“Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn.”
- Mike Tyson
Men will crowd around, and tell me alot of things. I’m thinking it’s because I’m female, and the testosterone and culturally accepted aggression level of American men tends to make them think they have inherent genetic knowledge of boxing. Mostly it’s frat boys who have been in a bar scrap and assume I’m sporting pink gloves and and makeup during workouts where I hit nothing more dangerous than a heavy bag. Sometimes I’m lucky, and they have real knowledge to share. I still have eons to learn about this sport, so I’ve learned to smile, nod, and be gracious that folks are interested in my pursuits. But there are several things, after a year of standing around listening, that people forget to tell you about stepping into a boxing ring. Here’s a few.
1. You will become boring. Your days will become a blur of workouts, roadwork, timed meals and counted out grams of protein. You read food labels like they’re Tolstoy. Camp out in supplement stores like a groupie. People will imagine that boxing lends your life a sense of adventure, and they will be wrong. Surprisingly, you’ll become addicted to the monastic beauty of a dull routine. It provides a cleaner canvas for the big thoughts.
2. You learn to stop thinking. This is much, much, much harder than it sounds. Especially for bookish types who have intellectually thrived on keeping those hamster wheels turning behind the eyes. Get in the ring, and as soon as you start thinking about what to do, you’ll start eating punches. The trick is forcing your body to react without your mind. You start learning how to think kinetically. See an opening and dive, eliminating the backbeat of personal narration.
3. Fuck the mistakes. And blow off the victories, too. You may lose half a dozen fights before you find your footing, and you may win dozens fighting half-assed without hitting your stride. You really can’t focus on either. Your hunger has to come from something deeper, something that isn’t satisfied by a scorecard. Let your mistakes eat at you or your victories make you soft, and your opponent can go ahead and start circling the vultures. Untie the gloves and sit down if you think your past has any bearing on what’s going to happen in the next few rounds.
4. Fellow fighters are gracious and humble. And viciously bloodthirsty. In both my fights, the handshakes afterwards are genuine. The offers of friendship sincere. I know precisely how much I’ve had to give up to train every day, and respect that an opponant is willing to do the same. Perhaps this is where being a female fighter is a bit different, but I don’t despise them before I fight them and thus far I’ve gotten on well with opponents. I may manufacture a sense of rage in order to snap my punches a little faster, but it’s irrelevant to whomever is in front of me. Hatred has little to do with the person I’m fighting – the opponent is just part of the job.
5. How to calm down. For my first fight, my blood pressure before fighting was explosive. 150/95. The doctor nearly called it off until I explained I had the newbie jitters. I spent the first round wheeling punches and holding my breath, feeding on adrenaline like a hog at the trough. By the second round I was exhausted and couldn’t recover. Loss. For this last fight, I spent the morning getting a long massage and listening to Puccini’s opera. I laid around. I looked at art. I refused to talk about the fight, or even think about it. I napped. My blood pressure before the ring was 105/60, and the focus paid off with a win. There is a lesson in teaching your mind not to betray your body; it’s as much a trained muscle as anything else. This is the hardest part of boxing for me.
6. How to open your eyes. For as much as I love this sport, for all my fascination with the innards of a personal violence, the best lessons thus far don’t have alot to do with my jab or uppercut. I didn’t realize how boring my life had become before boxing, flitting from bar to bar swilling whiskey and men with the same aggressive aplomb. I didn’t realize my friends would be so patient as I became interested, then obsessed. I didn’ t know they would drive hours to purchase a $20 ticket and sit patiently to watch me in an 6 minute fight. I had no idea my trainer would have this much faith in my ability. He’s not doing it for money, this is all love. I didn’t know that I was essentially lazy before boxing. Thirty minutes on a treadmill isn’t a workout, it’s a warmup. I never saw how hard it is for so many young men to get out of the streets and why they desperately box. My own success made me blind to how hard it is for others to struggle out of the poverty of crime. I thought I understood what I was made of, what sort of character I had, whether I would consider myself committed, or lazy, or hardworking, stubborn, or dedicated. I had no idea. It took me until I was almost thirty years old to start boxing and ask – exactly what sort of fight, if any, is inside of me?
