.

    It gets worse. Remember the speech about boxing and social media? Well, Bonnie DID come when I spoke at Cisco about social media, and she brought her giant championship belt, too. I politely introduced her, raved about boxing, told everyone I was having my debut with Bonnie in the ring on Sunday, ha ha, ended my happy little speech, and started Q & A.

    And a woman in the back raised her hand and asked if my bout with Bonnie was going to be broadcast on video. I may have reacted somewhat strongly with my “Absolutely not!” because I saw a dozen sneaky grins light up in the room.

    People, this is NOT something you want to see. If you’ve gone out clubbing with me, you know how dorky and ridiculous I look when I dance. It’s not like Elaine bad, but it’s bad. I’m probably at least that dorky looking when I box.

    I hope for your sake that it’s not bad enough to be viral.

  • It’s Not Looking So Good for me


    Ok, I had a lot of fun doing this 15 question quiz, which I found on Lyell Peterson’s blog (he’s got a 48% chance of survival and I only have a 16% chance to make it out alive), BUT I have a few comments I need to make:

    1. On question #7, where they asked if I owned a sharp or blunt weapon like a crowbar, baseball bat or machete, I had to admit that I didn’t (although there may be one in the garage?). However, I own boxing gloves and I really wanted at least a half point for that. Please up my percentage slightly.

    2. On question #13, which wanted to know if I knew how to make molotov cocktails, I decided to say “I could probably figure out how to blow something up” simply because I have three sons, who are all pyros. That counts, right?

    You people need to take the quiz. If you score higher, I’ll stick with you. But mostly I’m counting on us NOT having a Zombie Apocalypse.

    (I’m kinda digging the fact that I’ll have the tags “zombies, death, boxing, and explosives” on this post.)

  • Tag Cloud Art!

    I just discovered Wordle. You feed it text, you get art. Tweak the art, post it to a gallery. Repeat as needed! It’s quite addictive, but I’m sure I can stop anytime I want to.

    The first piece below read the last few posts on my blog. The next one I put in the text of a post I’m working on about my wedding, and I added our names several times in order to get them to show up big. I did a little tweaking on that one.

    For the last one, I only entered the text of my boxing post, and didn’t tweak a thing.

    Make your own! Upload to Flickr! Send to friends! Make stuff!
    What did we do before the internets?

    Worm Cloud

    Wedding Cloud

    Boxing Cloud

  • I’m Learning to Box

    It sounded good at the time, anyway. This summer I decided to shift away from running as my main aerobic exercise since I felt like I was always complaining about how many miles I wasn’t able to do. My right knee has that distinctive Rice Krispies sound that tells me I may have to schedule a doctor’s visit in a few years and I probably won’t like what I hear when I do it. So, in classic avoidance technique I decided I should shift to boxing. Me smart.

    Me hurt now.

    After a month of anticipation, phone calls, and research (I watched Rocky and browsed fashionable boxing accessories), I had my first boxing class today.

    Apparently boxing is like church: no one arrives until after everything begins. But I was there, and after the instructor helped me wrap my hands, he tossed me a pair of gloves, put me front and center and we were off and running. People drifted in while he put us through a basic full-body callisthenic routine, and once we began punching combinations on the heavy bags the serious sweat began to flow.

    The words “speed rounds” may give me nightmares tonight. I kept my feet moving (boxing is more like running than I knew) and my hands up (mostly). Who knew two 14 oz. gloves could weigh as much as anvils? Or — and let me say this is the worst part of boxing so far, worse even than the pain I feel right now before the aspirin kicks in — stink so horribly?? Next order of business: get my own gloves. Which I’m sure will always emit the fragrance of fresh and dewy roses.

    Speaking of roses, I was the only woman in my class today. And it could be that I wasn’t dressed appropriately, but I won’t know that until I see what other women wear. The standard outfit I saw on the guys consisted of ginormous baggy shorts, skull motif tee shirts, and ragged sneakers. Scruffy is presumably the way to go, and my trim aerobics shorts and cheery sport tank were decidedly out of place. Also, today I noticed that I’m really tall. Everyone else is crouched down, hunched into their punching bags. I move less like Muhommad Ali and more like Gumby. Maybe later I’ll get the gist of that “float like a butterfly” thing.

    Overall, I kept up. I was in better aerobic shape than most of the guys there, although I’m sure my punches are about as hard as room temperature butter, and I just laughed and laid on the floor when the instructor called for (and snapped off) fifty push-ups during the “cool down.” Riiiight.

    My shoulders, upper back, and neck are all crying for a three-day vacation in Maui with complimentary Mai Tai’s now, but I’m mentally psyched, and I find myself saying “Yo, Adrian!” when I see someone in the hall. I’ll let you know how it goes.