The Joy of Boxing
This week, Z asks about what it's like to seriously train for a boxing match, and what the feelings and emotions are like as the big day approaches.
In January of last year, I signed up for a charity boxing match. As I remember it, the decision happened suddenly and with little fanfare, shortly after reading the 1997 Los Angeles Times article "Resurrecting the Champ". Unlike Moehringer, I had no particular obsession with finding my father. The mystery and outrage around stolen identity was a middling interest. What intrigued me were the descriptions of the boxing, the seductive prose outlining what it was like to be in the ring with someone else, to participate in what's probably humankind's oldest, violent ritual. All art can be enabled by struggle, but there is a unique beauty that is born of violence. I wanted to experience that violent beauty.
I should take a moment to level-set here. I'm a boxer, but only just. What I did was the bare minimum that could reasonably be called boxing. I fought one bout, three rounds of three minutes each. I trained regularly for a little over three months, and that 'training' was brief and casual in comparison to what the real stuff looks like. Real fighters train for years, starting in early childhood. One of my coaches had been one of the best amateur boxers in his home country, and he had over one hundred bouts in three years. He fought almost every weekend, and trained every day in-between, and had reached the top levels of amateur boxing. ‘Professional' remained an entirely different level. And yet, the whole experience was transformational for me, in spite of the fact that thousands of others have trained harder, achieved more.
That's the funny thing about the internet age: we live in a time where the absolute best of the best, in every domain, are instantly accessible for us to compare ourselves to. The second and third best you can find after a bit of scrolling, and if your hobby is a popular one, then there will be at least a few more pages of highly-skilled amateurs and personality trainers. To be an amateur in anything means being constantly reminded of the dizzying heights of achievement that are possible in your domain, but probably not achievable by you. The question then becomes: in an age of hyper-connected excess, how do we find meaning and worth and beauty in our own smaller struggles, in the things we can achieve, without comparison to others?
I digress. I wrote before about excess in the modern age, and now I'm writing about boxing, so I'll keep it about boxing. Boxing is both intricate and braindead, simultaneously a complex dance requiring skill and dexterity, and a simple matter of hitting the other guy harder than he hits you.
The comparison to dance is apt; boxing is mostly footwork. Some of the exercises and techniques are pulled straight out of the salsa classroom. One of my coaches -- undoubtedly fed up with how bad my footwork was -- at one point said I needed to listen to salsa in order to fix the rhythm of my punches. The movement has to be ingrained, instinctual, because when you get hit in the face, instinct is all you have left. In the ring, you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training.
The most important thing I took out of the experience is that boxing is about you. Not you the reader, but you the boxer.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche repackaged one of humanity's oldest cliches: “you yourself will always be the worst enemy you can encounter; you yourself lie in wait for yourself in caves and forests.” Older people are fonder of cliches like this than younger people, probably because the words have resonance when you're older in a way that's impossible when you're younger. Everyone is familiar with the constituent words, but those words only make sense at a point much farther down the line. The experience eventually catches up with the two-dimensional phrase.
Boxing is all about these kinds of repackaged cliches. Practice makes perfect. You get out what you put in. Fear is the thing to fear. You are your own worst enemy.
The time between the day I decided to fight and the day of the event was approximately twelve weeks. I trained for an hour and a half starting at five-thirty in the morning, six days a week. My coach was very particular about this regiment, and you couldn't spar or get any of the really valuable one-on-one workouts unless you were in the gym before the sun came up. The early bird gets the worm.
When I showed up for my first five-thirty class, I felt ready. I knew what I was getting into. There would be a struggle, but I’d weathered my fair share of failure. I could reason about the growth that comes from struggle, and I knew the counter-productivity of comparing yourself against others. There's always a bigger fish. Adopt a growth mindset. Embrace failure and only compare yourself to yourself, that's the way to think about getting better. But it's one thing to know about something, and an entirely different thing to regularly get hit in the face before you’ve had coffee.
My coach trained athletes for the Army, the Olympics, and for professional fights. She brought intensity and expectations that matched those domains. For an hour and a half every morning, the understanding was that everyone in the room was a real athlete, and the goal was to build that understanding into hyperstition, a self-fulfilling prophecy unfolding over twelve weeks.
The first morning I barely made it through the warm-up. The only reason I didn’t leave that day was because there were twenty others training in that room, and they were all struggling just as hard as I was. Pride is a dangerous motivator, but it’s the only thing that got me back for day two.