And shit, man. I’m just starting to find out.
From Daniel Day-Lewis, on learning to box for the movie, The Boxer (1997)
“ I wanted to see if I loved the sport, because if I didn`t love the sport, I wouldn`t want to tell the story. At its best, boxing is very pure. It requires resilience and heart and self-belief even after it`s been knocked out of you. It`s a certain kind of a test. And it`s hard: the training alone will kill you. And that`s before people start giving you a dig.”
A white-bread upbringing compels me to say hello to everyone in my neighborhood. Cracked out homeless, tweaking hipster, or an upright citizen in Senatorial haberdashery — they all get a polite smile. Saying hello to your neighbors is what seperates us from salivating animals, and it’s unacceptably rude to think I’m above someone merely because I’m lucky enough to have a job. This in mind, I’ve gotten to know a few of Capitol Hill’s more fringe culture folks who live on the streets.
I’m not sure whether boxing lends itself to a violent lifestyle after one stops competing, or if people start boxing because they lead a generally violent lifestyle. Moreover, I’m not sure I really want to know the answer to that question, myself. In any event, several homeless guys in my neighborhood have taken note of my roadwork, my drawn appearance when I’m coming home from a workout, my buoyance when I knock the shit out of a sparring partner. They take note and they cheer me on. And it is their cheering that I enjoy the most.
Rick lives on the corner of my street, and functions as a mediator for most of the Cap Hill homeless and the working stiffs. He performs odd jobs for the gas station on the corner, and because he’s only a drunk and refuses drugs, the neighbors feel safe around him. He’s nonviolent, easy-going, a decent mechanic, and a part of the clockwork of my day. Last night, after the gas station closed and before he moved his bedroll to a more quiet spot, he was joined by several non-regulars who typically sleep at the shelter up the street. They spotted me walking towards my car and began crude catcalls.
“Who dat whore?!,” sang one in a jangy falsetto. “She one of dose high class bitches.” Some other truculent name-calling ensued, which made me spin around and stare and consider immoral options.
“Stop it.” said Rick. “She ain’t no whore, she’s a boxer. And she’s got a fight in a few days. So shut the fuck up.”
Beautifully and succinctly, they did.
Al lives downtown and sports a yellowy-white chest-length beard and a wheelchair stacked with his belongings. He’s a vet damaged by early use of Agent Orange, which he says caused deep boils on his skin (it’s possible these are meth sores, but I hate to accuse without evidence). He boxed in high school and after, before he joined the Army. I see him mostly when I’m out running on my lunch break, and he gives me a one-handed fist bump and checks on my latest fight. “Buy me a ticket next time you fight here in the City,” he said last week. “I loved boxing when I was a kid, I want to see all this pay off for you.”
And there’s the light heavy middle-aged black man on the corner of M and Wisconsin whose father bought him a new pair of gloves each year, which he shared with his brothers. Until they each got a pair, they would wear one glove on a first and throw only jabs. He sits on a milk crate grinning lasciviously up the skirts of Georgetown students. Seeing my gloves on the way to sparring a few months ago, he now stops me to see how training is going.
And the toothless friend of Rick’s who gives me a shuffle with upturned fists when he sees me returning from the gym.
And the Jim Beam drunk at the Tune Inn, a USMC vet who begs me – every week – to stop and drink whiskey with him, and then reminds me he’s teasing, he knows I can’t. He alternates old boxing tales with war stories, sometimes confusing the two depending on how much he’s been drinking that afternoon.
And Creed, who lives in the park and whose recent abscence has been worrisome. Well over 70 and with the knarled hands of a creek-bed oak tree, we exchange dollars for tips when I see him in warmer months. His advice of late has been focused on maintaining a proper fighting spirit, avoiding burnout. “Stay strong, stay sharp in your mind.” he noted a few weeks ago. Not atypical advice for a fighter, but it seems to mean more when it comes from someone who has been there.
