My daughter emails me at
work (I have no cell service, so no one can text or call me) to find out what I
am doing tonight. She has decided that
kickboxing might be fun.
Not
cardio-kickboxing. Super-cardio Kickboxing. Taught by martial arts instructors, not
aerobics instructors, still with bags (not each other).
She has gone so far as to
email a place near her house, which is about a half hour from my house on a
good day, and an hour away with commuter traffic.
Oh, boy.
I decide to go. I mean, I’ve done cardio-kickboxing, and I
did years of judo (I sucked, but I did it), and lately I have been
walking/jogging and also kayaking. I’m
in reasonably good shape. Plus, I have
full boxing gloves for her (plus wraps), and I have fingerless gloves for
me. We’re good to go.
We show up to the place,
and the girl behind the counter tries to talk me into jiu-jitsu. Hmmm. Maybe.
But let me get through this class, first. As soon as we are situated, the other people
in the class show us two things:
The puke bucket and the
bathroom. Better to rush to the bathroom than puke in the bucket in front of
everyone, they assure us.
Oh, crap. What have we done? Should we bail? What the hell.
The first half hour is
super-cardio, like boot camp. This would
be almost, fine except that it’s all barefoot.
I’ve always wished kickboxing were barefoot … until I had extensive foot
surgery and developed an extremely painful neuroma. My daughter fights fatigue and I fight pain
as we attempt to keep up with the class and not look like boobs.
As the bags are rolled
out, we realize we have made it through the trial by fire and not puked in the
barrel (or anywhere else). The gloves
go on. My daughter, who has never
learned any of the punches nor hit anything more than her brothers, takes to it
slowly at first then with more gusto.
For me, the punching comes back quickly.
A classmate teaches my daughter about turning her knee out with one leg
to kick with the other. For me, this all
comes back naturally.
We decide to skip two
nights in a row, which is good. I’m not
as sore as I expect to be, but I have a lot of stuff to get done at work and
could use a few extra hours in my classroom after school. But tomorrow … that’s another story. If my daughter is up to another beating, I’m
in. I’m so in.
Besides, after the week I’ve
had at work, punching the shit out of an inanimate object might be infinitely
better than the alternative.