It was about a month into the training when I was beginning to realize just how bad I was at boxing. The Dunning-Kreuger rollercoaster had just tipped me off the bring and I was in freefall. I'd just been handily dispatched by a sparring partner half my age and nearly half my weight. The dance of feet and fists did not make sense. I was clumsy and uncoordinated, and all domains of previous athleticism seemed to be entirely irrelevant to this particular endeavor. Not only was I terrible, but I had no way of judging how good my opponent was, since I didn't yet know who I was fighting.
By month two I was tired of being tired, and I was sick of being bad. The sheen of training to be a boxer had lost its luster against the reality that I had no time for anything else, that I was always exhausted, that everything hurt at all times. I was never not hungry. I started to think about all the ways I could spin my quitting. I could ghost my coaches. Feign injury or cite my busy schedule. No one would ask many questions about why I'd stopped going, and I could have an easy out. Sure, I wouldn't have accomplished anything other than wasting two months in a dim, cramped, expensive gym, but that would be something I could regret later. You are your own worst enemy.
Starting in elementary school, I was one of those kids that got to go to a different classroom for two hours a day and do extra math and reading. When I was in first grade, my mom called the principal every day to get me in the class, even though it didn't start until second grade. I was a 'gifted' kid. That label is the most damaging thing you can give to a seven year old.
When your identity is tangled up in the idea that you're 'just good' at things, the eventuality of not being 'just good' is a hard one to handle. When being the biggest fish is a point of pride, reinforced both externally and internally, then you become unprepared for the day you find yourself in the ocean. These days, we're all swimming in the ocean.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens in the process of building habits. When you start doing anything worth doing, it’s hard to find the rhythm. It’s easy to find excuses, make other plans, find different things worth doing at that moment. The trick is to become numb. You do the thing so regularly that it no longer requires active effort to get started. Get up at five, drive to the gym. Punch the bag a thousand times, and the punch becomes automatic. Hit and get hit.
By month three, I was numb. Everything outside of training had the volume turned down. There was an absolute focus, a flow state that extended over weeks rather than hours. At that point it would have been impossible to not to get up and go to the gym every morning. Wake, train, work, eat, sleep, every day had the same rhythm. Any deviation from the schedule was impossible, and within those constraints was ultimate freedom.
Looking back, those last few weeks could have been any length of time. An eternity passes in a month or a minute. But eventually the end came. The purpose of the whole thing was for the training to come to an end, ultimately enabling something outside of itself. Months of struggle for nine minutes in the ring. There was nothing left at that point, except for fear of the unknown. Fear of failure. Fear of fear.
At that point I’d fought plenty. Sparring happened three times a week on average, and I’d been punched in the face by seemingly everyone, from a seventy year old featherweight yogi woman to the hulking crossfit junky who was to be my eventual opponent. The interesting thing about martial arts is that it’s usually harder to hit someone else than it is to get hit. Most people don’t have an instinct for violence, and you have to learn to hit for real. Getting hit is much easier. You don’t need to do much, and when the fist comes crashing into your head, you don’t really feel it until later. At the end of training, I wasn’t afraid of my opponent, of getting hit, of being hurt. The fear was simply there, an irrational and amorphous pit. The unknown is what we fear most, it’s instinctual. Fear the darkness, because danger might lurk outside the firelight. That was my feeling leading up to the end of the twelfth week, the simple and universal fear of the unknown.
After three months of struggle, all that was left was the small step into the darkness.
At its core, boxing for me was an experience of struggling against myself, of taking control over all of the small doubts and cynicisms, all the things that drag down, that add friction, that pull away from the goal. The doubt, the laziness, the excuses, the ego. Boxing is a sport that is incredibly lonely. You are an island in your head, you have no one to rely on to get better but yourself. The coaches and your training partners can enable you, but there is no one else that can do the work. You work, and you embrace all the small failures, because you will fail, and you will be bad, and you will be beaten. You will constantly hurt, and you will not be happy, and you will not be satisfied until it's all over, and all of that has to be embraced.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin penned what is probably the most accurate account of the mental aspects of the boxing training I did:
"I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, over-strained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy."
I don't think Ursula was a boxer, but she got it right. There are all sorts of things we can do in this world that are unhappy and unreasonable and yet worthwhile experiences. We hunger. We strain. We're anxious. We fear the unknown. And somehow, in that tangle of negativity, we can find the sublime.
Truthfully, I didn’t find the violent beauty I went looking for in the sweet science. That beauty exists only from the extrinsic perspective, when we look on violence from afar. The intrinsic perspective is wholly different. The beauty in boxing comes from sublimity born of constraint, of simplicity and lack, of flow and focus, an acute self-awareness of limitations and potential for growth. The things that don't matter fall away, and everything becomes simpler. All that's left is a shapeless focus, an understanding of nothing beyond the need to take the next step.
Next time: