Relaxing at will

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Relaxing at will

I’ve been doing Yoga on and off for more years than I care to remember considering that I’m still a rank beginner!

Oh well, not that I’m counting, but it is kind of funny to be struggling with the same poses twenty years after learning them.   What I have found is that when I begin to practice with some regularity my rank amateur status seems to fall away pretty quickly.  In a matter of days, my body is limber again and I’m amazed at my renewed strength and the tautness of my muscles — and this from the “easy” Vinyasa Yoga (where you work on smooth breathing and the flow of movement), not to mention the “power” varieties that have you posing on the tip toes of one foot with your arms in the air or something like that.

Given that I’m no Guru, I do find that incorporating some Yoga practice into the day provides a chance to stretch safely in poses that help to slow down the breath — and therefore create a space for relaxation, the side benefit being some additional fitness.

My renewed flexibility also helps my boxing – a lot.  I find that my stamina increases and as my overall “tone” is improved, it adds a little something extra to my boxing training.

Yoga classes certainly abound for every level of fitness and stamina — YouTube, Netflix and Hulu have tons of online options.  If you are new to Yoga or haven’t done it in a while, you’ll want to look for beginning classes or find the sun salutation sequences which are a terrific way to wake-up your body in the morning. You may not be able to relax at will after your first class, but after a few days you’ll sure feel better and it is a nice option for your daily something.

 

Alarm clocks and the bell

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Alarm clocks and the bell

I’ve been hit by the iPhone alarm clock bug.  Yep, my trusty morning wake-up call pooped-out of me this morning — and so my morning is already 45 minutes late.

As someone who loves boxing, I am otherwise bound by life in three-minute intervals: the boxing clock.  The typical timer has three flavors.  Green, yellow and red.  Green is lit-up for two and a half minutes before it dings and turns yellow for a further thirty-seconds.  The next bell is usually a fairly loud racket that signifies the turn to red and a sixty-second rest period.

At the gym yesterday, I used the “yellow” period to quicken up my pace as I trained.  My training consisted of nine rounds on the double-ended bag and a further three rounds on the speed bag before starting the abs torture.  This is not a typical training session, but that’s the beauty of a Sunday, it gives me a chance to challenge myself on different aspects of boxing.

Yesterday was all about lefts and upper-cuts as three-minute exercises.  First lefts, then left-left-right combinations, followed by left-left upper cut combinations and finally, right-left, right-left, right-left uppercuts finishing with the left jab off the left uppercut.

When I train throwing nothing but lefts for some part of the boxing clock or the entire three minutes, I hear trainers in my head talking about how such and such a fighter won a 12-round fight with nothing but lefts.  Hyperbole aside (although I swear someone did do that), challenging oneself to the equivalent of nothing but lefts as a timed exercise has a lot of benefits.  I used to do it as a writing exercise, setting an egg-timer for five minutes and writing down whatever entered my head without letting the pen off the page.

Yesterday’s workout was a variation on that.  Working on speed, agility and most importantly stamina.  By my last three speed-bag rounds I was pretty much “done,” however, I did try to use the last thirty seconds of each round to pound away without stopping on my alternating left hand and right hand 8-count, 4-count, 2-count, 1-1-1-1, speed-bag rhythm.   I was mostly successful and did feel that I earned the latte treat from Starbucks afterwards.

I’ll never get back the 45 minutes I lost this morning — that’s 15 rounds of boxing or nine timed writing sessions.  Oh well.  There’s always tomorrow.

Getting back to normal

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Getting back to normal

Still feeling a 2010 hangover?  What with all the best of/worst of lists that abound it all feels a bit much.

To get into a new-beginnings frame of mind that’s a lot more cheerful, here’s a list of our own of things to do on day two of the New Year.

1.  Go to the gym, they’re open today — and sure there will be the extra New Year’s Resolution crowd in there, but it’ll still feel great and if your gym has one, spend a few extra minutes to relax in the hot tub or the sauna (or a really hot bath or shower at home).

2.  Take a long walk somewhere, preferably with someone you love, but if not, with the person you love the best — yourself.

3.  For Girlboxing’s boxer friends, feel inspired.  This is going to be a great year for women’s boxing with a lot of well-matched bouts, plus some terrific amateur fights.  Check out Women’s Boxing Archive Network’s 12/30 piece on upcoming fights to get of taste of what’s coming up here.

4.  Help someone.  Whether it’s being extra nice to your kids, your spouse or a friend; or going out to give your time to a charity or something as simple as buying a street person a cup of coffee, none of us can do it alone and it’ll sure feel good.

5.  Write a short list of five things or less that you want to accomplish this year.  List out how you can go about achieving those goals.  You don’t have to think of it as a set of resolutions so much as a map of the things that are important to you.  Having written them down — consider that now is the time to start getting them done.

 

 

 

 

Happy New Year abs

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Happy New Year abs!

So true to my do a bit of exercise everyday New Year’s resolution, I completed a 40 minute Yoga video (courtesy of Netflix:  “Crunch: Candlelight Yoga”) and found a 15 minute Ab-workout on YouTube from http://www.sparkpeople.com.  I’m now free to watch yet more English police-procedural videos with a clear conscience!

