Today a friend Amelia’s Shepherd’s multi media project about female fighters is featured on the BBC’s website. Kickboxing has become a very significant part of my life, and inspired (albeit reluctantly) by the Olympics, I thought I’d share my story about it. It begins with me admitting that I am becoming a sporty person.
Now, this might not be odd to some of you, but I have steadfastly avoided sporty activities for a considerable time. I thought sporty people were odd, alien creatures who might have been born with too much energy, like over-enthusiastic cocker spaniels.
I however, have never been in any doubt that I was born with more than my fair share of sloth. I like a lie-in. I like to potter. I’m happiest near a well-stocked fridge where I can graze like a cow. I practice sleeping, looking for those golden ten hour specials. My finest sleeping achievement was twenty-six hours, with only a ten minute loo break in the middle. True story. You get the idea.
Exercise seemed to me something primarily uncomfortable, and I was confused as to what the fuss was all about.
In school I was overweight and clumsy, and suffered a debilitating fear of social embarrassment, which could be made manifest by tripping over during a sprint, or failing to catch an easy throw. That fear ensured that mostly I did just that. So I avoided the sports field, and left the javelin throwers, long-jumpers, and large-shouldered swimmers to their own devices. Being unimpressed at just about everything that I was encouraged to do by my elders, became what my earlier years were about. A rebellion of sorts began.
In my twenties, happily identifying as a geek (something no-one had ever encouraged me to be), I was working in horribly trendy Shoreditch, East London. I bumped into an old school friend on the tube, he was getting off at my stop to train at a kickboxing gym. I was impressed. Being a fairly vapid, new media type, I figured I’d give it a try, to make myself look a bit more interesting.
Hidden behind a heavily graffiti ridden door which opened on to unlit stairs plunging down to the basement, the gym, an ugly, windowless room of crumbling paint and brick, existed veiled, like Pratchetts Unseen University, or Harry Potter’s platform nine and three quarters.
Full of arcane looking props and tools, and a smell I now instantly recognise as a combination of lightly rotting leather and old sweat, this was a place full of surprises for me. Run by two lively and charismatic brothers, both ex-kickboxing champions, I was made welcome and commenced a beginner course once a week. I quickly adopted the uniform of tightly bound hand wraps, a club t-shirt, and baggy, black cotton trousers with special room for high kicks.
The classes were like nothing I’d ever done (willingly) before. I was repeatedly pushed and challenged by the instructors to do better, work harder, even told to “suck it up” (the cheek!) and strangely, I felt a rush of eagerness to indeed perform better, partly to achieve recognition and approval (these guys were quite the specimens, remember), but also because no-one had ever really asked me to do physical things before, and I didn’t know if I could.
It was the antithesis of my day-to-day life writing code for websites. An opinion on which Linux distribution was the best, or what text editor to use, meant nothing in this world. And I picked up on something else about martial arts, how it was somehow a journey, an art, a practice, which carried a weight. There was mutual respect between teachers and students. I was encouraged to be proud of my own attendance and effort. And It Was Good.
One significant moment I recall was when a six foot three, spindly Irish instructor called Thomas was assisting me with my flexibility, propping my heel on his shoulder, and then lifting it higher. Looking impressed he looked at me sideways and asked “Have you done martial arts before?”. My heart fluttered at the compliment and I thought “Shit. I could be good at this.” In that moment, the spectres of Sports Days Past began to flicker and lose form.
However, the sporty didn’t stick. The attraction to large pints of lager, cigarettes and wild nights with my colleagues and friends was too compelling. And rightfully so, those ‘big’ nights out were great fun, a rite of passage and I wouldn’t change a thing.
Cut to today, and my restless soul has kicked off its army boots and is wearing furry slippers. I’ve been five years in the same town. I’ve found a gym which teaches a style of kickboxing I enjoy, much like my original gym in East London. In the peculiar world of martial arts, it is often said that you love your first ‘style’ the most, and for me this is true. For the first time in a long while I have the motivation, time and money to commit to this passion.
So on to the sporty. I had hit a barrier. If I can’t breathe after a minute of extreme exertion, I will lose a kickboxing fight, no matter how good my technique is. Cue long overdue attempts to quit smoking, and yes, I had smoked for a ridiculously long time, but in my mid-thirties it was now taking its toll. At one point I was losing feeling in my limbs during the night, so it had to go. That achieved (and I am 10 months towards my one year anniversary) I looked to another passion of mine to compliment my training, technology.
I love my iPad. Sorry Apple haters, I could say “tablet” but inside I’d be lying, I love my iPad. My first tech toy for fitness was Nike Training Club, nee Nike Women but renamed when guys found out it was a killer app for circuit training too, but didn’t want the stigma of using something for women. I am still fond of it. Choose a workout type from ’lean’, ’toned’ or ‘strong’, a duration, and a difficulty level. Instructions and encouragement from a friendly sounding woman play over your chosen playlist. Videos of frighteningly hard bodied women illustrate moves like “high knee raises in place” or “round the world lunge”.
