The Glowing Edge

Tag: messy

What Makes Sparring with New Boxers Really Good, or Really Awful
Thursday night is sparring night in our gym. Not everyone gets to spar; only the boxers who have been showing up regularly, putting in hard work, listening to the coach, and proving that they want to move up are invited into the ring.

But all that doesn’t guarantee a good sparring performance. I’m always fascinated about the ways our coach, Willie “One Bad Jab” Massey subtly rewards the boxers who give him what he’s looking for…

Last night there was a huge crowd; it seems like boxers come in waves to the program at Second Round, and we seem to be in the midst of a heavy influx. I counted four young women (ages 12 to 17, I’d guess), which is fairly unusual; and we don’t have a high retention rate for females.

So I was surprised when it came time for sparring, when Coach Massey pulled about 6 guys (all of whom I’d seen in the ring before)…and a young woman from the crowd.

Our gym typically spars the youngest or newest fighters first, and since the young woman was new, the coach didn’t put her in headgear, just gloved her up and put her in to work offense only with me. I noticed that two of the other girls pushed up through the crowd of guys to watch at the ring side.

Good: A straight, clean jab to the face (and body)

She had a completely respectable jab. It was straight, fully extended, and powerful. But even though we are about the same height, her first shots were aimed at my gloves and shoulders. “Punch to my face,” I told her over my mouthpiece, and she raised her eyebrows, hesitated a moment, then fired an easy one. I turned it neatly in the palm of my glove and nodded. “Yep,” I said, “Again.”

As she began to realize I could avoid all her punches, she gained confidence. Punches began to smack as I turned each one, and a few didn’t make any sound when I began to add slips to my defense.

Good: Throwing shots with varied timing, doubles

She started out a bit predictable, her shots coming at me as if they were being fired by the second hand on a clock, but again, once I told her to vary her timing, she immediately adapted, which gave me a rush of satisfaction.

And she didn’t immediately forget, either. I saw the coach starting to notice her from the side of the ring. “Double the jab,” he said, and after a few tries, she delivered. The tendency, when you’re new, is to not know that you have to bring the jab back to your face before shooting again — you try to throw once, tap twice, and it doesn’t work for a beginner. She fumbled the first few, but then got a double going.

Good: Finding and maintaining the right range

I realized she could do more, and I began to add footwork to my defense. She was a bit too squared up (most new boxers are), but I began to pivot and shift, forcing her to come to me to land her shots.

The first step in starting to move around the ring with a sparring partner is learning how much room you need to land a shot on your opponent. Some shots fall short, some are smothered (if your opponent drives in); you have to find just the right range and work it. She had a pretty decent sense of range for a beginner, and I could tell more would come quickly.

Once I turned on a little footwork gas, she ended up doing a fair amount of chasing me around the ring, but learning to “cut off the ring” will come later as well. She had basics, and she had…

Good: Sufficient cardio for at least 1-2 rounds in a row

It’s not at all unusual to think you have enough gas for a single round of boxing, and be dead wrong. Boxing demands anaerobic capacity, which is only developed with sprint training. That might be running sprints, but it can also be sprints flipping a tire, or doing kettlebells, hill cycling, or any exercise where you can get to your max heart rate and go for 2 or 3 minutes, then recover in 30 seconds and go again.

This young woman stuck it out for two rounds before rolling out, and I think she had another one in her. Of course, being on offense only is a bit easier, but even so, her ability to work until the bell sounded was reassuring.

I’ll look forward to seeing her back in the ring again, and I’ll hope that the other new girls will learn from her example.

After she and I did a couple of rounds, and I worked a few more with two other boxers, I rolled out and let a couple of brawlers in.

Awful: Brawling

There are so many reasons why we decide to roll under the ropes, and ego is often a part of it. But mix ego with bad technique (or no technique), and you typically end up with a brawl. We don’t always have two brawlers in the ring, but just one is enough to make a mess of the round.

And the unfortunate truth is that the brawler often won’t listen to instruction, which means our coach probably won’t waste much energy trying to teach him. Which is a shame, because that leaves the brawler in the same low position in the gym and ring, not improving his boxing.