Boxing is an unusual sporting community – those who have fought understand the loneliness, the reclusive culture, the long aches after a loss and countless hours of training. They know that even to be a losing fighter, you have to work harder than almost anyone you’ll know. They know the small glories of life — a fist connecting with bright, open eyes — are sometimes what counts the most. This weird, small community of men who relive their small moments of physical victory with me as I pound out miles in training, keeps me in line. For every friend and paramour who has drawn away from me in moral disgust — and there have been many — I’ve met ten more who cheer me on. The homeless boxers, the bar bouncers, the gas station attendants, the Hill staffers, the beat cops, the Capitol Hill police and Secret Service. They watch me put in the hours, and give me sly smiles of encouragement.
And this, this is the part of Washington, D.C. that I like.
My sleep is changing, on account of increasing my workout intensity. I reupped to three workouts a day for a few weeks, just to teach my body a lesson. I am my own worst dominatrix. Stairs and hard plyometrics at 6am, my regular 3-4 mile run at 3pm, and sparring at 8pm. By the time I trucked up to Georgetown for sparring, my legs and back ached with that deep, resonant soreness that reminds you you’re building something.
I sat down on a bench near Georgetown’s campus with an hour to kill before gym time started. I was in no mood to be chatty with workout buddies, and preferred a solitary bench and some Tom Waits to chit chat. Within seconds, I was dead asleep. Not merely a nap, but splayed out and snoring like the long-drunk homeless I have carelessly walked past for years now. Luckily the clucking laughter of a nearby student woke me up just in time, and I looked around with wild hair, wild eyes, hands taped and gloves resting beneath my crown as a makeshift pillow. I had not moved – my bottle of water was balanced upright in my hand; I simply passed out. I plundered into class for seven rounds of sparring. It took me three just to wake up.
I’m telling you, once you tap all the wickedness from yourself, put yourself in a place too tired to think, there is no better sleep. Not that of the innocent or the depraved. I’ve had insomnia since a teenager but during training like this, I prefer sleeping to men, whiskey, sex, food, music or bars any day.
All the things, incidentally, that typically keep me awake.
This would appear to have a deceptively simple answer. But the query has stumped me.
Clawing through my run yesterday, I pulled up to the Lincoln Memorial and caught my breath before 20 flights of stairs. I didn’t appear any different than the two dozen other runners on the Mall. I was winded, dirty, and my sweatpants gaped from accumulated sweat. My next fight is in 4 weeks and I need to drop a weight class again. My workouts are spurred on by a desperate rage that unscores everything. Drop the weight, train harder than the day before, or you will fail. This is a constant internal monologue. A bass rhythm.
I easily churled out the first ten flights without problem, heart rate barely raising above 165. The second set started to burn. My brow furrowed; you could plant tomatoes in that motherfucker. I focused on the top step, and willed the high knees. When I finished and skipped back down the steps to do plyo pushups, I caught a 40ish tourist and his wife watching me, cockeyed. Docksiders, tan and lean, digital camera’s hanging on their chest. He leaned towards me as I walked past them and politely asked, “Are you an athlete?”. My mouth fell open with hesitation and I shrugged, “Yeah…I,uh…I think so.” And ran on.
When does an endeavor, like fighting or basketball or cricket, become so integral a part of a person’s identity that they are no longer merely athletic? What distinguishes athleticism from someone’s consideration as an athlete? Is the distinction a matter of body fat? Commitment? Emotional attachment to a sport? Perhaps it’s just a matter of putting the time in, clocking in and out of the gym like a Detroit autoworker banking on his pension.
The question flattered me, and I kept staring at the other runners trying to discern which ones were merely athletic from the athletes. Who was burning past the pain in pursuit of some thankless goal no one understood? Did they workout because of narcissism or something greater? Which of us marked out the limits of our passion in sweat? Hard to tell. Certainly, though, makes the people-watching on my roadwork a bit more interesting.
