A Minute in the Ring

I really need to start wearing a watch again. I got out of the habit after 2001, right around the time Paperloop.com laid me off. As an event planner, a watch is part of the uniform. But after 9/11, I and so many of my fellow planners across the country took off our watches, as we stuffed our pink slips in card board boxes and headed out the door.

It’s been four years and although I’ve been gainfully employed for most of that time, I never took to wearing a watch again. There was always the computer clock, the clock on my cell phone, the VCR clock. It was a great way to practice talking to strangers, Hi, do you have the time?

All day at work, I was painfully mindful of the time. At my last job, I had left my $2.99 Target wall clock in my cube as a reminder to my office mates that “May Was Here.” I had yet to put a clock up in my new cube. As I exchanged short conversations with people throughout the day, I mentally logged minutes spent chatting and counted them down until the 5 o’clock hour hit.

I had to be at Fairtex gym by 5:20 pm. I had made an appointment for my $10 introductory session with Ken earlier in the week and I had been looking forward to it all day long. The trek from North Beach to Fairtex, in the SoMa district of the City, was about 15 blocks but if I sped-walked at an energetic clip, I would just make it. Fairtex was a muay thai kickboxing gym that had recently moved to its new location, at Hawthorne Lane and Harrison. A few months earlier, I visited my old office at 2nd and Harrison, in a futile attempt to become re-employed there. After a miserable interview and needing a caffeine, fat and sugar fix—coffee and a chocolate chip cookie—I walked around corner to what used to be Boudin Bakery. Serendipitously, what I found instead was Fairtex gym.

Ah! The bones of the front room were strikingly familiar. The mechanized platform for wheelchairs was still there. Thank you, ADA! The counter that used to sit above displays of cookies, sourdough and sweet baguettes and cheese Danish, now sat above handwraps, boxing gloves and an assortment of differently-sized shin guards. The poster-size prints of old San Francisco were replaced by pictures of muay thai champions in the requisite “fists up” pose. I stepped to the back of the café, half-expecting to see the same table my friend Jodie and I would eat our chowder-in-a-bread-bowl but there was no “corner” anymore. The room had been become a hallway that lead to a huge, cavernous warehouse, the center of which stood a regulation-size boxing ring. It was beautiful. To the left of the ring, the floor was a patchwork of blue mats, the squishy, soft kind that was more forgiving to bare feet that the hardwood my feet were used to. Large, black kicking and heavy bags lined the perimeter of the blue mats. In my mind, I could already picture my leg thwacking into that bag and making a dent right there…just below the Fairtex logo. To the right of ring were the jiu jitsu mats. The floor was red and smooth and just a little tacky. I wondered what it’d be like to grapple on that surface. I imagined some wicked floorburns.

My introductory session consisted of me training one-on-one with a Fairtex trainer. A private session for $10! Not a bad deal! I used to pay $40 a session with my old trainer every other week. A trainer named Pongsansan wrapped my hands. I recognized him from the picture on the T-shirts they were selling at the front desk. Yikes! This guy is a bad-ass! I told him I was a beginner. He guessed that I had been training two years. I lied and said yes even though it was probably more like four years. I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of a Fairtex trainer and not be as good as a person should be who had been training for four years straight.

But it was Armand, not Pongsansan, who would train with me that evening. He was wiry, around 5’8” I guessed, and personable. We introduced ourselves and after I warmed up with a few minutes of skipping rope, he took me into the center ring to begin.

I had never stepped foot into a ring before. There was a time when I had considered training for a smoker, a series of matches put on by gyms every now and again. Lack of nerve and a desire not to be weighed publicly always kept me from making the commitment. I was shy to step inside. There’s no doubt, that at least for a few seconds, everyone’s eyes will glance your way and judge you. I know, because I give everyone I see in the ring the same once-over, as I would be subject to now.

The floor was surprisingly slippery, slightly powdery-feeling. I felt I could be knocked on my ass at the slightest misstep. Armand started to show me the basics, the boxer’s stance, how to throw a jab and a cross. My new job in the City and the growing difficulty I had in stealing time away, had prevented me from going to a regular kickboxing class in over a month. My conditioning had deteriorated. And muscle memory? Mine were suffering from amnesia. I prayed I wouldn’t re-injure my groin muscles again, as I winced trying to throw double-roundhouses in succession.

Armand sprinkled water on the mat to prevent me getting knocked on my butt. He held the pads from me and called out different combinations. Jab-cross-kick-kick. Cross-hook-step-knee. Sixty seconds later and my eyes started stinging from the sweat running down my forehead. Unbelievable! How do boxers go fifteen rounds?

After a few rounds in the ring, I felt fatigued but Armand wasn’t done with me yet. We stepped out of the ring and walked toward the kicking bags. The conditioning drills consisted of forty kicks with each leg then one hundred “knees”. (Kneeing your opponent’s torso is allowed and encouraged in muay thai.) After that, fifty pushups and fifty crunches. Exhausted, I thanked God Armand “cut it short” after forty minutes. I was tired, but wanted more. Kicking bags, the blue mats, the ring…I had never before complete access to this kind of equipment. I decided to observe the next kickboxing class and partake in a little cheap therapy of the kicking kind with that hanging black bag in the corner, the one with my name on it.

I haven’t been back since my introductory lesson. If my work schedule continues to eat up my free time, I doubt I’ll be able to kickbox regularly. But at least I would have had my time in the ring, even though it was just for forty minutes.