Tag Archives: boxing timer

counting down ….

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Counting down …

We all have things we count down for.

Sometimes it is something grand like a fight and sometimes just the tick-tock of the clock till the end of the work day.

When I get anxious, I like to think of things in three-minute intervals, plus the sixty-second rest.

It’s a way of organizing my thoughts which otherwise race around in what my old Dharma teacher used to call a monkey mind.

If I set the clock, I can think of things in finite terms. I can count out each second, or count out other things such as the number of sit-ups I can do in three minutes or the number of words I can write, or the amazing amount of tasks that can be completed in between the buzzers.

Imagine, one can actually pretty much empty a sink full of dishes, or run down four flights of stairs, grab the mail from the mailbox and come back upstairs and find that the clock hasn’t even hit yellow yet.

At other times the clock provides order out of chaos.  It quells the what-do-I-do-now panic of momentary indecision, or worse, the I-can’t-get-started rut can be kicked into gear to a set menu of things to achieve–even if that just means taking an interval or two to calm down.

I bring this up as person facing deadlines and the stress that accompanies that. Thinking of the clock and the ding of the round though is helping to soothe me. In breaking things down into the tiny snippets of time I am reminding myself that no matter how daunting something may seem, it is only ever made up of moments; moments that follow one upon another each carrying its own weight and import.

Much as when I train, I can set aside so many rounds for one thing followed by a set number of rounds for another.

In their totality the time winds up to be the same as what had been originally allotted, but somehow in breaking it down into smaller bits, one can see and touch the progress as so many things that have already been accomplished.

 

 

Time and the clock

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Time and the clock.

My daughter’s alarm clock is blaring through her door as regular pulses reminiscent of the loud echoing blasts announcing a prisoner escape.  How she is sleeping through it amazes me.  Her strategy is to have multiple devices yell at her land of nod until one or another pierces the veil of her dreamscape enough for her to join the world of the awake.  She then stumbles up and out of her room towards the bathroom and the beginning of her morning.

It puts me in mind of how much of what we do is regulated by time.

We have the “masters” of the industrial revolution to thank for that one; having invented mechanized devices as the means of production, they needed a “regular” workforce to man and woman those machines.  Hence our alarm clocks which still beckon us (more like rip us) from the delicious warmth of bed and dreams into the world of work and dare I say a bit of drudgery???

Not so the boxer’s time clock!  Least ways not in my estimation.

Those intervals of time feel more like the explosions of musical notes with three minutes to blow your ax before resting and blowing again.

Shadow boxing around my living room gets to feel like an improvisational dance, throwing punches this way and that as I circle my way left then right, hop skipping forward or to the side, my arms flailing at the air to their own rhythm.  Then the dead s-t-o-p before repeating it all again — and yet different.

A jazzed solo, the improvisation of a boxing performance has all of the nuanced grace of a horn pushing out its notes in a staccato rhythm all its own and yet timed and lovely and full of melodic undertones, the dance of the body fluid and full of the momentum that pushes it from one posture to another for three full minutes before the ding of the bell signals the end of the round.

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.