Had to take a few weeks off hard training to tackle some work, but I’m digging in again, and it feels fantastic.
Boxing, much like what some of my military friends have conveyed to me, is 95% training, and 5% HOLYSHITADRENALINEPUMPINGHELLYEAH situations. The glory is in the 5%, but most people refuse to put the work in to make that happen. The rote labor of turning a body into a purely functioning, instinctual machine are a day in, day out maneuver. The days become a drumbeat of ritual, the work of monks. I rise, I run, I eat, I work, I lumber to the gym and riptearroar through a heavy bag and some sparring partners. Fall into bed, hair laying in a puddle of sweat against my pillow, and peel out of bed again the next day. Boxers do not thrive on lifestyles of spontaneity, creativity. You’re nurturing beastly machinations inside you, no need for theatrics or creative expression there.
Which got me thinking about how boxing may affect creativity. Said military friend noted that in high intensity training, our creative minds lapsed. They simply turned off. Flush with left-brain motivation and an end goal cast from very specific bodymetrics, there simply isn’t as much a need for day dreaming and play. Time becomes irrelevant, relationships falter. Days are measured in acheivements of body fat, fight tactics, punching ability. As a writer, this realization was more than a little terrifying. I’ve since pulled out all my paint, tucked notebooks into every crevice of my life, and forcing myself to straddle a hard line.
I was a writer before I was a boxer, surely I can do both.
* Title taken from a great book by Harry Crews.
The hardest part about losing was not immediately after. It did not come when the ref inevitably raised the hand of my opponent, while my shoulders sagged with the dank realization that I had not fought to my potential. No, not even when tears came streaming down in the back hallways of the Convention Center, that wasn’t the hardest. The tears were mostly a by-product of that hyper emotional state brought on by adrenaline; fighters are always oddly quick to cry.
No, the hardest part has been walking into the gym day after day, knowing that I now have to work that much harder, and there are never any guarantees. It is continueing to refuse a drink, a night out, a pizza, a wild night of dancing with my friends because I have to gear up and work that much harder, in spite of my best efforts producing failure. It has been looking my friends in the eye when they grew hopeful that I would get rid of this “fitness phase” I was going through, and whip back into a lifestyle of cuddling bar stools. When I insisted, in the days and weeks after, that I am still training, the hardest part was their look of incredulousness that I continue boxing, when I had so obviously failed.
That was tough.
And the weeks after have not been pretty. I am sleepwalking through the gym lately. Faced with making some hard decisions about trainers and gyms, I’ve been consumed with the politics of boxing, and let the process begin to feel like work. Not just work, but a desk job. The most gruesome banality of existence, really.
My temper is back to eating the insides of my cheeks as I attempt to hold my tongue in day life. My cardio has merely been going through the motions. I cannot relax, ever. All the things going wrong inside my head have started to accumulate into a soap opera of *yawn* *snore* *yawn*. Which is precisely what I was expecting when I spent this morning teaching soccer mom’s how to throw a jab. Yet as with most things in life, what you expect is never how things seem to work out.
Coach had asked me to assist him teaching an open house gym class in Sterling VA. I wasn’t particularly excited to go; I have unfortunately maintained an inner city snobbery and despise going out to the suburbs in spite of being raised better. But at Coach’s request, I loaded up the gear bag, taped up, and volunteered for Show and Tell amid strip malls and manicured lawns.
Coach loves the spotlight; I prefer to hide. While I’m known as being gregariously charming in a group of friends, my skin crawls when I’m on display to strangers. Our class/audience included an older gym rat, a muscle bound lifter, a young blond staffer, and a mid-30’s mom showed up to hear Coach’s schpiel. I took the young mother aside to work with her seperately while Coach taught combinations to the other three.
The young mom was all enthusiasm from the start. Swinging wildly, she desperately watched my short, smooth movements and once I stopped her windmilling everywhere, she seemed to catch on rather well.
