Uncomfortable

I am uncomfortable.  Distractingly so.  For reasons I did to myself.  And that I am both committed to, and deeply rethinking.  

I took a boxing class.  Well, at this point I have taken two. 

I used to live 20 min from a small Muay Thai kickboxing gym.  At the time I worked from home except when I had meetings, and one day on the way home from a meeting just I stopped by and went in, asked them all about it.  It was this simple place, smallllll weight room, one tread mill in the corner, and a big room with mirrors on one side and a mat covering the floor.  Smelled like what it was, but not in a gross way…sort of in a comforting way. 

The owner was behind the little counter, and I watched him watching me walk in.  To say I looked out of place would be a gross underqualification of the situation.  I am wearing my work dress and work shoes, white lady in pearls, with the body of not-a-contender, asking about the class schedule in this tiny smelly gym while in the background people are training to beat people into submission in a ring.  Let me be clear: I am 

This may well kick your ass...
but not in the same way.

calling it Mai Tai, like the drink.  That is not how you pronounce Muay Thai.  He looks bemused, but sure, fine, he’s between classes, he’ll answer my questions.  Shows me around, a process that takes mere moments, and there’s posters all over of him in matches (Bouts?  Tourneys?  Feats?) where he beat other people into submission.  

We sort of get to the end of this brief social experiment, and I ask him, why Muay Thai?  What’s the difference between this and all the hundreds of other martial arts, why has he focused here?  And he looks a little sheepish, then squints, and I watch his face be like, ok lady, I’ll play.  He says, “Well…it’s the most vicious.”  

I'm listening....

I came back the next day, took my free class.  The instructor was late, there were like 6 of us (this is the 11 am class, which I can do, because I work from home).  Guy sees me, he’s like, yeah, you’re new, cool, whatever.  Everyone else is on a first name basis, and the way this class is organized, people pair up and attack each other.  One person has the gloves, the other has the pads, then you switch who is throwing and who is catching.  He shows me what to do, and man, I do it.  After the 

Something to know about...

class, this instructor that just accepted me and didn’t make a big deal out of it explains to me he used to be a cop, and he volunteers with female military personnel to teach self-defense classes related to women not getting sexually assaulted in the military.  He is definitely teaching people to fight, not just get a workout.  I loved it.  I loved it so hard.  Was ready to sign up immediately, even though at the end of it my hands were shaking so much I could barely hold a pen.

As an adult, I was on a kick ball team once
(the kind where people are drinking beer on the field)
and the whole team knew I would stand in the field
 but they were going to have to
actually do everything, because I was garbage.
  I made it up in flip cup at the team bar after the game.

The thing is, I like being a healthy feeling person, using my body and all that, but not just…for the sake of it.  I have never in my life been a good athlete.  I never did sports in school.  I will never be able to throw or catch well.  Hitting the weight room will never be fun for me, nor will the aerobics class, nor will the high impact whatever thing where you throw heavy balls or flip a tire over or do that weird rope thing.

This is not a realistic life experience.

But I like hitting things.  The reason is in the action, the motions make sense in my body.  It makes sense that you hit with your hips as much as your arms, that you stand the way you do, that you move the way you do.  Wall sits make no sense.  It makes sense that it hurts, but I am immediately aware that sitting against a wall is an unnatural and, frankly, unnecessary thing to do.  My brain is not sold on this whole, it’s a good workout thing—it’s dumb.  And hard.  And when hard things are dumb, I just…consider that I could not be doing them, and then I don’t.

Hitting things is not like that.  Hitting things is fun.  Knowing how to clock someone isn’t a bad tool to have in your tool box, and it is a satisfying use of my body.  I loved that class.  

But I quit going-  life happened, and also I moved further away from it (proximity is important—I want to hit things but not enough to drive 30 minutes).

Not that bad, it turns out.

So I sat around doing nothing for another year and a half, but when I moved in with the boyf, I looked into other vicious class opportunities over on this side of town. There is a Krav Maga place like 7 minutes away (again, proximity) and I have heard good things about Krav Maga.  I went to check it out, and the local SWAT team was upstairs training, which seems like a rousing endorsement.  It was suuuuuuper expensive…but they had a “2 free weeks” deal so I figure, fine, we’ll try that.

I go, and there’s this guy there who is SO EXCITED to welcome a woman to the class that he ruins my entire night.  He's not flirting, no, that's not the kind of guy he is.  

He's helping.  

Sweet girl?