Here’s what you typically see in a brawler:
- Superman-style punch launches, where both feet come off the ground
- Off-balance fighting, sometimes falling to the canvas
- Illegal shots to the back of the head
- Lengthy clinching, sometimes with with knees thrown
- Sloppy, slappy shots with wide, windmilling arms
Sometimes you get profanity too, when a brawler feels he can’t get the better of someone. We don’t hear too much of that at my gym because Coach Massey will shut down the offenders pretty quickly, and he’s not prone to let them box again if they can’t control themselves.

I don’t often get in with beginner brawlers, and prefer instead to let the big, experienced boxers take them on. But you don’t always have that, so sometimes you just end up with a mess. And, it’s there in pretty much every boxing gym you’ll ever be a part of.

Interestingly, there ARE great boxers who are good at what they call brawling. But you’ll not see the messy stuff in the list above in their style. Instead, you’ll simply see an agressive, powerful, sometimes non-technical match — it can be incredibly exciting to watch.

What about you?

What do you see in your gym? Leave me a comment and tell me about what it was like when you started, or boxers and brawlers you’ve seen in the ring…

Image: Marco Crupi, cc
March 11, 2013
The Hairball to Joy Ratio in Competitive Boxing

I’m still in that slightly blurry stage of tired where I don’t seem to have much to say about losing my fight in Atlanta this week. Actually, I have plenty to say (it’s what I do, no?), but very little of it is about the fight itself. I think part of that is the fact that my 6 minutes of actual boxing were overwhelmed by all the other craziness involved in making this happen.

There’s this giant hairball which goes with boxing that can sometimes overwhelm the joy of the sport, and I think I’ve spent a lot of time experiencing the hairball (and poking, prodding, and trying to untangle the wretched, nasty thing) and my hairball vs. joy ratio is out of balance this time.

Am I disappointed that I lost? Fuck yeah. Who isn’t? But it’s also really okay in another sense. I had a marvelous opponent (of whom I made a new friend), got to hang out for a very little while in a sparkling firework of a town with a range of interesting people, and was privileged to fight in an extremely well put-together event.

I lost primarily for two reasons.

1. I was feeling incredibly cold and low-energy and didn’t move enough. She was pretty good with her feet. (All that pro tennis she used to play, if I had to guess.)

2. While I could work my defense pretty well by the second and third rounds, I absolutely failed to get inside her longer reach to build up my score. She had a long right cross that scored most of her points.

Really, that’s it. It wasn’t a horrible fight or anything; and if it had been sparring I would have asked for another 5 rounds and we both would have gotten some good work in. So, overall the actual fight — while I didn’t perform like I wanted to — was really okay. And I would LOVE to box with her again, truly.

But that 6 minutes counted for maybe 5% of the whole experience.

The rest was a giant, pulsing hairball of…doom. Or irritation, if I dial back the dramatic echo a bit.

And I can see you want to know more, more, more! So let me see if I can unpack some of the hairball for you, you lucky, lucky reader. If you’ve some experience of competitive boxing of your own, you already know much of this, but if not, you may be interested in seeing how the other 95% of training for and experiencing an actual match can sometimes be.

If you’re already fit, don’t do a long training camp

This is the first time I can ever remember where I simply got sick and tired of training. Training ate my life this time, and I crashed and burned, and (sort of) recovered. I didn’t enjoy this one the way I normally enjoy boxing training. It was just too much. Biggest lesson learned? Shorter training period! 6 weeks sounds good. More sounds like overkill.

The single best way to train for a fight is to spar

This was also the first time I have ever trained for a fight and had so little sparring. I was able to get weekly sparring up until Christmas, then only one sparring session in the month before the fight. Sessions were repeatedly cancelled, sparring partners were out of town, and other normal things.

So I didn’t get sparring. And I still believe that the single best way to get ready for a fight is to spar. Once a week, minimum; twice a week is better. At least 5 to 8 rounds each time. (Along with your other training, of course.)

It’s hard to hold weight steady when life is crazy

I was having trouble controlling my weight in the last few days before my fight. I wanted to weigh in at exactly 145, but two days before the fight I was 144, the day before I was 143, and somehow during the long drive to Atlanta I lost yet another couple of pounds.

I know those truckers thought I was nuts when I hauled my scale out onto the rest stop parking lots, kicked off my shoes, and weighed myself three or four times. If my weight dropped below 140 I could lose my fight, and I arrived at the hotel before weigh-ins at 141. During the drive down I’d been eating power bars, pouring water down my throat and trying not to pee. And most of all, I was twisting myself into a knot worrying about it.