The drawback with this app is twofold, the videos take about 800MB of space on the iPad, and as far as tracking your fitness - all it provides is a record of training sessions completed, and arbitrarily named stages of completion such as “Warrior” or “Contender”, depending on the hours you have put in. Nice, but I wanted harder data to track my progress.
I decided, having heard it bandied around, that jogging might be good for me. The benefit of this I surmised would be that you could quite readily see if you improved, speed and/or distance over time. I started out with a podcast made by Robert who is “40 and from California” (as he tells you at the start of each week’s episode) called CouchTo5k. It’s popularity has led the NHS to offer a similar podcast. This is great tool for non-sporty types who’d like to try running. As the name suggests it expects no previous experience and after the nine weeks, you should be able to complete a 5k at an easy jog. It starts you out with incredibly gentle patterns of walk then jog intervals, thereby giving you the motivation to improve whilst protecting all your virgin running muscles and joints from over-doing it and hurting yourself.
In honesty I didn’t finish the whole programme, but it got me going, and I surprised myself with the visible improvements in my ability. After a little time with this podcast I felt sufficiently savvy to query “real runners” about what they had on their iPhones, and I discovered RunKeeper.
Ah, Runkeeper! Runkeeper uses GPS tracking to see where you went, how far you ran, what the elevation was and how fast you were going. It also has a well designed website where you can view all these stats as graphs. Felt like a super hero as you pounded round that corner? Check the RunKeeper map and mouse over to see what pace you were at when the endorphins hit.
Now, no longer content with the progress I’ve made as a leisure jogger, the idea of “interval training” has made it’s way into my world. Science has clearly shown how short workouts of intense activity (google ‘tabata’ or ‘High Intensity Training’ for more nerdy info than you really need) make more effective use of workout time than much old fashioned jogging. Runkeeper doesn’t let you do this, it can tell you to go “slow” or “fast” at certain intervals only, but I wanted more.
Enter stage left, Adidas MiCoach. Despite a silly name (I can’t seem to call it “MyCoach” it’s always “MeeCoach” in my head) this app comes with hardware. Principles of athletic training (and I hope to not bore you with too much detail) are often based around training zones calculated by your heart rate. The MiCoach can be used solo, or with a heart rate monitor. This is a new toy for me (thanks Mum, for the birthday present, even though I could tell you couldn’t quite imagine why it would be so exciting) and works by wrapping around your chest, whilst speaking to a custom dongle on the iPhone. I have thus far only used it to see how much my heart rate increases after my statutory pint of morning coffee (60BPM to around 100BPM in case you’re curious). If you want to see how MiCoach plots your runs within the training zones, take a look at the picture below. The grey line is your heart rate plotted over the coloured zones, which are the targets you are trying to stay within.
The Adidas MicCoach website provides graphs similar to Runkeeper although is slow and made of Flash (I did email them to comment on the speed, and also less helpfully, to point out that Flash is so 1990’s), but it’s real appeal is that it will offer you a variety of training programmes – based on what you want to achieve such as endurance, a 10k, or fitness for boxing. Each time you run a workout (which you can schedule with an online calendar) it will make sure you are training in the right zone, or zones. As you get fitter and your heart gets bigger and stronger (isn’t the human body amazing?) you can re-calibrate the zones to continue maximising your workouts. Like a bloody olympic athlete.
Do I love running? Well, not really. About 10% of it feels good, for me somewhere after the first 10 minutes, which always feels like a slog. But when I hit my stride, and it’s night on the seafront, in the orange glow from the street lamps, with waves crashing and spray in my face – I’ve never felt more alive.
In addition to the graph-inspired joy, the way I see myself in a wider context is changing. Once I used to smile knowingly at the office workers on the street, inhaling hard on their cigarettes during a break, and I’d think cheekily “My kin”. Now it’s the runners on the seafront I ‘recognise’. I no longer wonder what possesses them to pound the pavement, in what I’d once assumed, must be some kind of masochism. I get it now, and I respect them for their practice. I don’t doubt that exercise is another drug, much like cigarettes. After all, endorphins are released from both exercise and nicotine. What’s different to me is the meaning. The cigarettes represented a devilish nihilism, two fingers up to the world and-I-don’t-care, but exercise feels like an act of accepting and embracing life, a celebration of the miraculous human body.
And that’s as ‘Oprah’ of me as you’ll ever get to witness.
More to the point and moving away from shaky profundities, I now get a lot more out of my kickboxing classes. I tire less quickly, and recover faster, and I feel a growing connection to my body, my breathing, and my strength.