Happy New Year everyone from Girlboxing!


Getting the jump on those pesky resolutions

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Getting the jump on those pesky resolutions

Yep.  It’s that time of year again — when you need to confront all the coulda’, shoulda’ woulda’s from 2010 to write-up the “list” for 2011.

I will box every day!

In years past, I’ve run the gamut from writing them hung over on New Year’s Day, to thoughtfully considering them for days and weeks before the turn of the year.

To be honest, the New Year’s resolution list is often an afterthought somewhere around the 3rd of January.  By then of course, I’m in a decided catch-up mode which in turn can spiral into a state of New Year’s resolution anxiety if I’m not careful.

This year I’m trying something a little different.  I’ve started my New Year’s resolution two days early — with the goal of doing at least *one* physical thing every day.  Okay, sure, that can be tough, but with a hat tip to Conjuring My Muse, doing one activity — whether it’s one three-minute shadow boxing round in the living room or a full-on two-hour work out at the gym is achievable!  And like doing anything else every day — it’s gets to be a terrific habit.

So to keep true to that New Year’s vow, I threw on my sweats, grabbed my gear (some of it with that new leather smell — thanks, Santa!) and walked down to Gleason’s Gym.  The sweet part was being accompanied by my daughter — and while I must say that the work-out was tough as my latest lay-off has been way too long, I worked out just enough to feel terrific about making the effort. It also helped that she was there to cheer me on, especially when it came to the sit-ups.

I’m heading down to Gleason’s again tomorrow to work out with Lennox Blackmore with the hope that I’ll be able to throw in one or two extra rounds and a whole lot more ab-work.  And though the gym will be closed on New Year’s Day, there’s yoga, fast-walking or dancing to James Brown to keeping me going strong — least ways that’s the plan!

Women’s sports

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Women’s sports

Babe Didrikson, 1932 Olympics, Track & Field, USA

I came across a couple of websites specializing in women’s sports that may be of interest.

Women’s Sports and Entertainment Network – reports on several different sports including women’s boxing.  A recent promotional piece on Alicia “Slick” Ashley’s upcoming January 13, 2011 fight caught my eye.  The link to the site is here.

 

Women Talk Sports – does a good job of reporting and publicizing a wide variety of women’s sports and sporting events.   The site also links to blog entries across the spectrum of women’s sports and does a fair job of reporting on women’s boxing and women’s MMA.  The site is comprehensive and worth checking out here.

 

PS – Check out blogs we like for other links.

Making it count

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Making it count

 

Brown Belt

 

Having achieved her brown belt, my daughter’s Aikido Sensei gave her about half a minute to rest on her laurels before starting the push towards her next goal.

She is ranked at 2.5 and must reach a 0.5 level before she will be invited to test for her Shidon or first rank Black Belt under the rules of the the Aikido World Alliance, the parent organization for her Dojo.  That will take three to four years, and given her age she will then wait at her 0.5 rank for some time before the AWA confers their invitation.

Her Sensei figures that as she is on her road towards a Black Belt — she is now not only an apprentice trainee with respect to all of the techniques that she must master, but more importantly she must also begin to learn the responsibilities of achieving the rank.  That is all pretty heady stuff for an 11-year-old, and yet, having been thrown to the front of her class to lead the warm-up, she has become cognizant of how difficult it is to command the attention and respect of a group of people long enough to actually get something done.

What she’s also learning is that small things matter.

In Aikido, stance is everything — much as in boxing — and finding the balance means a lot not only to her practice, but in her role as a novice teacher, to those of her students.  Thus she now sees when something is wrong and has begun to correct the tiniest of movements.  This process of breaking it down is helping her to ascertain the faults in her own practice — at least that’s her Sensei’s ingenious plan, though this last is perhaps the hardest to achieve.

Sometimes it is not really possible to articulate what happens beyond the realm of the pure mechanics of a particular set of movements.  In Aikido, that might mean the execution of a series of moves with a partner — pretty difficult stuff in that both partners must also act in a kind of harmony with each other even as the one may be attempting to toss the other to the ground.

Boxing offers something similar — a remarkable improvised dance executed by two well-skilled fighters balanced for ability and for that little something extra that comes from the heart.

All in the family: “The Fighter”

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All in the family:  “The Fighter”

Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund, Tom Herde/Globe Staff/File 1987

I saw The Fighter yesterday afternoon.  The film is a biopic about “Irish” Micky Ward fighting out of Lowell, MA starring Mark Wahlberg as Micky Ward, Christian Slater as his brother Dicky Eklund, Amy Adams as  Micky’s girlfriend Charlene Fleming and Melissa Leo  in the role as Dicky and Micky’s mother Alice.  The movie follows some of the formulaic aspects of boxing genre films, such as triumph over adversity, but at its heart the film is about families and what happens when love is applied as an imperfect reflection of how people feel about themselves and each other.