In the end, it all worked out — I just barely tipped 144 at weigh-ins. And had the best pee of my life immediately afterwards. Still, no fun was had.

You want to be good at handling unexpected events

I hate surprises. I try to factor as many of them out in advance as I possibly can. It didn’t work out so well this time.

I was running close on time getting to my hotel, and because I couldn’t find a place to park anywhere to go check in, I got a little lost looking for a spot. Then I got lost, period. (No, I don’t have a GPS.)

When I slipped into a vacant slot on the street and got out of my car to go see the names of the next cross-street up, the meter guy came and started to ticket me. I ran back and stopped him but was too angry and in a hurry to ask him for directions. I got out of there, quickly, found another spot, and logged on someone’s unlocked internet access and checked Google Maps, keeping my engine idling and watching for overzealous meter ticketers.

Eventually I found my hotel again, discovered a metered parking slot after circling a few times, then the parking meter wouldn’t take my dollars. I put in the few coins I dug out of the bottom of my purse and bought just enough time to race into the hotel to check in and ask where their damn hotel parking was.

That was when I learned that downtown hotels don’t provide parking for guests. You pay a good bit extra for that ($25/day), and if you plan to use a parking garage rather than the hotel valet, you have to pay every time you come and go.

I raced over to two nearby garages, mindful of my meter time running out, and asked two very annoyed parking attendants for rates. I did some quick calculations and realized I’d have to pay the whole day rate more than once a day (due to coming and going), so I booked it back to the hotel and told the hotel valet where my car was parked and hoped he’d hurry, because my meter time was out.

And by the thundering waves of Poseidon, I had to pee.

By the time I got up to my hotel room, I saw that my weight was perilously close to 140. Shit. And the only travel food I had left was an apple and (I’m going to admit this) a few Corn Nuts. I ate it all, and chugged water. I had to get to the weigh-ins, and I was pulled about as tight as a Joan Rivers facelift.

The giant hairball was gaining girth and momentum.

Beware of drinking, odd food, and sleepless nights

I hope I’m far too smart to screw up by drinking too much the night before a fight (I only had one much-enjoyed cocktail after weigh-ins), but I sometimes forget the many other factors that go into lowering your performance levels and increasing your stress.

I wish I had brought my own foods. I normally always do this, because I am such a weird eater. I love to talk about junk food, but the truth is that I eat extremely clean most of the time. Almost no fast food, no processed stuff, no fast carbs, no refined sugars. All of which is fine, until you go on a trip and eat whatever is available. Vending machine garbage, fried food, white bread and pasta, etc. After a (too) long training camp of stricter-than-usual eating, I didn’t realize how hard the crap food would hit me. BYOF, y’all.

Add to this mix a shortage of sleep. Is it hard for you to sleep in a strange place, too? I remembered to bring some over-the-counter sleeping pills, but they don’t always work. Feh. Bleary.

I walked downtown with a crazy friend (Hi, Amy) to Peachtree Center and had a great brunch on fight day though. Kale, grilled chicken, broccoli, mushrooms…real food at Cafe Momo.

Unfortunately, that was the last time I had a chance to eat before the fight. BYOF, as above.

Triple your estimate for the time you’ll spend WAITING

The hours of waiting feel endless, like sitting through the 1934 version of Les Miserables (running time 5 hours, 5 minutes) followed by 2012’s Rock of Ages (2 hours, but feels like 9).

This is possibly the single factor I hate the most about ANY official fight, and the reason why sparring is the real joy-filled heartbeat of boxing for me.

There are good reasons for all the waiting you’ll do. At weigh-ins, boxers not only weigh in and have their passbooks and gear checked, but they all have to go through a physical, usually with only a single physician in attendance. I’ve been at some fight nights where there were over 60 boxers, all of whom waited for 3 or 4 hours in order to be checked out. (Then they had to wait for their turn to fight.)

Fights are expensive to put on, almost nobody is paid, and it’s a logistical nightmare unless you have dozens of volunteers who already know the routine and can help everyone get where they need to be in an orderly or timely fashion. Even when you have enough volunteers, it’s a lot of thankless work, and it takes a lot of prep time to pull one off, even on the day of the event.

