Return to the Ring: The Next Day

Goddamn, boxing is hard

Artist’s rendition of what it felt like to be me yesterday.

Well, friends. Yesterday morning I strolled down to Northside Boxing here in Evanston for a complete and thorough ass-kicking. I knew that I wasn’t in the prime condition I was so near to enjoying the last time I went regularly to a boxing gym, but this experience was humbling in the extreme. It was a small group of three trim guys in their twenties plus me, taught by an unsmiling Coach Jason, who started us out with a four-lap run around the block—no, make that five. I was gasping and straggling by the third lap Then he had us doing bear crawls, a truly hideous form of exercise that works your core muscles. At the old gym we did a manageable number of these, or so it seemed at the time; Jason had us doing crawl after crawl after crawl, so that I was barely dragging myself along after a while. Then it was time to jump rope, with sit-ups in the intervals, plus endless push-ups. It’s not that the individual exercises are so hard; it’s that you have to do them relentlessly without pause with Coach Jason shouting at you whenever you falter (I faltered a lot). Finally, after what felt like the longest half hour of my life thus far, we strapped on our gloves and got to work.

My old gym was a bare-bones operation without an actual ring, just a padded floor and a wall of mirrors, a little like a dance studio. When it was time to spar we simply worked in a circle formed by our classmates, which is actually a lot more similar to how modern boxing began in 18th-century England. Now, for the first time I felt what it was like to climb between the ropes and bounce on my toes on what felt like a spring-loaded floor. Jason quickly showed me that I was jabbing all wrong, squaring off rather than positioning my left side forward, and failing to get my arm out to full extension, and not keeping my chin low enough, and a dozen other defects. Still after a while I felt I was getting it, or would have gotten it if I wasn’t already so exhausted. Plus we kept having to drop and do pushups between rounds of jabbing. I can still hear him shouting: “Don’t stop! The more often you stop, the harder it gets!” Very true, but at this early (or late) stage my body simply won’t obey me when it’s pushed. I know from hard experience that that will change if I keep at it. “It doesn’t get easier,” the coaches like to say, “you get stronger.” But it doesn’t happen quickly or all at once.

It was a long hour, made longer by the effortlessness with which two of my fellow classmates responded to the exercises. One guy joined us a little bit late and I was happy that he was a little slower than the others; it’s better to be on the bottom when there’s a top and a middle. When it was all over Coach Jason said, “Good job,” rather sternly I thought, and went back to watching YouTube in his office. “What’d you think?” asked Rich, the gym’s owner. I had barely enough strength to offer the man a thumbs-up.

I walked home slowly, in a daze, my calves sore from the unaccustomed sensation of running in wrestling shoes. I was drenched and exhausted. But I’ll be back. There’s something in the feeling of a live punch, even if for now all you’re hitting is another guy’s open palm, that’s completely different from the sensation of hitting a bag. It’s addictive. Somehow, somewhere, peaceable and unathletic as I’ve been for the majority of my life, I got the bug.

It’s the morning after and everything hurts. Happy birthday to me!