Not really that sweet.

He couldn’t imagine that a sweet girl like me had any idea what I was doing, I needed a guide and protector to explain every tiny thing to me, and he was def just the hero to do it.  The instructor allowed this to happen, and I didn’t know how to tell him to leave me alone without yelling "LEAVE ME THE $#!^ ALONE” at the top of my lungs, which seemed like the wrong choice.

Until he broke my glasses.  He has been so exuberantly explaining things to me all class that I have barely thrown a punch the whole time, right up to him interrupting the combo we are right in the middle of doing to show me some nugget of Israeli military wisdom.  So while I am leaning forward in a punch, he is no longer prepared to catch that punch, he is now leaning in to show me, again, what a punch is.  We connect in my front facial region, and he snaps the corner of my glasses. 

I did not go back to that class.

I tried going to a local gym after this but like….again, I can’t make myself care about sitting on a weight machine.  I even tried meeting with a goon (some people call them “trainers”) to motivate myself, but something about the combo of their attitude and my attitude was not a good fit.  (Their attitude that obvs you are here in the pursuit of ripped, sexy, peak physical perfection, and my attitude that I low key think all this is dumb, and I do not even know my goon’s last name, so them yelling at me to not let them down is not a motivation.) 

So I haven’t been working out in a while.  But then…they got me. 

The other night, I’m dicking around minding my own on facebook, and I come across an ad that has, with the laser focus of society-destroying algorithms, been put right in front of exactly me to sing its sweet siren song.  There is a woman owned boxing gym with a diverse group of trainers at a gym 9 minutes from my office that has a new, special deal on their new, special boxing classes.  You have to move fast, or the deal will be over!  What’s it cost?  None of your business!  Sign up now and you’ll reserve your spot! 

I obviously do this.  (Man, fb, you’re good.)

Next day, I call them and say, ok but what’s the deal?  I end up going in that night and trying their class.  It is taught by the most exuberant 12 year old I have ever met.  Seriously, he “ma’am-ed" me at one point, which was adorable.  

This is not a hit-other-people class, it is a hit-these-100lb-heavy-bags class, and it’s full.  I’m there early, so he says hi, helps me wrap my hands into gauntlets so even if I don’t actually do anything I get to look cool, and asks me if I know all the punches.  There are 6 basic punches, and we go through them right quick, and he’s like, “oh—you’ve done this before, you got this, great,” and leaves me alone.  ß easiest way for me to like gym goons, though let’s be honest, I am going to hate you anyway.

Boxing gauntlets!

I come home a wreck—but a happy wreck.  But a wreck.  They have my money (and it’s actually a reasonable cost), and they have classes every day.  I sign up to go back later in the week, and come home to presumably collapse into bed—but noooooooo.

omg just go to sleep....

My body is in crisis mode.  They made me do jumping jacks.  Do you know, Reader, how out of character it is for me to jump?  They made me move around on my feet for a whole hour, not in a sustained, steady pace, but in an attempt at speedy foot work.  Do you know how the-opposite-of light on my feet I am?  My body refused to sleep, because my lizard back brain was like, we are under attack!!!!!  Wait, are we still under attack?!?

This is my speed.

They had also asked me to engage in something called resting motion, which is where your “break” from the intense three minutes of hitting a hundred pound bag as hard as you can is supposed to involve, say, squats.  I was having none of that.  Maybe we’ll get there, or maybe die in a fire, even being here is a win, plus my gauntlets look cool.

The next day….it would be wrong to say I was sore, in the way I think of being sore after a particular work out.  I was more…incredibly, distractingly uncomfortable all over.  Like at work, I could absolutely engage in any consuming meeting or task.  But if I was, say, reading an article, I actually wasn’t, because that activity is not loud enough to drown out my body screaming quietly in the background.  My whole body. 

I tell this to people who work out, and they’re like, that’s great!  Which is objectively wrong, and how I know they are alien people and not to be trusted.  This is not great.

But.  Hitting things is fun.  Plus I paid them.  So I went back, and as I write this it is the day after that.  Part of the reason I am writing this is because just sitting around is terribly full of that same low key screaming from my whole body.  I still didn’t sleep well, because while I am exhausted, my subconscious is certain ze Germans are coming.  If this is not my best post, it is because I can’t find humor in anything and I keep getting distracted by a body I have been successfully ignoring for a long time at this point that is not filled with joy that I have reached back out.

But, I signed up for my next class, so we’ll see. 

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