Fighters typically have to be at a venue at least a few hours in advance of start time; for this particular night the cab dropped me off around 4:30 pm, and the event was set for 7 pm. That was kind of a record for me, only having to be there 2 hours or so in advance, although of course then I had to wait another several hours to fight. At my last fight weigh-ins started at 9 am, and fights didn’t begin until that same evening.

In this case, I had six hours of waiting at the event for six minutes of ring time. That’s a suck burrito, baby.

The fancy is for the audience

Most amateur fight nights, you’ll be lucky to have a folding chair to sit on, whether you’re a boxer or not. But even the time I did an exhibition match at a big-arena pro fight where the arena was nice, the digs for the boxers were still pretty grim. Pretty much everyone was crammed into a tiny 8×10 room with ancient carpet and a grimy couch; hands were wrapped by coaches in the narrow hallway as fighters shadowboxed, and there was always a wait to use the sole bathroom.

Unlike most amateur fight nights, the venue for my recent match was gorgeous, with spotlights, a DJ, a three-piece jazz band, bartenders and caterers with spreads laid out on crisp white linens for fight attendees. Valets opened doors for women in sequined gowns and 4-inch heels, who strolled on the arms of their impeccably-dressed men down a red carpet (not kidding) to a brilliantly and professionally lit step-and-repeat for photo ops.

The fighters, however, were sequestered behind a filmy curtain in a long, narrow strip at the far edge of the main event room. For some reason, there seemed to be a shortage of chairs, and all of the 6 or 8 chairs that could be snagged were appropriated by coaches for hand-wrapping. Everyone else stood, sat, or laid down on the poured concrete floor, which was fiercely cold.

The doors to the venue were all kept open so that the crisp January breeze flowed through during the long hours of waiting before the official start time arrived, making that concrete floor particularly wicked. I spread my thin scarf out to keep something between me and that vicious concrete, and laid down like many of the other fighters with my head resting on my gear bag. I kept both my lightweight jacket and my heavier coat on until shortly before I walked out for my fight. I don’t know how all the women in cocktail dresses kept warm; it’s hard to imagine I was the only hothouse flower in the place.

By the time of my match I was feeling like someone had laid a sizzling-hot curling iron down the back of my throat. Even two days later my throat is still painfully sore. I’m pretty sure it was that damned cold concrete and chilly breeze.

But this is the sort of thing you simply ignore. It’s part of boxing. The fancy is for the audience, and if they were as tough as you, they’d be waiting to get in the ring while you sipped your third dirty martini and smiled for the camera.

Whine if you must, but suck it up. You might not be able to make the hairball your friend, but it’s damn well gonna be your roomie.

Brace yourself for human drama cyclones

I took my iPod and earbuds, but there’s only so much you can do about the human drama happening all around you. Hell, even I turn into a human drama cyclone (albiet a smallish, boring one) in the 15 minutes or so before I roll under the ropes. Boxing calls up strong emotions in everyone, and when you’re in extremis, all your wretched, painful baggage comes barreling to the fore.

Worried about money? You’ll feel it strongly before your fight. Just split up with a boyfriend? You’ll be consumed with it before your fight. Shit going down at work, home, where ever… it’s all going to choke you like a mouthful of rancid, greasy flour and you’ll wish you could spit it out and get a clean breath of air and a double vodka to clear your head and dull your pain. Good luck with that.

You have nothing to do but wait, for hours and hours. You’re most likely going to be in uncomfortable spaces. You’ll do nearly anything to avoid having to obsess about your fight. So you’ll probably interact with the other boxers, hear their stories, and because emotions are so ungodly high, be buffeted about by their dramas.

And because every boxing match has a loser, you’ll see the women who are crushed by their loss, and the guys who had no idea they’d be taken down the way they were. There will be cursing, frustration, tears.

I do try to insulate myself emotionally from some of it, but the truth is I’m also compelled by it. I can’t help but want to hear the stories and be a part of the incredible, scary, wonderful, terrifying thing that is happening to all of us together.

But it’s also exhausting.

You may have to fight stone cold

I surfed the seas of human emotion for nearly the entire wait. I had a few minutes of joy shortly before fighting, followed by a miserable realization that I was feeling emotionally and physically tired, stiff, and absolutely freezing cold. Also my throat hurt like flaming hell. I asked someone to work pads with me for a few minutes and just that few minutes left me oddly weary. Trouble on the horizon.

