(Yes, the title is a takeoff on So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, the third book of the Hitchhiker to the Galaxy trilogy) The glass door closed with a pneumatically controlled whooosh as I exited the building that housed the gym. Immediately, the sensations of the City preparing for a weekend enveloped me. The busses spewed forth just as many diesel fumes as always, but the casual Friday attire of the passengers recently paroled from their cubicles in the nearby business and government center made the scene less formal than other weeknights. Fewer passengers queued for the bus, the normally anxious crowd thinned by workers TGIFing at nearby bars. What traffic there was seemed to be leaving the downtown area but the gridlock was more orderly than during the workweek. Even the gym had been much less crowded this evening, part of the normal pattern that sees participation erode as the week ages. Moments earlier, I had told some of the people in the gym that I wasn’t going to be back for a while. I had plateaued in my training and was getting frustrated. It was time to move on. So long and thanks for all the fist! |
| I shifted the gear bag across my back into a less uncomfortable position. The thin rubber grip of the strap provided no real padding as the strap chaffed my shoulder. It’s not that the bag was all that heavy, all it contained was my personal boxing kit. But, after the fatigue of a strenuous 90-minute workout, the bag seemed too heavy to carry by its handles. Portions of the bag’s black nylon ballistic cloth shell were wearing thin: pills of fabric gave testament to the many nights the bag was slung over the shoulder and rubbed against the sweatshirts that I favor. It was time to move on. So long and thanks for all the fist! | |
| Although the gym provides boxing equipment for its members use, I choose to use my own for a number of reasons, the foremost of which is a disdain for gloves soggy with the sweat of someone other than myself. Besides, after a while, no matter how well maintained, community gloves start to reek. Now, that may be an advantage in a sparring match when you stick a glove in your opponent’s face and his eyes well up with tears from the odor of the gloves, but it is an experience I would prefer to avoid. If we could culture the active ingredients in some shared gloves we might create the ultimate biochemical weapon. It would be non-lethal, it quickly renders its victim senseless; death would be merciful under those conditions. Still, it would disperse a crowd faster than tear gas and pepper spray. Unfortunately, the conditions under which this substance is created cannot be replicated in the lab. |
| Not that it was likely to happen to me. The club I where I worked out offered limited ring time, either for focus mitt work, skill drills, or for sparring. The flow of each one-and-a-half hour session allowed about 35 minutes for ring work. Allocating the ring, three heavy bags, and a double-ended bag among the 14 boxers who might show up to the 7:00 o’clock and rotating them through each station was a problem that required advanced simultaneous equations for solution. It also required a choreographer’s sense of space and timing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. The trainer would rattle off names and station assignments, never forgetting or stumbling over the name of a single boxer, unlike the parents in multi-child families who rattle through the list of names until they hit the right one. |  |
| More often than not, I was wedded to
the 100-pound, brown leather Everlast bag. Advised to throw only jabs to the bag from the
outside, I quickly gained respect for a bag that could hurt you without hitting back if
you approached it in the wrong manner. That thing was big and with the brown leather
cover, I often felt like I was trying to beat up a steer. I once got carried away and
tried to hog-tie it with a jump rope. It was time to move on. So long and
thanks for all the fist! Lately, the place seemed more crowded. Trainer had to triage the boxers for ring time according to a system of who needed it, who was around, and who whined. First, the youngsters preparing to spar in an upcoming exhibition were rightfully given nearly exclusive use of the ring for a couple of weeks. In naval parlance, these were the first rates, the ships of the line. The second group was made up of novices who needed more particularized attention in order to advance their skill. The next group was those relatively skilled boxers who needed time to maintain their edge. The final group, which lately I seem to have been press ganged into, was made up of the residuals, the also ran, those that just don’t fit in. In naval parlance, we were the dingeys. Its the same group from which the pine riders emerge to rise to mediocrity as the deep right fielders in Little League baseball when the score is 11 to 0 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Other factors confound the calculus of ring allocation. Size and skill match boxers, otherwise the training system doesn’t work. Being paired for jab drills as a novice boxer with a guy one-third again your size, with the attendant height and reach advantage, and who was already a fixture at boxing gyms before you were born is not conducive to learning and skill building. Under these conditions, the fight or flight response still so keen in novices gets stuck on "flee" which convinces the nervous system to "get the hell out of Dodge and fast." You can’t really practice marksmanship as the grizzly bear charges. It was time to move on. So long and thanks for all the fist! |
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So with a shortage of potential sparring partners in my size and experience, a recently healed knee injury and a coach reluctant to have go "craack" so soon after healing, I wasn’t going to get much ring time in the immediate future. In fact, in four trips to the gym last week, I got two rounds for a grand total of five minutes. But, I was willing to forbear the lack of ring time on the understanding that it would be my turn soon. On my last night at the gym, I figured I was finally going to get some sparring. The score was right, it was the ninth inning, and there was no one left on the bench. There was a similarly matched boxer who the trainer had mentioned as a possible sparring partner, the Friday night class was light with only six boxers, and those of us who had not been selected to spar earlier in the week had been promised that we would be next. |
| So when the practice rounds
didn’t materialize, I decided that it was time to take a little hiatus from the
workouts. After eight weeks of training for four or five of the six days they gym is open,
I felt that at this time that my training needs were not being met. It was time to
move on. So long and thanks for all the fist! Put another way, working out at a gym means that an "opportunity lost" cost is going to be imposed. That is, working out at the gym keeps you from doing something else--swimming, biking, running--the opportunity that is lost. Not doing these in favor of something else has a cost. Hence the concept of the opportunity lost cost. As long as the marginal benefit of the boxing workout exceeds that of another activity, I go to the gym, when it doesn’t I won’t go. I just hope in my frustration with the situation, I didn’t screw up the arithmetic. But I never felt like hanging around when it seemed by contribution amounted to helping pay the light bill. It was time to move on. So long and thanks for all the fist! |
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