It got me to thinking about why people box in the first place — and the kind of heart and mental fortitude it takes to get kicked down over and over, only to keep coming back; not only to get it right, but to say something about oneself.  In essence, the boxer is there to say, “I matter,” in the world.  Not to say that boxers or anyone who chooses to test themselves in that way necessarily comes from violent homes where “love” is equated with beatings or being pitted against one’s siblings or being taken on emotional roller coaster rides, but it does seem to say that one needs to test one’s inner strength  — and in that affirmation overcome whatever demons large or small may impede one’s ability to feel whole without that sort of test.

As a boxer I know once said, “any punishment I ever took in the ring was a damned sight less than what I got every Saturday night from my old man” — and yet he still found himself playing out his ability to overcome that abuse to come out on the other side as a fully intact human being.

Perhaps because it is Christmas and this is my first holiday season after losing my mother, I feel particularly sensitive to the notion that families propel us to so much of what we do in our lives.  And whether it is into the ring or some other form of physical or mental test of one’s mettle, in the end we do get to not only affirm that we matter, but to say that how we express those feelings has meaning.

This is a long way of saying that The Fighter is a good film worth seeing if not for the star power than for the fact that it attempts and succeeds at telling a very honest story about being human.

Train to Poughkeepsie

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Train to Poughkeepsie

I’m taking my daughter up to see her grandparents ahead of today’s snowstorm.

We’ve just passed our favorite part of the two-hour ride: seeing the ruins of a Bannerman’s Castle in the Hudson River just past Cold Spring. There are bits of ice and snow and low-flying birds cruising the waters. We both feel a sense of peace, seeing in the vista of the river a part of nature laying itself out for us as a special gift.

This is a train ride I’ve always loved taking; finding it less the portal to a destination than the chance to journey while taking in its special beauty. Would that all our travels were as serene.

Wrapping, baking, boxing

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Wrapping, baking, boxing

Aside from the fact that the cat decided that 5:09 was a great time to play hockey, I was figuring on getting an early start to the day.  Okay, not quite that early, but the usual 6:00 AM even though I’m off for the weekend.

Squirts to the kitty aside (and a timeout in the bathroom), I’ve managed to wrap everything — except for the stuff that hasn’t come yet (with an offering of my daughter’s brownies to the delivery Gods in the hopes that they arrive on time).

Next up has been three minutes of chase the kitty (the loud meows got to me) and the first round of baking — a nice banana bread with walnuts.  After slurping down some cold coffee from yesterday morning, it’ll be a shadow boxing sprint to the store for flour, eggs, sugar and milk (and the weird looks be damned as I punch the air).

I tell you my list of things to do today is giving new meaning to multi-tasking — all while my family sleeps, as not to put to fine a point on it (gosh, that’s a well-worn metaphor), when they’re awake it’s kind of hard to get a lot done.

Okay, so once I’m back with the days supply of baking goodies I’ll be trading rounds of making cookies with prancing around the room — before the real fun begins, my attempt at fashioning home made chocolate candies.  Mind, I got some fabulous Belgian semi-sweet chocolate from our absolute favorite Middle-Eastern grocery shop on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn called Oriental Pastry & Grocery not to mention the lovely array of nuts and dried fruits. The trick will be in melting the chocolate all at once so that the temperature stays even … hmm.  Best that I work in some shadow boxing rounds before I attempt that so that my arms are nice and warmed-up before I start whisking the chocolate.

Here’s hoping that your day is as fun!

Boxing over the holidays

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Boxing over the holidays

Micky Ward and Mark Wahlberg

 

Given my schedule these days, I think the only boxing I’ll be getting in over the holidays will be at the movies.  My plan is to catch up on two of the latest films about boxing:

Frederick Wiseman’s Documentary Boxing Gym and the Hollywood biopic inspired by the life of “Irish” Micky Ward, The Fighter.

Boxing Gym was shot at Lord’s Gym in Austin, Texas and examines the ebb and flow of life at the legendary gym where people come to pursue their dreams in the ring.  This highly acclaimed documentary by master filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has garnered several major awards.

 

The Fighter starring Mark Walhberg, Christian Bale and Amy Adams, is a Hollywood biopic about legendary jr. welterweight champion “Irish” Micky Ward.  The film explores classic boxing genre film themes of family, loyalty and the antagonist’s ultimate triumph over adversity.  The real Micky Ward is perhaps best known for his warrior’s tenacity in his three classic “fight of the year” battles against Arturo Gatti (whose subsequent tragic death in 2009 is still subject to speculation as to the cause).

James Zadroga 9/11 Bill Passes in the Senate & the House!

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UPDATE:  Bill signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 2, 2011!  CNN has a piece about it here.

James Zadroga 9/11 Bill Passes in the Senate & the House!


GREAT news folks!  A retooled James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act passed in the Senate this afternoon — and the House acting with amazing speed just did the same!

This is fabulous news for the 9/11 first responders who have endured so much over the last years.

Special thanks to all Girlboxing friends who drummed up what support they could to get this bill passed.

We should all send a collective THANK YOU to Jon Stewart for his amazing efforts — with a further thank you to New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who has tirelessly kept this bill alive over its many iterations.

For further information links are here and here.

Also read the ABC News piece here.