I was so chilled down during my first round I couldn’t get my body to move. That warmed up a bit as we went, but 6 minutes does not give you much time; you gotta work your ass off or risk losing the fight. I was barely moving and it was all over before I ever felt warm. I certainly never broke a sweat.

This was the first time I considered that I may actually fight better in the heat than in the cold. But this was just one small tangle in the giant hairball, and not even a particularly unusual one. Most amateur events are held in gyms and community spaces that are drafty in winter and stifling in summer. For that matter, most boxing gyms don’t have reliable heating and cooling. Working HVAC is not something a boxer should need to function well.

Factor in the toll that travel takes

For me it wasn’t so much the 7 hours or so that it took to get to my fight location; it was more about the other hairball components, including getting around while in Atlanta. And getting home, which was a nightmare.

I don’t have a GPS, but I had run off a series of Google maps: How to get to my hotel downtown (noting one-way streets), how to get to and from the weigh-ins from my hotel (which was walking distance), and how to get to and from the fight venue from my hotel. All of my maps were essentially useless for various reasons, and in the end it felt like so much stress that I simply decided to hire a cab to get me where I needed to go. Which, of course, also drove up the cost of the trip (3 tanks of gas, 2 nights in a hotel, two nights of hotel parking, cab fares, tips, a couple of meals — around $300).

The real stressor in this case was getting home again the next day, as an ice storm moved in and forced me to change my travel route in order to try and stay ahead of the worst of the weather.

My slightly lengthier route helped me avoid the storm for the first 6 hours, then I crossed the NC state line and the sleet wall hit me like a sledgehammer. Traffic slowed to a crawl as we struggled to drive on sheets of packed ice, with more sleet falling hard. I passed at least 10 wrecks, including one pickup truck flipped over onto its cab. I drove between 15 and 30 miles an hour for the next three hours in low visibility and terrible conditions, finally arriving home as my wiper blades were failing and the right half of my windshield was entirely obscured by ice. I had to break a heavy layer of ice just to get my door open.

I hate winter.

And 3000 words later…

I’m ready for a break. I’m ready to recover the joy of boxing, which I find most in sparring. My next fight will damn sure be in-state, and if I can have TWO big wishes, during warm weather.

Meanwhile, I’ve vented a bit about the hairball of competitive boxing, and I can’t believe you actually read the whole gawdawful thing. I love you for that.

And I love boxing, I truly do. But it ain’t no bed of pink Bourbon roses, y’all.

Special high-fives to my worthy and powerful fight opponent Lisa Belcher, the incredible boxing women of Atlanta, and Terri Moss, promoter of Atlanta Corporate Fight Night. More fist bumps to Cheryl Smyth and Connie Gomez-Joines, NC boxing girlfriends who made the long trip to see the fights, loaned me boxing gloves at the last possible minute, bought me drinks, loved me despite my moodiness, served as my “entourage,” and who just may be on a future ACFN card.

And most of all to YOU. For cheering, listening, and continuing to push along with me on this crazy-ass journey of ours. You inspire and amaze me.

PS: I had my long-awaited Cinnabon cinnamon roll tonight, sore throat be damned. It was amazingly delicious.

Image by Action Fighter Media

January 27, 2013
The Geography of Boxing Guts

There is a visually simple way to understand where you are — and change your position — on the fear scale in boxing.

Sparring can be scary, of that there’s no doubt. And there’s always dread to overcome when making the decision to roll under those ropes. But there’s actually a very physical way to shift yourself forward and make it into the ring.

The first thing you need to understand is the difference between a regular sparring night and a hard sparring night, because if you are going to see the absolute truth about where you stand and make real progress in shifting yourself forward in boxing, you need a hard sparring night.

On a hard sparring night, things get very clear, very quickly.

A single look at the gym will tell you everything, and you can make your decision about whether you decide to fold and watch or play and win.

And you absolutely will win if you play.

Because just being willing to get in the ring during a session like that will move you forward, no matter how you actually perform during your sparring.

But there’s more to it than that. Let me see if I can explain…

The typical sparring order and match-ups

In most of the gyms where I’ve trained the littlest boxers typically go first in sparring. Maybe it’s because they’re small or young, and their parents will be waiting to get them home, fed, and off to sleep.