After a few minutes, when she started pulling together the jabs and rights, we added some movement. Threw a 1-2. Threw a hook. Taught her to keep that hook in close; don’t open up too much and don’t put your punches on a billboard to let someone know what you’re getting ready to throw.
By the end of class, she was throwing a six part combination, including a slip. And as she grew more enthusiastic, I felt that copper sheen of cynicism start to melt away, and I started to grin.
Oh yeah, this really IS fun. I almost forgot.
Soccer mom gave me four hugs, her phone number, and an offer to pay me for private lessons, though I insisted I am learning yet myself. She begged me for a few extra minutes with the punch mitts, so she could relish that *POP* of a right cross into a surface begging to be hit. It really is a beautiful feeling, all that power streaming straight from your chest through your arm and out of your hand. A genius of physics. She ran out of the room bouncing, and ready to kick someone’s ass. She fell in love with boxing.
And I had to swallow my pride. Because hell….maybe I need to stop whining to myself about winning and boxing politics and motivation, really. I want that win more than ever, but just as importantly, I have to fall in love with this sport, every day.
Funny that you can live inside a body for thirty years or more, and never really get to know it.
One of the more surprising parts of learning to box is how much more involved I’ve become with my own physiology. For one, relaxing the grip of narcissism has forced me to look at myself as more machine, less beauty object. I no longer have the time or energy to constantly check a mirror — not that I was ever terribly high maintenance. Even so, becoming an athlete is sometimes a painful lesson for the ego, in that we don’t realize how vapid and idiotically time consuming beauty standards really are, until you’re standing outside of them doing pullups.
But the more exotic lesson is rendered from relentless training and a regimented diet, and the resulting decisions you make in the ring.
For one, you learn how to handle real pain, and make decisions outside of that pain. Last night my sparring partner got vicious with his left hook, slinging wildly in our fourth round, he connected when I didn’t pivot far enough out of the way. The punch landed with a wide THUD, and I distantly heard Coach make a yelp from across the room, worried.
Prior to boxing, I think our natural inclination is to deal with pain, to live inside it and move viciously and efficiently to get rid of it as quickly as possible. We scream, we become alarmed, and move immediately towards comforting whatever hurts. But there is a slight seismic shift somewhere in learning to box, a moment when you learn that you have to set that pain aside, and keep making smart decisions. You just place it in the background, like knowing you need to go to the bathroom when you’re in the middle of a long meeting. You hold it.
Ancillary to this relationship to pain, is that you develop with food. I come from a very Southern family; food is far more emotional than nutritional. The kitchen is the center of our family’s social life, and reading labels was something West Coast liberals engaged in, not us.
But the pressure to make weight changes everything. You don’t make weight? You don’t fight, it’s a rather simple equation. This is not a diet in the summer-bikini sense. It’s getting to know real hunger. It’s realizing hydration means everything. Going to sleep with an empty stomach, staring at a menu knowing you can’t, you won’t, order from it.
And these aren’t bad lessons. Americans tend to let themselves be led around by the leash of our merest physical impulse, our bodies like petulant children begging for carbs, fat, cholesterol, sugar. And on the whole, we give in to whatever impulse seizes us as our eyes walk down a menu. But food as emotional sustenance is one of the most dangerous metaphors we can make.
In the same way I watched the punch clang hard against my jaw and snapped my mind down on the pain in order to deliver a right cross, reacting to hunger has been it’s own strangely rewarding lesson. Timing my meals and my calories, I’ve begun to realize when hunger is justified, and when I need to wait. I treat my body more like a parent with a ornery, demanding child. No matter how strong the urge to order cheese grits and fried catfish for dinner, the sugar rush and carb load will lead me down a devastating path of unhappiness when I weigh myself in the morning. It’ll take hours to recover, like a hangover. It’ll take another hour of running. My arms will be screaming from the pushups, the burpees, the rope, the weights. You will take what I give you and stop complaining, becomes the overarching internal monologue, a feisty reminder of my father’s stern words when we were served cold bologna sandwiches for lunch as children.
