Kickboxing Until I Kick the Bucket

My fascination in exercising has interesting roots.

At seven, and at eight, nine, and ten, I liked to swim the summer months away. When they'd come to a close, I'd beg my mother to continue. Discovering I wouldn't really let it go, she looked in to a year round program, to swim on a team, summer to summer and spring through fall.

I loved to swim because of it's other worldly nature to it. Water is a substance devoid of sound and chores, homework, and the domestic angst that plagued my childhood. It was a happy place, of innocent intentions where I could be as good, or as lazy as I wanted to be, where I was part of a team, but my success was internally bred. It was a source of focus and motivation, and an escape, when the dry land world was unforgiving. Success in swimming means medals and fast times, but success in swimming means more swimming. And more swimming means not a whole lot of anything else. A year short of college and a surgery to my shoulder later I hung up my Speedo to dry for the last time, and moved on.

Retired athletes all visit the same post sport issues - the what next, the change in body image, and a return to an unforgiving dry land world.

I kicked around doing something else, but I was never as good at anything as I was naturally suited for water. I got older and joined a gym with the masses to fit in to my 7 jeans. I spent years making up reasons why I was entirely too busy to go, until I realized it was time to grow up and take care of myself.

I've done spin and elliptical, rowing machines, weights and treadmills and pilates and yoga. Last week I started kickboxing.

I liked kickboxing, and for more reasons than imagining the battered face of last guy who broke up with me while punching and kicking toward the mirror. It was a lot of jumping around, but with that came coordination and choreography, which I'd somehow became really really bad at. I'd learn one move, and we'd be on to the next. I couldn't master right arm and left leg. I thought chewing gum and patting my head and tummy were next. There was a lot going on at once. I was surrounded by a lot of people not just more in shape than me, but with a lot more energy, as if that was possible. It was the best workout of my life, and I left the class half with the feeling I cant wait to do that again, and one half I think sometime before this class I decided I didn't love myself anymore to put myself through that pain. The two halves made one whole world of pain in parts of my back that made it entirely impossible to turn over in bed.

So I cried.

Like the zen masters before me, I would conquer kickboxing class. I returned Thursday for kickboxing class PART TWO (insert Jean Claude accent for flare). After improperly warming up, and getting yelled at for doing just about everything wrong, the music two beats ahead of anything I was doing, a spinning room and a whole lot of sweat, I made this solemn vow. I will, if it's the very last thing I do, master kickboxing class. And look hot for my 20 year reunion.