After the younger ones have their ring time, the rest of the team begins to work, not necessarily by rank, but simply based on what the coach wants to achieve with each boxer. I might get paired with someone who is a fast puncher because the coach wants me to practice my defense, for example. Or a heavyweight will get put in with a visiting heavyweight because the home boxer rarely gets a chance to really unleash as well as experience the power and pain that another person of the same weight brings to the ring.

If a boxer is behaving poorly, refusing to take instruction, and allowing their emotions and issues to cause them to brawl rather than box, the coach might put them in with someone who is technically better and who can pound a physical lesson into them. Incidentally, that lesson is called “get yourself under control, boy” and it’s still hard for me to understand, but my husband says it’s a guy thing. It looks like a street fight, and it’s often bloody, but it seems to be a part of the way boxing works.

And as I mentioned earlier, there are also different kinds of sparring nights. Some are more easygoing and filled with stops and starts, and some are all-out war.

War nights are good to have on occasion, because a real boxing fight is not about patty cake. It isn’t you and your buddies, messing around. It’s serious hard work, and it can be brutal.

Every gym has war nights. My gym had one recently, too.

What happens on a war night

There were maybe 15 to 18 boxers training in the gym when the coach sent everyone to gear up and went and took his place ringside on a painted wooden stool.

The young kids did not go first.

Instead, Coach put in two of the top boxers in the gym, instructed everyone to ignore the bell, and calmly uttered the one word that causes every fighter’s engine to roar to life, “Box.”

Those are the first two clues to a hard sparring night. Different order of business, no bell boundaries. Your gym might keep to the bell, but no bell means you’re about to work quickly all the way to failure (and then you’ll work some more).

The top boxer stayed in the ring as multiple fighters rotated in and out. I’ve been in that “stay in” position in other gyms (with less skilled people than Second Round) and it’s something everyone should experience once in while.

When the coach puts you in and makes you box to the end of your ability with a string of fresh fighters, you not only feel great to be in that position, you learn a lot about your strengths and your limits. You find out what areas of training you’ve been neglecting. You discover how long you can last. You learn how to defend once you’re played out.

The top boxers at my gym went in, one after another. The shots were not training level. No one pulled punches. No one messed around. Everyone threw full power, all out.

About 5 minutes in, someone went over to the boom box and turned the volume way down until all we could hear was the relentless slam of leather against flesh, the bright pop of a glove against headgear, and the dull thud of a perfectly executed body shot.

The church of boxing had been called to order, and the supplicants focused all their attention on the ferocious litany in the ring.

This is the time when you can see, visually, exactly where you are on the fear scale.

Where boxers stand

On a hard sparring night like this, the unspoken code is: watch or leave.

Every heavy bag hung undisturbed. The constant chatter of speed bag was silenced. There was no intermittent clang of weights being racked. No one skipped rope, or shadowboxed, or chatted aimiably on the ragged, garage-sale couches at the back of the gym.

And if you find yourself in a holy moment like this, look around to see where everyone stands. Physically.

Most of the fighters were ringside, leaning up against the ring apron, watching the action through the lower two ropes.

One man stood, jump rope in hand, about 6 feet back. Periodically he would wander over to the heavy bags. I was fairly certain he would not get in. (He didn’t.)

A thin young teenager stood nervously next to the freestanding pull up machine. I thought he might not get in, either. (He didn’t.)

Anyone further back than that is most likely doing their best to avoid the battleground and stay out of the fight.

Which is perfectly acceptable.

But the phrase “know where you stand” is particularly useful here. If you want to shift your fear, you need to walk forward. If you want to tell your body that regardless of what your brain says, you intend to spar, you need to stand where you are actually touching — connected to — the ring.

And here’s another piece of that same puzzle…

Are you ready?

Last night I suddenly realized, during this moment, that although I was leaning against the ring apron, peering intently through the bottom two ropes at the action, I had not geared up.

In fact, neither had the guy with the jump rope in hand, by the heavy bags.

It’s true, I was late coming in, and was only warming up as everyone else was getting ready to spar, but now that the game was on, what did my relative unpreparedness say about my willingness to get in the ring?

It was clearly a war night. I’ve been here before; in fact, the first time I experienced it I bailed. I needed to take stock and make a decision about how much I would allow my fear to rule me.