In a year of hard training, 6 days a week, this new relationship with a body-in-training has been rather more thoughtful than most I’ve had with men. The concept of mind-over-body isn’t a new one, but swallowing the lesson whole has been one of the more eye-opening parts of boxing for me.
I was 3 miles into my run. An 85 degree day, perfect in every respect.
I cut a hard left out of my office and spent my lunch hour on a run, my regular cardio plan of 2.5 mile hard run, 10 minutes of rope, and between 10-20 flights of steps up the Lincoln Memorial, depending on tourist foot traffic. I then cool down with another 2.5 mile jog/walk. It’s a beautiful workout, and I do it three times a week seamlessly. While signs posted around the Memorial proclaim the area unfriendly to runners, the guards know me and let me slide. There are benefits to being a local in DC.
He was a newer guard, Sudanese and with a greasy pot belly and liquid yellow eyes. As I pulled up to the top of the first two flights of steps of the Lincoln, I could sense him watching me (along with the majority of the other 200+ tourists, thank goodness boxers are all a bit exhibitionist). On the second round of steps, he got my attention and smiled.
“You’re not even working hard.” he laughed.
I looked down at my heart rate monitor, which begged to differ. I thought his joke was at first so laughable, I broke into a grin myself.
“What sport do you play? You must play a sport,” He began.
I motioned that I wanted to continue my run, and on my third lap to the top of the steps explained. “I’m training for a fight; I box.”
His eyes widened in that now-too-familiar look of injured surprise most men hang on their faces when they realize I like to fight. For most, it’s a combination of emasculation and respect.
“I’ve never met a female boxer before. I played soccer in Africa, myself. You look like you’re built to fight, but I don’t think you have the heart of a fighter.”
Deeeeeeeep breath.
I have always had a hard time managing my anger. But far greater than my daydreams of knuckle punching the meter maid, is the respect I’ve had for my family and hesitancy to embarress them. Which is why boxing was so immediately appealing; I get to take out my anger and make them, conversely, proud. I glanced up at the sky and noticed two tourists watching our interaction closely. I tried hard to breath.
“What in the fuc* do you think you’re talking about, I have no heart? Who are you to say what I have or don’t have, you’re not my trainer, you’ve never seen me fight…”
He tried to keep pressing on, and I could tell this was entirely an exercise in trying to piss me off in some sort of juvenile attempt at flirting. But my stomach had already bloomed into a festering pit of hate, and there’s not alot of U-turns once you go down that road.
“Well, you should be doing more stairs, you should be doing 30 flights instead of 20. If you had heart, you’d do five more flights. You won’t be ready for your fight otherwise.” He had two friends grinning like jekylls at his side, simpering while he goaded me into an inevitable rage. What can I say….I bit.
“You know, I’m preparing for a fight. I’ve got three trainers jumping on my ass all day long, screaming at every mistake. I’ve got a boss wondering why I’m not spending more overtime at work. I’ve got freinds wondering where I’m at, and family I don’t call. So that I can prepare for all this. And here I’ve got some random asshole saying I don’t have the HEART?
“I know you’re just wanting to piss me off and you think this is cute, but what would it have hurt you to be encouraging? And why do you think it should matter to me whether or not some random cop thinks I’ve got heart? Does it matter to you that I call you a rude porker?”
He was backing up now, and tourists started to gather to watch. His friends’ eyes were see-sawing against us both.
“I was just trying to make you angry, so you’d work a littl—”
“I AM ANGRY YOU PIECE OF SHIT.” (cue other Park Guards walking our way)
“I’M ANGRY ALL.THE.TIME. That’s why I box. But don’t you dare tell me I don’t have the heart to do this; that’s my trainer’s call, and I could give a shit less about whether you respect me or not.”
” I was just hoping—” He backed up, confused that I was making a scene. Evidently, he had anticipated getting a date out of the deal.
“I’m not listening to you anymore. You’re worthless.”
I counted off five more laps up the stairs, staring at him silently the entire time while the tourists whispered between themselves. Haven’t seen him at the Lincoln Memorial since.