I turned and walked to the back of the gym, quietly gathered my gear, and returned to the side of the ring and began to gear up.

The unspoken request

If you expect to be put in the ring on a night like this, you have to mentally request it. Your posture, your attitude, your engagement level all have to tell your coach that you are willing to get in if he calls your name. He’s not going to call everyone, because the stakes are higher, and there needs to be room for people to keep themselves out of the fight even if they stay in the gym.

This is about eye contact. About listening intently to whatever comments and instruction the coach is giving the fighters. It’s about leaning in, both mentally and physically, no matter how much the edge of the ring feels like the edge of a blade.

The test of fire

The coach at Second Round is phenomenal.

A former pro boxer himself, Coach Massey completely understands the dynamics of fear, and the geography of boxing guts. He works with, rather than against his boxers. He rarely raises his voice, but instead trains us to hear his voice anywhere in the gym (no matter the din) and respond to his instruction. He will take me farther than I would go on my own, and I can count on him to judge accurately when to push and when to leave be.

Last night there were many other issues to be worked out among our top fighters before I could get a chance to box, but I was ringside, I was geared, and I was mentally asking to fight, despite my fear. I knew he would call my name, and finally I heard him say, without even looking in my direction, “Lisa. On deck.”

I swallowed hard, levered myself up onto the ring, and waited outside the ropes for his signal.

As it happened, I was in pretty good shape for my challenge. I’m keeping up with my workouts and doing my sprints. Earlier in the week I had gone 6 rounds or so with no bell, working on inside fighting only. Trey, a beautiful, powerful light heavyweight had given me plenty of hard work, forcing me to stay knee to knee, leaning into me and making me bump him off with my shoulder and dig in with right and left uppercuts before finishing with a left hook to his head. Over and over. Slowly I shed my fear of his powerful shots to my body, and quit hopping backwards to my more comfortable outside fighting position.

On war night my gas was good, I wasn’t already tired out, and I felt mentally as solid as you can in these situations.

My first opponent was a fierce young man named Shaq. He’s fast, but he’s smaller than I am, so I knew I could take his power. I intended to give him a taste of my hard right, and I was primed to stick with the inside game if he forced the issue. I planned to employ every illegal tactic I could (our coach is pretty lenient on this issue) to tip the scales in my favor. I’d already seen some damn messy (and bloody) brawling, and I’d heard the coach tell us that just because a shot was ugly didn’t mean it wasn’t effective. I was ready.

No bell, just the word from the coach. I rolled in with guns blazing, and Shaq let me dominate the first minute or so.

He’d already been fighting and I was fresh, but I started to suspect he was “going easy” on me, so I pinned him to the ropes and growled at him. “You better bring me something to work with, dammit,” I told him, and before I could finish up with a suitable threat, he had spun out and rocked my head back with the most beautiful, crispest jab ever thrown.

“Nice.” I commented, “Thank you.” And we were on.

We worked a couple of rounds I think (no bell, hard to figure it), before the coach switched up fighters again, and I ducked out feeling wonderful. I knew he would put me in again (he did, with a very tired Trey), and I might not look as fresh or fight as well, but I’d already won the real victory.

I’d gone forward. I’d shown I was ready. And I got in.

And that’s the most beautiful part of boxing.

Photo by Official U.S. Navy Imagery, creative commons license

April 6, 2012
The Dark Road to… Darkness.

Beware children! See how easy it is to slip from an ordinary good boyhood into shudder-inducing nightmarish-ness. Nightmarish-osity. Something dark that involves hissing and a small amount of drool, anyway.

I was surfing through some of my recent pictures and came across these two from earlier this year — taken on demand from the Maker, who relishes a pair or five of those cheap plastic Halloween vampire teeth. I always purchase a “Party Pack” of these (the name makes me snort) and then I’m exceedingly careful never to touch the myriad pairs I see laying around the house for the next month or so.

After about six weeks I don’t have to worry about them anymore since they’ve all been shared with friends and left at their houses, sliced and diced by the lawnmower, run through the wash and thrown out by me, or carried off by the cats. Tidy, huh?

Nobody ever talks about who cleans up after Darkness.

December 7, 2010
Second Day of School

And this is what comes downstairs in the morning, “ready” to go. I said, “Dude. Your head.”

July 25, 2008